Deep Felt Throat

Yes, I did get caught up in the Deep Throat story because it is pretty fascinating "espionage" kind of stuff. Last night right after midnight I pulled up the Washington Post web site to finally read reporter Bob Woodward's version of how he met W. Mark Felt of the FBI (when he was a young Navy lieutenant serving as a courier to the White House) and how their acquaintance bloomed into a kind of mentorship, followed by the whole famous Watergate story as told in "All the President's Men." I still love the 1976 movie version with Redford and Hoffman, by the way, especially Jason Robards' portrayal of Ben Bradlee (he won an Oscar for his role). Now I suppose we'll have to suffer through some kind of remake of the film with the added story of how Woodward met Deep Throat in the first place. Nothing could beat the original film though, I'm sure.

Another element to the Deep Throat story is covered in the Wall Street Journal today. The headline of their story is "How a Lawyer Finally Unveiled Deep Throat." John D. O'Connor is the San Francisco lawyer who now represents W. Mark Felt and his family, and he is also supposedly the "author" of the story that ran in Vanity Fair revealing Deep Throat's identity. I read elsewhere that O'Connor was paid roughly $10,000 to write the story (NYT 6/2/05). The family seems anxious to cash in on their patriarch's fame, so I am afraid we have not begun to hear the end of this story, even though all of the suspense is really over now with the revealing of his identity. Plus, Woodward still seems to possess the real story, and apparently he has already written a book about how he got to know Felt that is being rushed to press as I type this. It remains to be seen if Felt has additional juicy details from behind the scenes that we don't know about yet. We do know that at the time of Watergate, he did provide Woodward (and Carl Bernstein) with amazingly accurate information that in some cases took years to substantiate.

O'Connor is a "conservative corporate litigator... best known for his work defending a cigarette company" according to the Wall Street Journal. That company was R.J. Reynolds (now Reynolds American), by the way. So we're all very happy that he was able to cash in on revealing the identity of Deep Throat. Anyway, he had heard for a number of years that Mark Felt was very likely the infamous Watergate informant, and then he met Felt's grandson Nick Jones through his daughter because the two were classmates together at Stanford. I'll go ahead and include that part of the story as it appears verbatim in today's WSJ (written by Joe Hagan and Katherine Rosman):

"At a dinner in 2002, Mr. Jones mentioned to Mr. O'Connor that he was Mr. Felt's grandson. Mr. O'Connor recognized the name and said to Mr. Jones, "Your grandad is Deep Throat! Did you know that?", repeating a rumor he had heard for years. Mr. Jones replied that he had heard the rumor, too, and said, 'just recently we have started to think maybe it's him.'"

O'Connor eventually met Felt through the grandson and coaxed a kind of confession out of him that he indeed was Deep Throat. I guess you know the rest. They sold the story to Vanity Fair (or however you want to look at it), and now Woodward is scrambling to have the last word and release everything he had planned to release as soon as Felt died, rather than now while he is still alive at the impressive age of 91.

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