IT'S PAT:

Deep Throat suspect found dead in hotel (Dan Glaister, July 29, 2004, The Guardian)

One of the longest-running mysteries of American politics may soon be resolved after it was announced yesterday that the man many suspect of being Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal had died.

Fred LaRue, known as the "bagman" because he delivered payments to ensure the silence of participants in the Watergate break-in, was found dead in a hotel room in Biloxi, Mississippi. He was 75.

The two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, have maintained that they would only reveal the identity of Deep Throat once he was dead.

MORE:
Student study identifies Deep Throat (The Signpost, April 28, 2003)

Attempting to solve one of America's greatest political mysteries, student investigators at the University of Illinois have concluded that former White House lawyer Fred Fielding is Deep Throat, the secret source who broke the Watergate scandal wide open.

Some of the students and their teacher, William Gaines, named Fielding as their choice for Deep Throat at a news conference at the Watergate Hotel.

Fielding and Bob Woodward, who first reported the Watergate story with fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, did not respond to telephone inquiries. In the past, Gaines said, Fielding has denied he was Deep Throat, the nickname Woodward gave to the anonymous source who provided damaging details of the break-in by Republican operatives and the Nixon administration's efforts to cover it up.

In their project, which lasted four years, the students from the university's Urbana-Champaign campus and Gaines cited six specific instances of closely held inside information that Fielding knew and Deep Throat provided. These included the involvement of Nixon White House operative Howard Hunt in the burglary and Nixon aide John Ehrlichman's instructions to White House counsel John Dean to throw a briefcase containing incriminating information about political tricks into the Potomac River.

-Was Fred Fielding Deep Throat?: The evidence is surprisingly strong. (Timothy Noah, April 28, 2003, Slate)

Chatterbox is looking at a January 1981 clipping from the Washington Post headlined, "Nixon Ex-Aide Named Counsel to Reagan." The ex-aide in question was Fred Fielding, whom William Gaines and his journalism class at the University of Illinois have identified as Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's famous Watergate source. Deep Throat's identity is known only to Woodward; his co-author, Carl Bernstein; their editor, Ben Bradlee; and Throat. (Serious Deep Throat scholars always call Deep Throat "Throat.") Bradlee once famously claimed that you could discover Deep Throat's identity by feeding all known information about him into a computer. Taking that as a challenge, Gaines more or less did so. The computer named Fielding.

In the past, Chatterbox has expressed skepticism toward Gaines' project. The students' initial speculation that Deep Throat was Pat Buchanan was patently ridiculous. The case for Buchanan on paper is better than you might think, but had they looked up from their printouts and observed Buchanan's near-pathological commitment to personal loyalty, they would have understood how poorly cast he was for the role. (Buchanan's own Deep Throat candidate is Lowell Weicker, a bizarre choice that mainly reflects Buchanan's unwillingness to accuse any former White House comrade of behavior that he considers beneath contempt.) Chatterbox also felt the students (in concert with former Nixon White House counsel and Deep Throat sleuth John Dean) had dismissed the "G-man" Theory—the idea, most forcefully argued in the Atlantic by Jim Mann, that Deep Throat had to work at the FBI—rather too hastily and with far too little evidence.

But during the past year, Chatterbox has been rethinking his commitment to the G-man Theory in light of two pieces of evidence. The first is Dean's and the Gaines group's observation that a November 1973 Woodward and Bernstein Post story was sourced anonymously to "White House sources." That's significant because in All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein say that Deep Throat was a source on this story. That would make Deep Throat a White House aide, wouldn't it? The second troubling piece of evidence, flagged by Brown political scientist Darrel M. West, was a Playboy interview that J. Anthony Lukas conducted with Woodward in 1989. In that interview, Woodward flatly denied that Deep Throat was someone in the "intelligence community." On first considering these two inconvenient facts, Chatterbox argued that they didn't put the G-man Theory out of business. Over time, though, Chatterbox has been more inclined to think that they do.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 28, 2004 11:27 PM