Tuesday, May 31, 2005

I thought it was Linda Lovelace: Today is a historic day. One of the last fun mysteries has been solved. Some guy I am not very familiar with was one of the important sources for the Watergate stories.

Watergate was before my time. So the revelation that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat is anticlimactic.

But even though this mystery is over, so many questions remain:

How does Felt feel about being forever linked to a porn movie about blow jobs?

Will everybody accept that Felt was Deep Throat? Or is this going to turn into another JFK-assassination-type theory, and this is just the cover up, and the real Deep Throat is somebody else, but the MSM is protecting him, because so many things just don't make sense, and that somebody still believes it was Pat Buchanan?

Was meeting in a parking garage really necessary, or did Felt just think it would seem really cool to be shady like that? And a flower pot? Did Felt really walk by Woodward's apartment every day to check out his flower arrangement?

And, finally, who is going to make the most money off this revelation?

I'm highly annoyed, however, that Felt's family leaked the information to Vanity Fair to give that magazine the scoop. The Washington Post owned the story and sat on the story for decades out of respect for their cherished source and his privacy. In return, the family goes behind Woodward's and Bernstein's backs and tells some other magazine.

Kudos to Woodward and Bernstein for protecting their source this well. Although many people suspected Felt for years, nobody knew for sure. In this day in age when anything remotely interesting gets smeared across cyberspace in seconds, I think we can all concur with Ben Bradlee: "The thing that stuns me is that the goddamn secret has lasted this long."