Posted on 05/03/2002 6:11:02 PM PDT by kattracks
Last week NewsMax.com reported that former Nixon White House counsel John Dean is promising to name the real "Deep Throat" - the alleged source who kept the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein informed about what was happening behind the scenes at the White House during the Watergate scandal.
Dean, dubbed by NewsMax.com columnist Dan Frisa as "ethically challenged," has written a 35,000-word e-book, "The Deep Throat Brief," which he says will appear on June 17. In it he says he will reveal the identity of the legendary leaker.
But Dean, who is making something of a career out of unmasking Deep Throat - he's done it twice before - has been beaten to the punch this time, according to the New York Post's Page Six, which reports that in the book "The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI," author Ronald Kessler says that all the evidence points to former top FBI official W. Mark Felt as being Deep Throat.
Kessler's book, about to be published by St. Martin's Press, authoritatively states that material in the Woodward/Bernstein stories was "lifted almost verbatim" from FBI reports to which Felt had access. Moreover, Kessler says that several of Felt's FBI colleagues believed that he was the infamous source.
Kessler reported that Carl Bernstein's son Jacob Bernstein told a friend that Felt was Deep Throat, back in 1999. Not long after this, Woodward paid Felt a mysterious surprise visit to the home of Felt's daughter Joan, where the 88-year-old FBI man was staying, and took him to lunch. The Post says that Joan told Kessler her father greeted Woodward like an old friend.
"Woodward seemed to be celebrating with him," Kessler told Page Six. "There was no other reason for Woodward to see him. He came in a white limousine, which he parked 10 blocks away."
Kessler told Page Six that he had "additional information" identifying Felt as Deep Throat, which he "can't use," but noted that Felt, who later said he couldn't remember lunching with Woodward, denied he was Deep Throat. Kessler, however, told the New York Post that Felt had had a stroke and "you couldn't rely on anything he said, really."
While Kessler may be off the mark, he is a far more credible source that John Dean, who makes his Deep Throat identifications hard to swallow in the light of the fact that in 1975 he fingered Watergate prosecutor Earl J. Silbert as the leaker. Then later, in 1982, he insisted that Nixon's chief of staff, Alexander Haig, was Deep Throat. Silbert and Haig said Dean's accusations were untrue.
"I think it's a little pathetic that someone like Dean would write a whole book about Deep Throat when he obviously doesn't know who it is," Kessler told Page Six.
A Fabrication?
There is a possibility that Dean and Kessler are both be wrong. Some insiders say there was no Deep Throat. They believe he was a composite dreamed up by Woodward and Bernstein to add credibility and drama to their story.
Researcher Edward Jay Epstein, for example, reported that in Woodward's Watergate stories, he attributed many of his revelations to multiple sources. Later in the book "All the President's Men," he attriburtes the information to Deep Throat, who just pops up out of nowhere.
The most convincing evidence Epstein offers, however, comes from Woodward's agent. "According to his agent for the book, David Obst, this substitution [of Deep Throat for multiple sources] did not occur even in the early version of the book. Obst wrote: 'In the original draft of their book, Deep Throat was not mentioned. In the second draft he suddenly appeared - and it was a better book for the addition, a much more exciting one.'
"Obst's implication is that a single character was substituted for a number of early sources to make the book a more exciting read," Epstein wrote. This is not to suggest Woodward did not have many real sources - of course he did. But creating a composite character is the same operation as creating a fictional character."
Who was Deep Throat? Probably nobody. He has, Epstein notes "little reality out of the journalistic imagination."
Woodword, like him on not and I don't, has good 3-letter agency connections and the idea of an FBI source as an element of a composite Deep Throat would not be surprising to me.
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