Stones Cry Out

The guessing game reignited with the release of the new materials. The Washington Post reports:

Thousands of pages of notes, memos, transcripts and other materials collectively known as the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers open to the public today at the University of Texas, minus the most fascinating detail connected to the demise of the Nixon administration: the identity of Deep Throat. . . .

Attempts to uncover the closely guarded identity of Deep Throat, known only to Woodward, Bernstein and former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, have been the subject of books and college journalism class projects for years. One book, "In Search of Deep Throat," published in 2000 by former Nixon aide Leonard Garment, speculated that White House colleague John Sears was Deep Throat. Sears and Woodward denied it.

In 1999, Bill Gaines, a journalism professor at the University of Illinois and a former investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, began a class project to solve the mystery. Four years later, he and his students concluded that Nixon White House deputy counsel Fred Fielding was Deep Throat. Fielding also has denied it.

Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, perked further attention:

“We'll all know one day very soon, however. Bob Woodward, a reporter on the team that covered the Watergate story, has advised his executive editor at the Washington Post that Throat is ill. And Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Post and one of the few people to whom Woodward confided his source's identity, has publicly acknowledged that he has written Throat's obituary.”

But Nixon Special Counsel Charles Colson, who like Dean is not on the list of possibilities because they left the White House in 1973, has said consistently over three decades that he believes Deep Throat is not a single person but a device used by Woodward to combine the information he obtained from multiple sources. Colson has said that no one person had access to all of the information that Woodward claimed he received from the secret source.

As recently as 2002:

“Chuck Colson told CNN news that he thinks there is no such person as Deep Throat. Colson said that information Woodward and Bernstein attributed to one person they labeled Deep Throat in their book "All the President's Men" came from several different sources. In other words, Deep Throat may not exist and Woodward and Bernstein may have been lying to us for all these years. In other words, Woodward and Bernstein may be far from ethical journalists who deliberately lie to their readers.”

It is completely credible that Woodward and Bernstein would use what may have been an actual parking garage encounter with a source, which they named Deep Throat, and attributed several other details to that same source, both to simplify the reporting and to protect a number of sources.

Since the creation of the fictional glue necessary to tidy up gaps in his reporting and writing has been a characteristic of Bob Woodward’s work over the years, this twist of the truth in the Deep Throat story is not at all unlikely.