Deep Throat's identity was a mystery for decades because no one believed this woman.
'Nora Ephron told everyone who the anonymous source for Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate scoops was. And she was right.
When you think about it now, it’s sort of amazing that people gossiped and speculated about the identity of Deep Throat — the source Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relied on during Watergate — for 30 years without the use of Twitter.
This week, the Twitter sleuths were out in full force, trying to figure out the identity of the whistleblower whose complaint about President Trump’s conduct has fueled an impeachment push. On Thursday, acting national intelligence chief Joseph Maguire said he did not know who the whistleblower is, but kept referring to him using male pronouns. The New York Times published a report identifying him as a CIA officer who had once worked at the White House, drawing condemnation from readers who said the Times was endangering his safety.
And a former CIA official wrote in the New York Post that the whistleblower had to be a law professor and not an intelligence official because — wait for it — the complaint included “detailed footnotes.”
No one expects his anonymity to last as long as Deep Throat’s did.
Richard Nixon became the only president in American history to resign in 1974. It wasn’t until 2005 that W. Mark Felt, the associate director of the FBI during Watergate, revealed he was the one who provided crucial information to Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein during their investigation into the Watergate break-in and coverup.
Perhaps if Twitter had existed in those years, the matter would have been resolved sooner, because there was someone who knew who Deep Throat was, and that someone was a) a master of brevity and wit, b) married to Bernstein for a time and c) eager to blab to anyone who would listen about Felt.
But no one believed her.
That someone was Nora Ephron, the filmmaker behind classic romantic comedies like “When Harry Met Sally,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.”
Before she became beloved by witty women the world over, Ephron was married to Bernstein for four years, from 1976 to 1980. As she recounted later, Bernstein refused to reveal Deep Throat’s identity to her. But she learned that before The Post’s managing editor Howard Simons gave the source the pornographic moniker “Deep Throat,” Woodward had referred to the source as “M.F.” in his notes. . .
(Felt also denied it to the Wall Street Journal in 1974, cryptically adding that if he were Deep Throat, he obviously wouldn’t admit it.)
But by 2005, he had changed his mind, and revealed all to Vanity Fair.
Fortunately, Ephron, who died of complications from cancer in 2012, lived long enough to be vindicated and to gloat about it in the way only she could.
“All I can say is that this is a huge load off my mind. Mark Felt is Deep Throat,” she said. “Don’t say I didn’t try to tell you.”'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/09/27/deep-throats-identity-was-mystery-decades-because-no-one-believed-this-woman/
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