Deep Throat Unmasked

So, after all these years, we finally know who Deep Throat is. I find it rather amusing that he actually ended up looking like the actor who played him in All the President’s Men. As an aside, the movie wasn’t that great, but I think I was looking for more details about what happened after the story broke ala Oliver Stone’s Nixon.

Anyway, this revelation comes in a very haphazard manner and with very interesting timing. Deep Throat, and the whole Watergate mythology that has grown up over the years, has immortalized the “inside anonymous source.” Recently with the whole Newsweek Koran flushing retraction, the sanctity of the anonymous source has taken quite a beating. In fact, the blogosphere in general has been forcing mainstream media to shy away from the insider with an axe to grind.

For the most part, I suspect the rest of the week will be a reveling by the mainstream media of the Watergate era. It’s a reminder of when they were kings and had complete control of the establishment. Their ego has taken a severe beating in the past few years with the combination of scandals that have been unearthed, from the Eason Jordan incident to the Dan Rather memo incident.

The great irony in this whole thing is that Deep Throat didn’t actually give Woodward and Bernstein anything. He confirmed facts the duo already had, gave them encouragement when they were unsure, and nudged them down helpful avenues. Yet he has been built up as this great mythological figure that everyone reporter feels he must have. Woodward and Bernstein actually uncovered the story with good old-fashioned hard-nosed investigative journalism. A talent that has been noticeably lost on reporters of today who are too obsessed with the quick story that brings down the house.

It’s also amusing to note that if Nixon had simply promoted Mr. Felt to FBI Director, as most of the FBI insiders thought he should be, we would probably never have heard of Deep Throat. As a result, Woodward and Bernstein might have been much slower about breaking their story, or completely done in by a couple of mistakes they made along the way. Either way, Nixon might have been allowed to stay in office to complete his full term that would have meant that Ford wasn’t carrying the Nixon pardon baggage. Relieved of this burden, Ford might have had enough in him to defeat Carter in the 1976 election. Without the baggage, Reagan might have decided to work with Ford rather than oppose him. Ford would probably have snapped Reagan up to lock in California’s electoral votes and would have pushed him over the top against Carter. Most people forget that Carter only narrowly beat Ford by a couple of states. From then on we take a number of different avenues. Of course, this also assumes that Nixon would have chosen Ford to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew. If he wasn’t worried about his own image as much, Nixon might have opted for someone other than the squeaky-clean Ford. So many avenues, so little time.