Today is the 40th anniversary of one of the greatest events in American history — the resignation of corrupt president Richard Nixon as it became clear that the U.S. House of Representatives would impeach him and the U.S. Senate would expel him from office.
Nixon’s resignation was a great event because it proved that the principle of American democracy was more important than the power of the president and it proved, sort of, that no one is above the law. I say “sort of” because Nixon didn’t go to jail, as he should have, because of a pardon by his successor, Gerald Ford.
Nixon’s Aug. 9, 1974, resignation remained a hot topic in my industry, the journalism industry, for decades after the actual event because of the mystery of “Deep Throat” — the source of numerous revelations in newspaper articles by reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that were pivotal in Nixon’s eventual resignation.
I am proud to say that I identified Mark Felt, the No. 2 official in the FBI during part of the Nixon administration, as Deep Throat before he identified himself as Deep Throat in 2005.
Unfortunately, I was never paid one cent for the time I spent trying to figure out who Deep Throat was, and I identified him in a graduate school paper rather than a newspaper article (I wish Storeboard was around before 2005).
My graduate school paper focused on my obsession with the news. The assignment was about what we students did in our spare time. It's a mystery why this was an assignment in a graduate school class in Education, but it was. In the paper, I detailed my obsession about reading articles about the mystery of Deep Throat and wrote that I concluded it was a high-level FBI agent while I read Bernstein and Woodward’s book “All the President’s Men” in the 1970s when I was a teenager because:
* Deep Throat knew a little bit about everything and a lot about nothing. Thus, Deep Throat could not have been a high-level Nixon administration official.
* Deep Throat was obviously investigating Watergate at the same time as Bernstein and Woodward were and was constantly giving Woodward tips on how to find information that he didn’t know. He was very interested in the results of Woodward’s probes.
* The FBI was investigating Watergate and other possible nefarious activities by Nixon’s aides after the June 17, 1972, burglary. Several FBI agents were working on different aspects of the investigation. Thus, one FBI agent was trying to learn about what the 1972 re-election committee was doing, another FBI agent was trying to trace the money trail from donors to the campaign, another was trying to find out the connection between the burglars and White House aides, etc.
* The FBI investigation was halted after Nixon appointed a flunky, Patrick Gray, to become the FBI director (J. Edgar Hoover had died shortly before Watergate). Deep Throat was really, really, really ticked that the investigation had been halted and wanted Woodward to be a de-facto FBI agent who could do what agents were now prohibited from doing.
My conclusion was that Deep Throat was the supervisor of the several FBI agents investigating Watergate, had read their reports, and wanted the investigation to be completed.
Over the years, I read “All the President’s Men” a few more times as well as newspaper articles that generally identified a high-level Nixon aide as Deep Throat. Here are some of the suspects, according to this article — administration aides Steven Bull, Fred Fielding, Frank Gannon, Leonard Garment, Jonathan Rose, Diane Sawyer (yes, that Diane Sawyer), and John Sears; speechwriters Pat Buchanan, David Gergen, and Raymond Price; State Department officials William Casey and Alexander Haig; press officials Gerald Warren and Ron Ziegler; Justice Department officials Henry Petersen and William Rehnquist; Secretary of Commerce Peter Peterson, and Patrick Gray.
Most, if not all, of these suspects seemed absolutely preposterous choices as Deep Throat. Nothing I ever read convinced me that there was a remote chance that any of them could be Deep Throat.
In 2002, I read an article about the 30th anniversary of Watergate. A sidebar identified 30 possible people as Deep Throat and had three or four paragraphs on each of them. One of the suspects was Mark Felt. ‘Never heard of him,’ I thought. Then, I read his short bio. ‘That’s Deep Throat,’ I said to myself. This was the FIRST time I had ever reached this conclusion. I then spent several more hours investigating Felt. I was 100 percent positive that Felt was Deep Throat.
It turns out that other reporters correctly identified Felt as Deep Throat, but I don’t know what it says about the journalism profession that a teenager was more accurate about Deep Throat than several investigative reporters.
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter and journalism professor William Gaines directed a four-year investigative effort to identify Deep Throat. According to this article, Gaines’ 60 students “combed 16,000 pages of government documents on Watergate and the 1972 shooting of George Wallace, another story Woodward covered with the help of deep government sources. The team studied FBI reports, congressional testimony, Nixon memos and tape transcripts, and either biographies or working papers of all significant Watergate players. They scrutinized every Post story written by Woodward before and during Watergate, and all stories he wrote for Maryland's Montgomery County Sentinel before joining the Post in September 1971. Finally, the researchers cross-referenced old Washington city directories with White House staff lists to identify Deep Throat suspects who lived near Woodward's 1972 apartment in Washington, D.C.'s Dupont Circle area.”
In the middle of their investigation, EVERY student who was interviewed by NBC about this project said Deep Throat was Pat Buchanan, partly because he smoke and drank just as Deep Throat did in the “All the President’s Men” movie. When they were finished, they decided that Fred Fielding, White House counsel John Dean’s deputy, was Deep Throat.
“I know who Deep Throat is,” Gaines said in an interview with On The Media. “It's Fred Fielding! There's no question about it. Nobody else could be Deep Throat but Fred Fielding. He had access to all the information. He's the only person who fits Woodward and Bernstein's description, and not coincidentally, he has access to all the information that Deep Throat had, some of it almost exclusively. So it just cannot be somebody else.”
So I reviewed NO documents and outthought 60 future journalists and a Pulitzer Prize winner who reviewed thousands. More remarkable was their logic. They decided “Deep Throat could not be in the FBI after we found a quote in a 1973 Woodward and Bernstein Post story attributed to a "White House" source that was similar in wording to one attributed to Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men,” according to this article.
Wow!! The students spent four years investigating Deep Throat and ruled out all FBI employees based on that. Wow!!
The students decided Deep Throat was Fielding rather than six other White House aides who smoke and drank because they “learned that the FBI had shared some of its findings with the White House counsel, John Dean. We did not consider Dean himself to be a candidate because he had left the White House in April 1973. This led us to Dean’s assistant, Fred Fielding, who was already on our shortlist.”
Wow!! Double wow!! They picked Fielding because he might have read FBI reports, but did not suspect any of the FBI agents who had WRITTEN those same reports, any of the agents’ supervisors, or the supervisor of the supervisors.
The supervisor of the supervisors was Mark Felt, who also had a personal motive for leaking anti-Nixon information. Felt felt (sorry) that he, not Gray, should have been the FBI director. He also resented Nixon’s attempt to use the FBI for political and nefarious purposes.
Interestingly, Nixon himself thought Felt was Deep Throat (but didn’t ‘out’ him because he knew Felt had all sorts of other dirt on him). More interestingly, Nixon testified for Felt in 1980 when he was on trial for ordering FBI agents to search the homes of members of the Weathermen, a radical political organization, without warrants and donated money to his legal defense fund. Felt was convicted, but pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.
It’s debatable whether Mark Felt was a hero who was angry about corruption that endangered our democracy or a self-serving egomaniac who was angry that he never became the director of the FBI, but I’m glad that his revelations led to the resignation of the USA’s most corrupt president.
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