The CIA and Hollywood

[Jan Klimkowski]

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Jan, I think you are being a bit hard on the Pak-man. After all he apparently already died an Unchristian and UnJew death, when a long contruction steel rod backflipped off a Connecticut (there it is again; Doddge that!) flat bed, through his windshield and rudely edited his palpitator.

This to a guy a guy who also made the excellent The Parallax View... well this could lead to another proverb!

Are you forgetting the famous parking lot scene in Presdients Men where the Deep Throat Character clearly states that the Woodsteins really dont know anything about the deep intelligence background of what was going on with Wattergate?

This scene would seem to make this movie not entirely the enemy of Watergate Revisionists , oder?

Nathaniel - I do think Pakula was most probably on the side of Light, rather than Darkness.

However, I also think the Quest for the Identity of Deep Throat is an archetypal example of Their arts of misdirection.

I can't say it better than Thomas Pynchon in the fantastic & massively misunderstood Gravity's Rainbow:

Proverbs for Paranoids 3: “If They can get you asking the wrong questions, They don’t have to worry about answers.”

Below is one big reason why I think the Quest for Deep Throat was a gift that fell into Their laps, and They have delighted in keeping the myth alive ever since.

There are original documents at the url:

The truth about Watergate is In Nixon’s Web. What follows here is adapted from the final chapter, “The Watergate Books: Fact and Fiction.”
The myth is All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. It’s also a terrific book. The story is gripping and the characters are memorable. It reads like a novel and translated seamlessly into a screenplay.

But what gave it the legs to become an iconic bestseller and an Oscar-winning movie was the sleight-of-hand it got away with from the outset. In the book they wrote about themselves, Woodward and Bernstein aren’t the after-the-fact voyeurs they were in reality; they’re the main characters. In All the President’s Men the Watergate conspiracy isn’t unraveled by the authorities, it’s uncovered by a pair of plucky reporters who wouldn’t quit.

The literary trick they employed to achieve that shift was as simple as it was brilliant: in the narrative they treat every new discovery as if they were the ones who first uncovered it. It simply wasn’t true. They didn’t uncover the crimes, they followed the investigation that had already uncovered the crimes.

The advantage they exploited was their First Amendment press privilege to publish anything they wanted as soon as they heard about it. Thus their revelations in the Washington Post were always ahead of the legally constrained and tactically deliberate public announcements of the prosecutors. When the American people began to get a sense that there really was a conspiracy, they got their hints from the press, not from the government.

But of course that’s true in any crime story. We always get bits and pieces of the prosecution’s evidence long before the trial. In the much-later court testimony, we get the details of a story we already know, but it’s nonetheless far more compelling than the pre-trial publicity. The courtroom drama eclipses all those early news scoops. We end up knowing the judge, the prosecutors, the defendants, and the defense lawyers, but no one remembers the bylines of the reporters. So how did Woodward and Bernstein become so famous?

By short-circuiting the process.

In the world according to All the President’s Men, the government never was going to tell the tale. The prosecution was going to be stopped with the low-level burglars themselves, and the big shots were going to get away with it because everybody was in on the conspiracy, including the head of the FBI. Only through the pluck and grit of the two cub reporters was the evil scheme uncovered, the top dogs forced to resign, and the wheels of justice handed back to the honest lower echelons

It was a great story, but it had one big problem: the prosecution hadn’t stopped. The storyline could hold water only if the book were published before the next round of revelations, indictments, and trials, including the biggest one of them all: Nixon’s impeachment trial.

And that’s just what they did, writing it in 1973 and rushing the book out in February 1974, six months before the whole story came out and Nixon resigned. It was a brilliant move: not only did they get their story out before it would have been eclipsed by the impeachment trial, but its publication helped to drive the president from office before the trial could even start.

Even with that master stroke, the book might still have fallen as flat as all the others that came out at the same time. According to David Obst, the literary agent who helped write the proposal in Woodward’s apartment, the original concept was an insider’s account of reportage in the style of Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President books. There was no “Deep Throat” in the proposal. But before the first draft was finished, Robert Redford bought the screen rights for $350,000 and invited Woodward to dinner, where he introduced him to William Goldman, who was to write the screenplay. Goldman and Redford suggested a few changes. “Deep Throat” appeared and so did the dramatic storyline.

What sets Woodward and Bernstein’s story apart from, say, their boss Barry Sussman’s much more accurate and insightful The Great Coverup (published the same year) is the fiction-like drama that appeared in later drafts as All the President’s Men took shape. Late-night meetings in parking garages, warnings that everyone’s life is in danger, clandestine encounters in out-of-the-way bars. Those are screenplay elements. They seem fabricated. So does “Deep Throat.”

It has now become clear that “Deep Throat” was fabricated. The most famous anonymous source of all time was a fictional character made up by the two best known reporters in American history.

