Our intrepid parking-garage-dwelling brother at FishbowlDC engages in a little poetic justice, scooping Vanity Fair on its own Deep Throat story, recalling how VF's late-May outing of Mark Felt scooped Woodward and Bernstein on their own high-profile secret. Except the scooped article is by Bernstein, which means that the guy just can't catch a break.

Well, if it's any consolation, Bernstein, it looks like it's a fascinating article, filled with behind-the-scenes details about how the WaPo team of Woodward, Bernstein, Bradlee and Downie decided to address the confirmation process and lots of other nuggets, including a stinging indictment of the Bush administration's treatment of the press (astute readers will recall our Daily Show roundup from the Woodstein episode where Bernstein took the floor and railed against the Bush League's obfuscations and stymie-ing of the fourth estate (wow, I really don't know how to spell that word. Stymiing? Stymying? Stymieing? Grammarians out there, help me!).

Upshot: Bernstein remains staunchly committed to anonymous sources; today's press is under assault as never before; power in the three branches of government has led to an unprecedented era of spin over truth; and oh yeah Woodward and Bernstein are like brothers, dammit. I think in the photo above they look like Haydn Christenson and Benicio Del Toro. Agree? Disagree? In any case, save yourself the hefty VF cover price and hop on over to FishbowlDC for the story ahead of the story.

Woodstein: How it Felt [FishbowlDC]

NB FishbowlDC says that the tensions mentioned in yesterday's Lowdown, mentioned previously, seem to have been exaggerated.

Guess we can't blame this one on John D. O'Connor. Today the Washington Post got totally scooped - again - on Deep Throat, this time by USA Today which scored a copy of Woodward's rushed-to-print Deep Throat memoir, "The Secret Man" and happily dishes its now-semi-secret details. The book is - was - set for release on July 6th. The worst part: USA Today didn't even get it by subterfuge or cool cloak-and-dagger secret book-getting ways. They bought it, at a bookstore Fairfax County, Va., that put it on sale early. Oh, my God, everyone at the Post must want to kill Bob Woodward right now (see above). Bob, you couldn't cough up an advance story for the paper that gave you all that, you know, free advertising?

In any case, because we know you wanted to know:

On another note, I guess we were wrong.

Last week we noted that the folks at the New York Observer must have worked like maniacs to get their coverage ready* for a next-day article breaking the Vanity Fair backstory. But they didn't stop there, so this week we have "Deep Throat, Inc.," the definitive word on the behind-the-scenes wrangling for the story (not to mention the shilling), by Tom Scocca and Sheelah Kolhatkar.

It confirms our impression that John O'Connor's stewardship didn't do the Felt Family any favors (Doubleday editor in chief Bill Thomas: "We decided not to take the meeting with O'Connor." How badly do you have to screw up for publishers not to want Deep Throat story from the Throat itself?). It also makes us a little sad for the Felts, who have been viewed under arched eyebrows for admitting their financial motives here but seem to mention "having enough for bills" an awful lot (remember Joan Felt took her dad in after he wasn't happy/was kind of recalcitrant at a nursing home). Our brows remain arched at this line: "Mr. Kuhn had been engaged by Mr. O'Connor to represent him and the immediate Felt family..." (emphasis added). Cute how Mr. O'Connor is suddenly as much of a player as Deep Throat and his ilk. How did that ten grand from Vanity Fair get divided again?

Well, according to the Observer piece it may all be moot,** anyway, given the lack of interest in the Felt version of the story on the part of publishers (and the public, as we theorized last week - "Deep Throat" was the top gaining query on Google last week, and "Washington Post" was number 4 - but nothing on Mark Felt). It would be another thing entirely if Felt had kept amazing super-secret records from his time in the FBI, but wouldn't we know that by now, at least in the form of a high-six-figure book deal courtesy of the high-six-figure-book-deal-getting David Kuhn? No, the Felts laid it out there for a VF spread and a $10,000 payday. Perhaps they've got no one to blame but themselves, but for the record I'm still going to go with John O'Connor.

Deep Throat, Inc. [NY Observer]
Google Zeitgeist [Google]
Fishbowl Deep Throat Archive [FishbowlNY]

*Chekkit, Keith Kelly, that's exactly what we wrote last week!
**And by the way, how random to have reason to use the word "moot" in two separate posts. Blogging, where anything is possible.

