Washington’s ‘last best secret’

The magazine had spent two years at work on the story.

Even so, Vanity Fair could not be certain its story was right until Woodward and Bernstein confirmed it last Tuesday, Henry Porter said.

"A percentage of doubt in this case was reasonable," he said, although he added the magazine had "a huge amount of evidence."

In fact, the magazine had been approached several years ago by a friend of Felt’s family.

San Francisco lawyer John O’Connor contacted Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter to say a client of his was Deep Throat and wanted to unmask himself in the magazine.

Carter rejected the story because O’Connor wanted the magazine to pay Mr Felt and his family for the story, the Washington Post reported.

O’Connor then looked into writing a book about Deep Throat, but ultimately came back to Vanity Fair.

When the magazine agreed to run the story, it assigned a team of about 15 journalists to work on it with O’Connor, and went to extreme lengths to keep it a secret.

It even sent the magazine to the printer with a false headline on the cover.

Those kept in the dark included one of the magazine’s own contributing editors — Carl Bernstein himself.

Woodward and Bernstein only learnt of the story when Vanity Fair e-mailed them on Tuesday morning, shortly before going public.

"We felt that if we let Bob or Carl know, the Washington Post would be out before us," David Friend, the lead editor on the story, told the Post.

The 91-year-old Mr Felt had been mentioned decades before the Vanity Fair story as a possible Deep Throat.

"In fact, Felt was pretty much fingered in 1974 in a series of articles in the Washingtonian magazine — and I mean the evidence stacked up in the Washingtonian is very persuasive when you read it now," Porter said.

But Felt had firmly denied being Deep Throat many times over the years.

At one time, he said if he had been the secret source he "would have done better."

"I would have been more effective. Deep Throat didn’t exactly bring the White House crashing down, did he?" Felt told the Hartford Courant newspaper in 1999.

He reportedly only told his family in the past few years, and they urged him to go public.

Felt was only one of literally dozens of Washington insiders to be a suspect.

Just about every whiskey-drinking, cigarette-smoking man close to the White House has been proposed since Hal Holbrook made the character famous in the film version of Woodward and Bernstein’s book All the President’s Men.

Candidates have included former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan — a young speech writer in the Nixon White House — and even ex-president George HW Bush, the current president’s father.

A four-year investigation by a University of Illinois journalism class named Fred Fielding, who was deputy White House counsel under Nixon.

Like all the other suspects, Fielding denied it. Only last Tuesday did one finally come forward.

Leonard Garment, a lawyer in the Nixon White House who published a book called In Search of Deep Throat, said it would be "a relief to everyone to have this settled."

But Washington Post columnist Hank Steuver disagreed, lamenting: "What’s gone is the last best secret. What could be more of a let-down than finding out who Deep Throat is?"