The proof? It’s in their own notes, the ones they sold to the University of Texas for $5 million, a deal they struck in 2003 while the identity of “Deep Throat” was still theirs to withhold. (The contract allowed them to hold back notes of still-secret living sources.) It must have seemed like a great idea until 2005, when Vanity Fair magazine printed an article identifying Mark Felt as “Deep Throat.” When Woodward and Bernstein reluctantly confirmed that he had been a source, Mark Felt was no longer a secret source. The two owed their notes of conversations with him to the University of Texas.

After stalling for a year and a half, Woodward finally got around to depositing his “Deep Throat” notes at the University of Texas in January 2007. It took Ed Gray less than five minutes with the first interview to see that it was with someone other than Mark Felt. And it took barely more than that to see that Woodward’s sketchy notes were of interviews conducted with at least two different men, probably three. The incontrovertible evidence behind that conclusion is detailed in In Nixon’s Web, in a final chapter written by Ed. It’s also available to anyone who looks at Woodward’s now-public notes. Here’s a summary:

--Although there are 17 clandestine contacts between Woodward and “Deep Throat” in All the President’s Men, the newly-deposited notes include only three of them. Two are marked “meeting with X” and another “interview with my friend.” An additional single page is unattributed and does not match any passage in the book. There are no notes at all for the other 13 contacts, including the climactic post-garage-meeting scene in the book and movie where Woodward types a memo in his apartment for Bernstein under loud music because Deep Throat has told him the CIA is bugging “everyone,” a memo that according to the book was distributed to their editors at the Washington Post the very next day. If it exists, Woodward and Bernstein are under a $5 million obligation to produce it.

--In the notes of October 9, 1972, “X” told Woodward that immediately after the burglary, John Mitchell, the chairman of CREEP, conducted his own investigation.

Here’s how part of this interview appears in All the President’s Men, as an exact quote from “Deep Throat” during one of their clandestine garage meetings:

“Mitchell conducted his own--he called it an investigation--for about ten days after June 17. And he was going crazy. He found all sorts of new things which astounded even him. At some point, Howard Hunt, of all the ironies, was assigned to help Mitchell get some information. Like lightning, he was pulled off and fired and told to pack up his desk and leave town forever. By no less than John Ehrlichman.”

Here's the same part of the actual interview with "X" as it appears in Woodward's original notes, now on deposit at the University: of Texas:

Note the dropped “we had guys assigned to him to help.” (The yellow highlighting does not appear in the original.) Woodward and Bernstein dropped that detail in order to hide their source.

If that source was Mark Felt, his “we” could only mean the FBI. But that’s impossible. If there had been FBI agents “assigned to help” who “found all sorts of new things,” not only would the Watergate case have been broken during those first ten days, but the FBI’s now public Watergate files would be filled with official summaries of the assignments and resultant interviews. There are none. Woodward and Bernstein are lying to us when they say “X” was Mark Felt. It was someone else, someone on the inside trusted enough to “help.”

--As described fully in the last chapter of In Nixon’s Web, the unattributed single page is actually of an interview with Donald Santarelli, a prominent Washington lawyer who was a justice department official during Watergate. While examining a photocopy of Woodward’s page, Santarelli told Ed Gray that it definitely was him.

--Another set of notes, dated January 24, 1973 are marked “interview with my friend.” These may very well have been with Mark Felt.

Thus there are interviews with at least three individuals in Woodward’s far from complete set of “Deep Throat” notes: Mark Felt, Donald Santarelli, and X.

Why is it so important that “Deep Throat” was a fictional character and not an actual person? For two reasons, one specific to Pat Gray, the other important for the rest of us.

First the personal. All the President’s Men wasn’t just the title of a bestselling book and a major motion picture. It was a list of evildoers and Pat Gray is still on that list. Check the current paperback, first page, “Cast of Characters.” Check the website at the University of Texas, which houses Woodward and Bernstein’s papers and where L. Patrick Gray III is still listed prominently by Woodward and Bernstein as a “conspirator.” Pat Gray isn’t just a name on that list, his photograph was included with Nixon himself and ten others on the book’s original dust jacket. Of those ten men, every one except Pat Gray either pled guilty or was convicted of a crime. As a list, All the President’s Men needs to have one name removed.

But more important, like several recently disputed memoirs, the book itself needs to be reclassified. All the President’s Men is today accepted as a factual recitation -- and often the factual recitation -- of how Nixon and his “men” were driven from office. Until Woodward and Bernstein sold their notes to the University of Texas there was no way to test the book’s claim of historical accuracy. Those verifiable documents have provided the previously unavailable key. “Deep Throat” was a myth. So, therefore, is All the President’s Men.

http://lpatrickgrayiii.com/watergate02.html