Graydon Carter: Sometimes being right isn't as important as being first Newly-nupted Vanity Fair EIC Graydon Carter unburdened to Salon about how nervous he was to run the Deep Throat story, because he wasn't totally sure he had the right dude. Moving forward with the story under those circumstances apparently required "brass balls," and cost the mag $10,000. John O'Connor may be an all right lawyer, but it seems to me that he's the worst agent ever. Felt Family, you got hosed. [Salon]

Nicholas Kristof Wins Michael Kelly Award: NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof doesn't write about his wife or viagra, but he does write about injustices and travesties all around the world (like his most column on Sunday) and galvanizes his readers to help, too. So it's hardly shocking that he is this year's recipient of the Michael Kelly Award, established to honor the former Atlantic Monthly editor who was killed in Iraq, for Kristof's columns on sexual exploitation in Southeast Asia and his columns which consistently (and stubbornly) kept the genocide in Sudan in the national conversation. He gets a prize of $25,000, which probably more than makes up for having a street value of $2.35. [Michael Kelly Award]

Daniel Radosh just fell a little bit in love with Jack Shafer: Over at Slate, Jack Shafer weighs back in on the murky issue of sex slaves in the U.S., based on the even murkier justifications in Peter Landesman's much-impugned and internally-Times-examined NYT Mag piece on the subject. Daniel Radosh and Landesman have sparred fairly ferociously on the matter since then, mostly because Radosh loves to rag on Landesman for shoddy, irresponsible sourcing and because it drives Landesman absolutely crazy. It will also no doubt drive Landesman crazy that Shafer agrees with Radosh that the article was utter hokum without "a scintilla of certitude." Meanwhile, Radosh loves saying "I told you so." Somewhere, a vein is popping in Peter Landesman's head. Round three, we're watching for you. [Slate]

The Washington Post whooshed a Deep Throat blog into being, and checked out the Amazon rankings on "All The President's Men": today the book's at #5 on the non-fiction list and #24 overall (up from 27 per the WaPo blog). The DVD is doing well too, at number 11 (another jump - ahead of "The Incredibles" as WaPo points out but, then again, behind the number-one ranked "The Eagles Farewell 1 Tour, Live From Melbourne" - who the hell is buying that???). I was actually planning on renting it this weekend ("All The President's Men," not the Eagles), so I'll let you know how I fare at Blockbuster. That's the real litmus test.

Another quick note about web popularity, specifically Google searches: this morning top queries included "Deep Throat," "Bob Woodward," "Watergate" and "Richard Nixon" (now it's just Nixon). I've been keeping my eye on it and I haven't seen any query for "W. Mark Felt" crack the top spots. Going back to the Felt family's eagerness to make a buck off this thing, one wonders what kind of hook any "authorized" Felt version will have given that the real custodian of the story is Woodward, and the public seems to know that. We'll see what Google Zeitgeist has to say next week.

Meanwhile, if someone wanted to whip up a "Deep Throat's Identity Is Revealed And It's All Been Kind Of Scandalous" mixtape, we wouldn't discourage it. If you wish to remain anonymous we'll totally swear to not to tell anyone for at least 30 years, even at summer camp.

It struck us as a mite odd* that the Deep Throat story was broken by Vanity Fair. Here was a major scoop, one which would have been snapped up by any magazine. Apparently the Felts had wanted Vanity Fair to "give the story the stature they sought" - as in, sandwiched between glossy photos of hot young Hollywood starlets? It kind of didn't add up. Would Felt have chosen Vanity Fair? Would he have even read it?

Well, in addition to stature, the Felt family wanted money. Today's NYT offers a breakdown of the Felt family's bid to sell the story, first to People and then to the always-dignified ReganBooks, meeting with Woodward sometime in between, which obviously led nowhere.

Another weird point: as Richard Bradley asked on HuffPo, who the hell was John D. O'Connor? It seemed an odd dual role, to go from legal adviser to agent, morphing into author along the way (how was the $10,000 Vanity Fare fee allocated, I wonder?).

Bradley notes the following: (1) The VF piece is way short on actual quotes from Felt (except for the money quote, "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat"); (2) There is at least some evidence that the 91-year old Felt's mind ain't what it used to be; and (3) It's odd (and to my mind, kind of sad) that Felt would choose this route instead of going with his WaPo confidantes, still holding to their oath after all these years.

Joe Hagan and Katharine Rosman of the WSJ also examine O'Connor, tracing his attempts to reveal/sell the story, painting him as a bit of an opportunist who started by offering legal expertise and eventually being "permitted by family members" to waive attorney-client privilege and actually write the story himself. Family sign-off or not, the whole thing definitely suggests a conflict of interest.

Well, in any case, Felt seems happy about it now, and there's no reason that he should be the only player who doesn't benefit from his legacy. But for a story defined by codes of honor the whole way through, it seems like the wrong ending.

*And of course we totally knew it was Mark Felt all along.

