In Deep

Well, I guess we know who Deep Throat is now. And his family's clearly enjoying the prospect of cashing in on Grandpa's activities.

Personally, I tend to be skeptical of anything, including the idea that this guy is either a hero or a traitor. I'd question the fact that he chose to blow the whistle even though he was a law enforcement officer, but I'd classify it more as an ethical violation than a crime. And while liberals may crow that the end justified the means in bringing down Nixon, they should probably realize that Hoover, the object of their scorn for many years, probably could have brought down any number of Presidents, and this approach endorses the idea of law enforcement using the press to bring down a government. Even Felt appeared to be ashamed of potentially being "outed" as Deep Throat, as Tim Noah noted when discussing why Felt opted not to reveal his identity for so long...

But the main reason, I think, was that Felt saw his leaks as a betrayal of the FBI. Six years ago, I asked Felt (who at that point was still denying he was Deep Throat) whether, if he were Deep Throat, that would be so terrible. His reply:

It would be terrible. This would completely undermine the reputation that you might have as a loyal, logical employee of the FBI. It just wouldn't fit at all.

But wasn't Deep Throat a hero?

That's not my view at all. It would be contrary to my responsibility as a loyal employee of the FBI to leak information.

Now that we know Felt was Deep Throat, 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.

Like I said, it's a little hard to consider the guy a hero of any sort, and I think Noah's right to take Woodward and Bernstein to task as well. Of course, the MSM is busy trying to spin this into an analysis of why the world was a better place in 1972 than now, when noble reporters like Woodward and Bernstein could operate free of the fear that someone on the right might -- God forbid -- dispute the account. To be fair, Howard Kurtz at the Post did a solid job of outlining the downside of the press' victory...

But it must also be said that while Watergate and "All the President's Men" briefly turned journalists into heroes, they may have contributed to the long-term credibility problems of the profession. Too many journalists became sloppy with anonymous sources, some of whom didn't have first-hand knowledge of what they were talking about, and some reporters tried to pump every two-bit scandal into a "-gate." Having been lied to by the Nixon White House, journalists became more confrontational, more prosecutorial and more willing to assume that politicians must be lying. And the news business is still paying the price for some of those excesses.

The real question doesn't involve Deep Throat. He clearly exists. It involves other anonymous sources, in other stories over the years... and whether they were real.