“The things you find rummaging around in people’s darkrooms.”
I was way off on who Deep Throat really was but so were a lot of the Washington “know-it-all” crowd.
The admission by The Washington Post today confirming the identity of the confidential source who helped bring down the Nixon administration was kind of anticlimactic in a way.
Speculation was rampant for years about just who was the person who fed Woodward and Bernstein the lowdown on Tricky Dick Nixon. Some bigshot Washington pundits thought Deep Throat was a well-known name such as Al “I’m in charge here” Haig, or even Henry Kissinger. To find out in the wake of a Vanity Fair story that it was a guy I had never heard of — a former top FBI official named Mark Felt — was a bit of a letdown.
I always secretly hoped it was Elvis Presley who was Deep Throat. To find that out would have set off one hell of a conspiracy theory that would just conjoin with existing conspiracy theories that The King really wasn’t dead in the first place and would result in a conspiracy theory deluxe on toast. How could Elvis possibly know all these secrets? Hey, just look at the picture man! How could Elvis possibly NOT know everything that went on under the leadership of Richard Milhous Nixon? You can see the bond between them. The photo above leaves one with the impression that aliens swooped in and took over Nixon’s brain, and all that he was able to say afterwards was: “Thankaverymuch.” Oh wait, that may have really happened.
Of course in this puritanical age in which we find ourselves today, it would have been a scream to find out that the real Deep Throat was Linda Lovelace, who of course was the original “Deep Throat.” And how would she know all Nixon’s secrets? I speculate, you decide.
So another enigma wrapped up in a mystery spoiled like a four-day old burrito! Thanks for nothing Vanity Fair!