Mark Felt - Deep Throat Speculation

Deep Throat Speculation

For a detailed overview of speculation prior to May 31, 2005, see Deep Throat.

The identity of Deep Throat was debated for more than three decades, and Felt was frequently mentioned as a possibility. An October 1990 Washingtonian magazine article about "Washington secrets" listed the 15 most prominent Deep Throat candidates, and Felt's name was among them.

Jack Limpert published evidence as early as 1974 that Felt was the informant. On June 25 of that year, a few weeks after All the President's Men was published, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial, "If You Drink Scotch, Smoke, Read, Maybe You're Deep Throat." It began "W. Mark Felt says he isn't now, nor has he ever been Deep Throat." The Journal quoted Felt saying the character was a "composite" and "I'm just not that kind of person." During a grand jury investigation in 1976, Felt was called to testify and the prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights J. Stanley Pottinger, discovered that Felt was "Deep Throat", but the secrecy of the proceedings preserved the secrecy of Felt's alter ego from the public.

In 1992, James Mann, who had been a reporter at The Washington Post in 1972 and worked with Woodward, wrote a piece for The Atlantic Monthly saying the source had to have been within the FBI. While he mentioned Felt as a possibility, he said he could not be certain it was him.

Alexander P. Butterfield, the White House aide best known for revealing the existence of Nixon's taping system, told The Hartford Courant in 1995, "I think it was a guy named Mark Felt." In July 1999, Felt was identified as Deep Throat by The Hartford Courant, citing Chase Culeman-Beckman, a nineteen-year-old from Port Chester, New York. Culeman-Beckman said Jacob Bernstein, the son of Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron, had told him the name at summer camp in 1988, and that Jacob claimed he had been told by his father. Felt denied the identification to the Courant saying "No, it's not me. I would have done better. I would have been more effective. Deep Throat didn't exactly bring the White House crashing down, did he?" Bernstein said his son didn't know. "Bob and I have been wise enough never to tell our wives, and we've certainly never told our children." (Bernstein reiterated on June 2, 2005, on the Today Show that his wife had never known.)

Leonard Garment, President Nixon's former law partner who became White House counsel after John W. Dean's resignation, ruled Felt out as Deep Throat in his 2000 book In Search of Deep Throat. Garment wrote:

The Felt theory was a strong one ... Felt had a personal motive for acting. After the death of J. Edgar Hoover ... Felt thought he was a leading candidate to succeed Hoover ... The characteristics were a good fit. The trouble with Felt's candidacy was that Deep Throat in All the President's Men simply did not sound to me like a career FBI man.

Garment said the information leaked to Woodward was inside White House information Felt would not have had access to. "Felt did not fit." (Once the secret was revealed, it was noted Felt did have access to such information because the Bureau's agents were interviewing high White House officials.)

In 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle profiled Felt. Noting his denial in The FBI Pyramid, the paper wrote:

Curiously, his son — American Airlines pilot Mark Felt — now says that shouldn't be read as a definitive denial, and that he plans to answer the question once-and-for-all in a second memoir. The excerpt of the working draft obtained by the Chronicle has Felt still denying he's Throat but providing a rationale for why Throat did the right thing.

In February 2005, reports surfaced that Woodward had prepared Deep Throat's obituary because he was near death. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was battling cancer at the time (he would die in September 2005), and the rumors led to speculation that Rehnquist might have been Deep Throat. Rehnquist was a Justice Department official early in the Nixon administration and was an associate justice of the Supreme Court at the time Deep Throat was active.