Deep Throat

When the newspapers started reporting that “Deep Throat” has died at the age of 95, I thought a very grave and embarrassing journalistic error had been committed by everybody in the newspaper business.

But it was to my own great embarrassment to find, as I read on, that the “Deep Throat” in the story referred to somebody else and did not allude to the “Deep Throat” that those of my generation knew rather well.

The “Deep Throat” of my generation referred to Linda Lovelace, the porn star who became famous for her oral sex performance in the 1972 movie of the same name. “Deep Throat” went on to become the most financially successful pornographic movie of all time.

Lovelace, a Roman Catholic born in the Bronx to a policeman father and an overly strict mother, later renounced her pornographic career and claimed a sadistic first husband forced her into it.

Whatever the truth was in her life, Lovelace took with her to her grave. On April 3, 2002, she lost control of the car she was driving and died in a terrible crash. Despite the huge success of her porn career, “Deep Throat” died a very poor woman.

Now back to the “Deep Throat” bannered by the newspapers recently. This “Deep Throat” referred to W. Mack Felt, the former FBI second-in-command who tipped off reporters to the Watergate scandal that eventually toppled then US president Richard Nixon.

This “Deep Throat” managed to conceal his real identity for three decades until he himself, after long consultations with his family, finally decided in 2005 to reveal who he really was.

Since the infamous break-in into the Watergate complex housing the Democratic National committee happened in 1972, it is probable that Felt was inspired to hide under the pseudonym “Deep Throat” from the porn movie Lovelace made at the time.

But what is remarkable in this case is the fact that Felt managed to keep his real identify intact for more than three decades despite the seriousness of the Watergate scandal and what must have been a real earnest attempt by a lot of people to know who the mole was.

Felt, as “Deep Throat,” secretly helped Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein piece together the scandal in a real-life “cloak and dagger operation” that is the stuff of which spy movies are made.

So riveting was the saga that the Post eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for the work that Woodward and Bernstein put together. The story also became the basis for the hugely successful movie “All the President’s Men” starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.

Felt was eventually persuaded to reveal his real identity thirty years later when, his health failing, his daughter said taking his secret to the grave will only make Woodward rich since he might spill the beans the moment he died.

The secret was revealed in a 2005 Vanity Fair article written by a friend based on what Felt himself narrated. As his daughter correctly surmised, the disclosure earned for them a little amount “to pay the bills.”

Interestingly, in a strange unintended footnote, Felt went public that he was “Deep Throat” in 2005, the very same year that Linda Lovelace, the original “Deep Throat,” died in a crash that brought to an end, not a troubled presidency, but her own troubled life.