Who was deep throat watergate12/13/2023 ![]() ![]() I remember vividly that when Nixon commerce secretary and fund-raiser, the late Maurice Stans, was exonerated of felony charges and convicted of two minor misdemeanors, he called me and asked, “How do I get my good name back?” We never found the answer. Despite the name of their movie, not all of the president’s men were involved, not even close to that. When and how did he become a source for two unknown young reporters? Woodward and Bernstein did a remarkable job of reporting, but they, too, sometimes were inaccurate. There are still many questions to be answered about Felt. Woodward once told me that we rode in the same elevator in the Hay Adams Hotel, and he was afraid I would recognize him as he went to interview another of his sources. Woodward and Bernstein also were young reporters generally unknown to most of us. Most of us on the White House staff did not know Felt, but we were close to his boss, Pat Gray, who was appointed by Nixon to head the FBI as a successor to J. In the long run, it was the “smoking gun” tape that forced the president from office, not the “Deep Throat” news tips. “Deep Throat” stirred the pot as he provided leads for Woodward and Bernstein, but looking at the breadth of the stories they wrote, I believe they also had to have had other sources. The problem came from the White House cover-up, not the break-in. Some raised the question whether President Nixon knew of the break-in, but there was no evidence to indicate that he did. ![]() My theory was that Magruder was trying to show that he could use more modern methods of gaining political intelligence than the legal methods used by those of us who were his predecessors. Some said they were looking for negative material on O’Brien, and others related John Dean to the crime. The break-in had been authorized by Jeb Magruder, the young head of the Nixon 1972 presidential election headquarters. Six Cubans were arrested as they bungled their way through Democratic National Chairman Larry O’Brien’s files. In giving interviews to several television stations after the Felt revelation, I was asked by two young men from the camera crews, “What was Watergate?” They had not been born when the scandal broke.įorgotten by many is the fact that the original Watergate story evolved around a break-in at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Building in Washington. If the term “Deep Throat” had not been used, one might logically ask whether the public would have been as intrigued in trying to identify the news source. To me it is interesting that the term “Deep Throat” never was used by Woodward and Bernstein in their Washington Post stories, but it became a key term in their book and in the movie, “All the President’s Men.” About that time, there also was a pornographic movie entitled “Deep Throat,” and I often wonder whether the sexy name was applied to sell the book and movie or to be a code. Al Haig because he was known to smoke cigarettes and drink scotch whiskey, part of the description given the anonymous news source by the two Washington Post reporters.įelt now says he feels he was a hero, but those of us on the White House staff felt that whoever it was, the Watergate source was disloyal and unethical. Almost everyone who had a senior position in the White House was given the “Deep Throat” label. ![]()
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