Apparently Chatterbox, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, and Jack Shafer (then with Washington’s City Paper, now with Slate) aren’t the only journalists who took note of James Mann’s brilliant-but-mostly-ignored 1992 Atlantic piece identifying the FBI as the place where Deep Throat worked. (See “Deep Throat Revealed (Again).”) It has been brought to Chatterbox’s attention that the Post’s Watergate Silver Anniversary Web site maintains a Deep Throat page that gives lengthy, respectful consideration to the FBI theory in general, and to Mann’s Atlantic piece in particular. The Post’s Deep Throat page also cites a CBS documentary from 1992 called Watergate: The Secret Story that offers up an alternative FBI theory: Deep Throat was L. Patrick Gray, who succeeded J.Edgar Hoover as acting FBI director right before the Watergate break-in in June 1972. Chatterbox isn’t sure he buys it, but he finds the evidence interesting enough to pass along.
The CBS documentary, hosted by Mike Wallace, does a nice job of knocking down the most hackneyed Deep Throat theories fingering Al Haig, Henry Kissinger, and Melvin Laird. All three, it says, were out of the country on days when, according to Woodward, he met with Deep Throat. Then CBS turns to W. Mark Felt, a prominent suspect in Mann’s piece (and, unbeknownst to Chatterbox, also the man Richard Nixon, no mean authority, accused of being Deep Throat). CBS’s problem with Felt–who denies he’s Deep Throat–is that Woodward described Deep Throat as a heavy smoker, and Felt gave up smoking in 1943. Chatterbox doesn’t think this dismisses Felt as a suspect; it’s possible the heavy-smoker bit was a phony novelistic detail that Woodward got wrong or invented.
The thrust of Mann’s Atlantic piece is that the FBI lifers had an interest in helping Woodward because their new boss, L. Patrick Gray, was bowing to White House pressure to limit the investigation. However, it’s possible that even as Gray was knuckling under to the White House, he was advancing the Watergate investigation by an alternative route: leaking to Woodward. According to the CBS documentary, Gray “started out as a Nixon loyalist, but according to our sources, as Gray was dragged into the Watergate scandal, he became increasingly disgusted with the whole business.”
What’s the evidence that Deep Throat was Gray? Here’s what Mike Wallace says in the documentary:
Through a lawyer, Gray denied to CBS he was Deep Throat.
[Update, 8/4/99: After much pestering online and by phone, Chatterbox has finally gotten The Atlantic to post on its Web site Jim Mann’s watershed Deep Throat piece. Click here and wonder no more about Deep Throat’s place of employment.]