Via Drudge:
The Washington Post today confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was "Deep Throat," the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon.
The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee. The three spoke after Felt's family and Vanity Fair magazine identified the 91-year-old Felt, now a retiree in California, as the long-anonymous source who provided crucial guidance for some of the newspaper's groundbreaking Watergate stories.
Money quote:
Bradlee, who was the Post's executive editor during Watergate, said today, "The thing that stuns me is that the goddamn secret has lasted this long."
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said:
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
I've heard investigative reporters invoke that quote to justify their jobs. So I have a question: Why doesn't that apply to journalistic sources? Why should we trust stories based on unnamed sources, when there have been so many prominent cases lately of journalists just making stuff up? Why shouldn't journalists have to name their sources?
Update: Timothy Noah points out that Felt had parochial bureacratic reasons to serve as Deep Throat:
Hoover had died. Hoover loyalists at the bureau were frantic that President Richard Nixon would get his mitts on the FBI, which Hoover had kept independent of political control through a variety of nasty methods, including blackmail. The Hooverites' bureaucratic anxieties were well-founded: After the Watergate break-in, Hoover's acting successor, a Nixon loyalist named L. Patrick Gray, routinely passed FBI files about Watergate directly to White House counsel John Dean, who was a party to (but eventually would expose) the White House's illegal coverup. In effect, the White House ended up knowing everything the FBI knew. (That's why it seemed so plausible that, if not Felt, Deep Throat might be Deputy White House Counsel Fred Fielding, a theory that, I regret to say, undermined in recent years my previous rock-solid conviction that it was Felt, or at least some other high-ranking G-man? case closed.) Felt pushed back by helping Woodward and Bernstein discover that high-level White House aides were in up to their necks in Watergate, up to and including Nixon.
DC turf wars make the story a lot less romantic, don't they? At the very least, as Glenn Reynolds notes, "I don't mind Nixon going -- I think he was a pretty lousy President for all sorts of reasons aside from Watergate -- but it's obvious that the simplistic Woodward & Bernstein hero-tale is a bit, um, incomplete." But it also speaks to my point about anonymous sources: Might we not have evaluated Woodward and Bernstein's work with a more informed eye if we knew they were being fed stories by somebody with a bureaucratic axe to grind?
And speaking of journalists just making stuff up, Noah catches Woodward and Bernstein in what look like outright lies about Deep Throat, not just omissions:
I have a few bones to pick with Woodward and Bernstein. One is that, in All the President's Men, Deep Throat is described as a heavy smoker. But Felt quit smoking in 1943. I suppose Woodstein would call this necessary misdirection. I call it conscious fabrication, however trivial. Also, a November 1973 Woodward and Bernstein Post story sourced anonymously to "White House sources" is described in All the President's Men as being sourced to Deep Throat. Yet Felt was not a "White House source." It's conceivable that Deep Throat was an additional, unacknowledged source on the story, but it's also possible that Woodward and Bernstein were misleading readers about where they got their information. Which was it, gentlemen? Finally, why did Woodward, in a 1979 Playboy interview with J. Anthony Lukas, flatly deny that Deep Throat was anyone inside the "intelligence community"? The FBI, where Felt worked, is most definitely part of the intelligence community.
What Noah fails to consider is the possibility that those discrepancies might reveal a deeper truth: Maybe Deep Throat was really a composite character all along. We don't know because we tolerate a culture of anonymous sourcing and journalistic dissembling.
