Junto Boys

LIES: THE OFFICIAL ALTERNATE TRUTH

If Jonah Goldberg and others are right that Deep Throat never existed, but was merely conjured up as a plot device, then essentially the liberal media lied to bring down a sitting president. A generation later, Rather and friends are still at it.

Here's the second problem: I don't think Deep Throat exists.

I'm not alone. Recently, Eric Burns revealed that the late, great historian Stephen Ambrose had told him there never was a Deep Throat. Burns's evidence was secondhand at best. He said Ambrose had shared an editor with Woodward and Bernstein — the legendary Alice Mayhew — and she had told him that Deep Throat was a composite of various sources. Mayhew told Ambrose that the first manuscript of All the President's Men contained no references to Deep Throat and that she told them the book needed a stronger plot device. D.T. was the result.

This version corroborates that of David Obst, Woodward and Bernstein's former literary agent. In his memoirs, Too Good to Be Forgotten, he confirms that the first draft of the book didn't mention Deep Throat and that Bob Fink, the researcher who organized the reporters' huge pile of sources, notes, and articles into a workable manuscript, was stunned to discover the appearance of Deep Throat in later versions.

Obst also runs down several of the implausible details about Deep Throat in the book. Woodward was supposed to have signaled to Throat that he needed to talk by putting a cloth-topped stick in a flowerpot and moving it to the back of his balcony. If Throat saw the signal, they would meet at a prearranged underground garage. Inconveniently, however, the pot couldn't be seen from the street. In other words, this major Washington figure was supposed to drive to Woodward's building, get out of his car, and walk down Woodward's alley every single day. That's not very secretive behavior for someone trying to stay secret.

A similar problem is Woodward's claim that Throat would secretly mark page 20 of Woodward's home-delivered New York Times with a hand-drawn clock marking the time of their next meeting. But Woodward's Times was delivered to the building's lobby, writes Obst, "unmarked and stacked in a pile" before 7 A.M. How did Deep Throat figure out the right paper? And why would a super-secret, high-profile source devise a system that required regularly skulking in a public lobby before dawn?

Anyway, there are more questions and more answers to all of this. But I think history deserves a full accounting. Watergate prompted a generation of preening journalists to lecture America from a pedestal. The least Deep Throat can do — or, the least the leading Deep Throat suspects can do — is to let us know if the journalists belonged on that pedestal in the first place.

The lack of outrage over Woodward and Bernstein's fabrications, Rathergate, academic phonies like Ward Churchill -- indeed, over most anything anymore -- is a curious thing. I guess the rules have officially changed.

Churchill did address the issue of his ethnicity, admitting that he is not Native American.

"Is he an Indian? Do we really care?" he said, quoting those he called his "white Republican" critics. "Let's cut to the chase; I am not," he said.

His pedigree is "not important," Churchill said: "The issue is the substance of what is said."

That was Rather's defense: so what if the smoking gun documents were fake, the story they point to is true. Does that make journalistic integrity a permanent oxymoron? Is moral relativism now an established social more? Now lying is okay if it serves a greater good, as defined by an editor, producer, or dean? As I continue to shake my head at why Hunter S. Thompson was famous, I am choosing to believe that integrity, character, honesty and purity continue to matter, somewhere.