Perhaps one of the most intriguing political
mysteries of our lifetime has been the true identity of Woodward and Bernstein’s
“Deep Throat”.
So mysterious has this character been that
many have speculated that he is, in fact, a fabrication by the Washington
Post reporters.
WoodStein have always adamantly denied
this, as has their editor Ben Bradlee.
The deal has always been that those four
men; Woodward, Bernstein, Bradlee and Deep Throat himself, would remain
silent until
Deep Throat dies. For years this
deal has stymied the efforts of almost everyone who has tried to crack
the case of Deep Throat.
However, now the jig may be up for old Deep
Throat. The completion of an unprecedented, four year study of Deep
Throat’s true
identity by the School of Journalism at
the University of Illinois may well have unmasked him. This study has mustered
all the considerable
resources that every other Deep Throat
researcher has lacked and it looks very likely they have succeeded where
all others have failed.
My own obsession with Deep Throat began
in college in the early eighties and it was there that I learned just how
difficult a task it was
going to be to ferret out who Deep Throat
actually was. This was the era of reference books, publication catalogs
and microfilm.
An era of note taking, copious copying
and time consuming reading Hard fought research you might say.
Armed with only my dog eared copy of “All
the President’s Men” and a healthy zeal, I began pouring through the old
microfilms of the
Washington Post. The reference librarian
quickly realized what I was up to and commented “You’ll never figure it
out...it’s just too
much information!”. I blew her off
with a wave of my hand and continued on. But in the end, she was
right; it was way too much
for any one person to tackle.
There were too many time lines to establish,
too many detailed quotes to record and not enough time to link who knew
who, who knew
what and who knew it when. By the
time I graduated in 1985, I had amassed a sizeable file on Deep Throat
and had a pretty good list
of possible suspects but I just left if
for others and unceremoniously tossed all my research into the trash.
Over the years, I have maintained an interest
in Deep Throat’s identity. Reading the oft book or noting a chance article
but my experience
in college told me that some of these things
were just guesses at best. Whoever was going to crack the case would
have to do a lot more
than rank speculation. They were going
to have to break down all the information bit by bit and match it with
the players. And that’s just
what Professor Gaines and his students
have done!
So, who does the good Prof and his students finger for being Deep Throat?
A man who probably wasn’t very high on many a researcher’s list: Fred Fielding.
At the time of Watergate, Fielding was the
Deputy White House Counsel, working under John Dean. Since Dean was
high on the
Deep Throat list, you might expect that
lots of folks put a lot of light on Fielding. Not so! For many of
us, Fielding just passed under
the radar because he seemed too straight
a shooter and a Republican loyalist (Fielding would go on to serve Reagan
as Chief Counsel).
Ironically, Fielding has been accused before
of being Deep Throat by H. R Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff and head
coverup conspirator,
but many of us (probably out of our disdain
for Haldeman) dismissed it completely.
However, it now appears that Haldeman very
well may have been completely vindicated in his accusation that Fred Fielding
is indeed
Deep Throat. Professor Gaines and his team
have meticulously linked Fielding to every piece of information that Woodward
got from
Deep Throat. They have also gone to great
lengths to eliminate the others high on the list by indicating either a
lack of access to key
information or lack of opportunity to meet
with Woodward. In each test, only Fred Fielding passes muster.
This is significant because
it’s all backed up by evidence provided
by FBI files or testimony of the actual players.
As complete as the team’s research is, it
doesn’t answer all the questions regarding Deep Throat. Two big questions
that remain
unanswered are:
1) What was Deep Throat’s motive for revealing
what he knew to Woodward? And
2) How and when did Deep Throat and Woodward
meet.
The answer to the first question is very
important but is quite elusive.
This motive business can be very confusing.
I, myself, labored under the idea that Deep Throat had some beef with Nixon
or his troops.
Later, I came to view that it was possible
that Deep Throat was out to save Nixon by keeping the pressure on him to
clean house.
But what if Fielding, as Deep Throat, had
an even more altruistic motive?
What if Fielding was motivated by a benign
respect for the Constitution and a deep seated fear that the Nixonites
were endangering the nation?
Whatever the original motives, from the
teams research one may deduce that Fielding’s motives may have in fact
changed over the years.
Gaines’ team did a very interesting search
for articles that Deep Throat might have been a source on long after the
Nixon administration
and low and behold they came up with a
few striking examples.
In 1981, Woodward did a piece that revealed
that in the confusion after the attempted assassination of Reagan, the
card that contained
the all important nuclear launch codes
had been misplaced. This was a secret known to very few indeed!
If Fielding is the source of this information,
and it’s likely that he would have indeed known about this fact, why on
earth would he reveal
such a secret to Woodward? Given
the timing of the event and the climate of the Cold War, one can argue
that this is the kind of information
we would prefer be kept under wraps.
So, why would Fielding reveal this secret
to Woodward? I would suggest that regardless of Deep Throat’s earlier
motives, he’d become
a player and just liked feeding Woodward
key snippets of his highly placed but anonymous sources.
The answer to the second question is similarly
elusive. There are indeed times when Woodward and Fielding might
have crossed paths.
They had both served in the military at
the same time and were both posted at intelligence.
But, is that where they met? My pick
for Deep Throat has been, for the past number of years, David Gergen.
He and Woodward were
at Yale together and undoubtedly knew each
other. Woodward has repeatedly referred to Deep Throat as his “old
friend”. If Woodward
met Fielding during his Pentagon years
in the late sixties, then this “old friend” business is really more of
a gentle euphemism.
Nonetheless, the team (much to my chagrin!)
has eliminated Gergen as a Deep Throat suspect because he would not have
had access to
key information that Fielding did have
access to. So the mystery remains as to how and when Fielding and
Woodward met.
Unanswered questions aside, the team has
really wrapped up the issue of Fred Fielding as Deep Throat very well.
Interestingly, Fielding
himself has, at least on one occasion,
admitted to being Deep Throat. At some point Fielding was seriously
ill with a pulmonary embolism
and it has been said that he proclaimed
that he was Deep Throat then laughed wildy.
Professor Gaines and his team have provided
a detailed package of their evidence to Fred Fielding. It will be
very interesting to see how
Mr. Fielding responds and how his comrades
in the inside the beltway crowd take the news.
You can read the team’s report here:
http://deepthroatuncovered.com/