Bob Woodward writes the definitive, 4,882-word account of how he came to meet, befriend, and collaborate with Deep Throat, aka Mark Felt. The Post obviously gave Woodward carte blanche on the piece, which is first-person and filled with small personal details. But God is in the details and it's a fascinating account, and presents a very real and fleshed-out picture of Mark Felt when he was Deep Throat and not a 91-year old man bending to the will of his family (more on this later).
As you can see, the story jumps off the front from a fairly modest space (to my mind, for the stature of the story and the storyteller), but maybe that's because yesterday's front page was dominated by Deep Throat. There's a great archive of that coverage here (with a VF cover page shot as a special bonus). The Post also has a complete Watergate chronology here, including front-page shots and links to key stories.

Our Foreign Correspondent, SAC, reports on the unmasking of Deep Throat: Perhaps it is my remote location that allows the clarity to see the obvious, or perhaps it is my dogged tenacity or just maybe it's because I'm so fucking wonderful. I really can't pin down the reason that I am the only one to catch on to this Deep Throat "revelation." It's a PR stunt, people, a genius one, sure, but still, nothing more. Let me break it down for you with a funky timeline of events:

• 1972 - Gerard Damiano, a former Queens hairdresser and Mob patsy, makes a movie about a woman with no apparent gag reflex entitled Deep Throat.


• 1973 - Woodward and Bernstein decide to honor this cinematic milestone by giving their primary anonymous source in the Washington Post Watergate investigation the codename "Deep Throat," as a play on the common journalistic phrase "deep background," but also because the anonymous source, now known to be Mark Felt, gave amazing blowjobs.


• 1976 - Hal Holbrook is tapped to play the role of Deep Throat in the movie version of All the President's Men, mostly because of his distinctive voice and authoritative persona, but also because he gives amazing blowjobs. He later parlays this double threat into a never-ending stint as Mark Twain.

continued...

Yesterday we wondered how the outing of Deep Throat might affect the swirling debate over anonymous sources. Not surprisingly, the gang seems to like 'em a whole lot more than they did two weeks ago.

Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee kept Felt's identity secret for over 30 years, and they're not going to let us forget that they were upholding a mighty oath, the oath that allowed the story to come out in the first place (especially since they were scooped so blatantly). The weight of history counts for a lot, and Bernstein invokes it to the NYT, saying that

This is a case history and a case lesson of why it is so important that we have confidential sources. If you were to look back at the original stories, I think hardly any of them had named sources. There's no way this reporting could have been done, nor is there any way that good reporting at a lot of places can be done, without anonymous sources.

(You may recall that Woodward went on record in support of anonymous sources in the WSJ just after Newsweek broke, stressing their extreme importance especially in the face of a "secret government.")

continued...

Everyone's excited about Deep Throat! The folks at the New York Observer must have worked like maniacs yesterday to get their coverage ready for today's paper, with Tom Scocca giving some backstory to how the Vanity Fair article was brokered (and it sounds like VF got a pretty good deal; the Felt camp had wanted dignity and money (not necessarily in that order), but VF only had to cough up its standard rate plus the priceless assurance to the Felt camp that "it would give the story the stature they sought"). Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, staffers had to figure it out by themselves as they watched The Post being scooped on their scoop (the VF fact-checkers deliberately skipped the Post, it seems). Meanwhile, original leaker Jacob Bernstein suddenly wasn't so talkative, refusing the clamoring media seeking his inner-sanctum commentary: "I've turned down Good Morning America, the Daily News, Fox News. I've turned them all down." (Who knows, Jacob may change his mind and share his secret. Apparently that can happen.)

But the real excitement come from over at Slate, where Timothy Noah is near-apoplectic with joy at having been proven right through years of chasing the secret identity of Deep Throat (not surprisingly, all sorts of people "knew all along"). Even now he can't stop chasing, obsessively going back over his conclusions and evidence, mad at Woodward & Bernstein for red herrings they may have cast, mad at himself for not going to summer camp with Jacob Bernstein. Expect more from Noah Thursday once Bob Woodward publishes the definitive denoument in WaPo. Meanwhile, the lack of Deep Throat innuendoes has truly been surprising, though these efforts were appreciated. James Wolcott, your restraint is superhuman.

Deep Throat, Antihero [Slate]
Washington Post Is Copping A Felt On Deep Throat [NYO]
Still Deep [NYO]
Disclosure by Magazine Catches Post by Surprise [NYT]
Conflicted And Mum For Decades [WaPo]
Slate's Deep Throat archive [Slate]
Deep Throat round-up [MediaBistro Morning Newsfeed]

continued...