Who Was ‘Deep Throat’? It’s Still a Deep Mystery

WASHINGTON — In a city where even the kinkiest details of a president’s sex life can end up on the front pages, one big secret has remained secret.

Who was “Deep Throat”?

For more than a quarter-century, journalists, pundits, historians and politicians have tried to divine the identity of the Nixon White House insider who kept a pair of resourceful young Washington Post reporters steps ahead of the competition on the news story of their generation.

Speculation has ranged from Alexander Haig to Diane Sawyer, who both deny being perhaps the century’s most famous anonymous news source.

Another theory maintains there was no actual “Deep Throat,” that the source was rather a composite, a fictional device created by the writers to provide cover for numerous Nixon White House leakers and to spice up their best-selling book and blockbuster movie, “All the President’s Men.”

No way, say the reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. “Deep Throat,” they insist, is a real person whose identity they’ve sworn to keep secret until he dies.

“ ‘Deep Throat’ does exist,” Bernstein has said. “He was and is one person--exactly who we have said, a highly placed official in the executive branch. . . . If we had made up ‘Deep Throat,’ we would have been fired.”

Other names from the Nixon administration on the list of possible suspects include: Assistant Atty. Gen. Henry Petersen, Deputy White House Counsel Fred Fielding, FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, Nixon lawyer Leonard Garment and the late William Casey, a government official who later became CIA director.

Woodward, who continues to write for the Post and is the author of “Shadow,” a new book that examines the effects of Watergate on the men who have occupied the White House since Nixon’s resignation in 1974, says honoring his promise to “Deep Throat” helps him convince people he’s serious about keeping confidential sources confidential.

Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher during the Watergate era, wrote in her memoirs that her newspaper’s top editor, Ben Bradlee, assured her of “Deep Throat’s” reliability.

“It’s why I remain convinced that there was such a person and that he . . . was neither made up nor an amalgam or a composite of a number of people, as has often been hypothesized,” she wrote.