Re Our Man Inside: "John Who? Leonard Garment thinks he's figured out the identity
of the mystery man who helped bring down Nixon.
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First Chapter: 'In Search of Deep Throat'
By MICHAEL ORESKES
Washington is a city full of secrets.
Most of them don't mean much
or last long. A lot of them aren't even
true. But knowing a secret and when to
share it is, as Leonard Garment writes,
''the official and unofficial coin of the
realm, the universal matter out of which
individuals create their status, power and
wealth.'' Which makes it all the more
remarkable that for 27 years no one has
spilled one of the great secrets of
Watergate. Who was Deep Throat?
There have been plenty of guesses,
educated and not. But it seems that only
four people know for sure. They are
Deep Throat himself (we are told he is a
man) and Bob Woodward, the then
ambitious young Washington Post
reporter (now middle-aged assistant managing editor and author) to
whom Deep Throat imparted valuable inside perspective on the break-in
at Democratic headquarters, the larger political intelligence operation of
which it was a part and the White House effort to cover up both;
Woodward in turn told his reporting colleague, Carl Bernstein (who says
that during all the years they were married he never told Nora Ephron),
and then his editor, Benjamin Bradlee, although not until Bradlee asked
Woodward as they sat on a park bench after the resignation of Richard
Nixon. There the secret kept all these years.
The fact that we can still care is an interesting implicit point of Garment's
new book. Watergate was a true scandal of substantial and lasting
import. It is difficult to imagine some unresolved detail of, say, the
Lewinsky matter (as we shall call it) that could hold our interest in this
way for the next quarter-century. If you disagree, meet me on the park
bench in Lafayette Square facing the White House on this date in 2025.
I'll be the one holding a first edition of ''In Search of Deep Throat: The
Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time.'' For I suspect it will still be
worth reading then.
For one thing, Garment gives us a valuable short summary of Watergate,
reminding us of twists and context that have receded into that haze in
which anything vaguely unsavory is now called a scandal and suffixed
with ''-gate.'' This history lesson is quite timely.
We have entered what I will call the
post-post-Watergate era of American
government (a free copy of Garment's book
to the creator of a better name). In the past
two years or so, much of the political
change brought on by the Watergate
scandal has been swept away by the tides
of this new era. Rules designed to limit
money in politics have collapsed, the
independent counsel law has lapsed, and
journalists, lionized among the heroes of
Watergate, have been condemned as
among the villains of the Lewinsky matter
(as we shall call it).
Garment argues that at least some of these failures happened because the
post-Watergate changes were built on a bad understanding of what really
happened in Watergate.
For example, the special counsel law, which eventually brought us
Kenneth Starr, was based on the premise that the Nixon Justice
Department could not investigate the Nixon administration. The lesson of
Watergate, Garment argues, was precisely the opposite. The Justice
Department was conducting a vigorous investigation. When Nixon tried
to block it he doomed his presidency. As for journalism, few areas of
American society have been more influenced by the perceived lessons of
Watergate, and not all for the better, Garment says.
''Investigative reporters grew in numbers and skill,'' he writes. ''They gave
us, predictably enough, ever more news about the failings of institutions
and leaders. They directed sunlight to some places that surely needed it.
They also fed an unjustified and dangerous disenchantment with public
life.'' Here again, Garment rightly argues that a more careful reading of
what actually happened in Watergate would be an important corrective
to later excess. Deep Throat was not the source for the Watergate
scandal. He didn't simply leak ready-to-publish allegations. He was one
of many sources, valuable not for the information he provided but for the
way he was able to deepen Woodward and Bernstein's understanding of
the information they had garnered elsewhere. Between those two
thoughts lies the line between good journalism and sloppy. Over all, the
contribution Garment seeks to make is that a better understanding of
what actually happened in Watergate might actually help lead to better
government, politics and, yes, even journalism. His route to this
understanding is his search for Deep Throat.
Garment is fun to tag along with on his sleuthing through the offices,
restaurants and even saunas of Washington. He candidly describes the
very thing that most irritates people outside the Beltway about life inside
the Beltway. ''I began gathering fresh information in the prototypical
Washington ways,'' he writes, ''through talk in general and lunch and
dinner in particular.''
I have not rushed to tell you his conclusion about Deep Throat's identity
because it seems almost secondary to the spirit of his search and his
thinking about why Watergate and Deep Throat's role in it still matter.
But here is his conclusion. Deep Throat, who met with Bob Woodward
in a parking garage, was John Sears.
If you had been told this at the
time you almost surely would
have replied, John who? Sears at
the time of Watergate was a
young man in his early 30's who
had worked on Richard Nixon's
campaigns but had ended up
without the influence in the White
House he had hoped for. After
Watergate, he became one of the
most prominent political
strategists in the Republican
Party, guiding Ronald Reagan's
campaign for president in 1976
and then again in 1980 until
Reagan fired him to resolve
personality clashes between
Sears and Reagan's more
ideological compatriots. He had
a reputation, and still does, as a
brilliant political tactician, but
also as someone thoughtful about
the meaning and purposes of
politics. After his dismissal from
the Reagan campaign, Sears
spent considerable time in the
Republican political wilderness.
He was almost named manager
of Bob Dole's 1988 campaign,
but was blocked by Dole allies in New Hampshire. In 1995 he began
preparing Jack Kemp for a presidential campaign that never happened.
''His long banishment,'' Robert Novak wrote in 1996 of Sears, ''is
attributable to his reputation for not being a team player.''
Garment, by his own account, does not have the smoking gun that proves
John Sears was Deep Throat. At the end of the book, Sears denies it
and threatens to sue Garment. Garment assuages him and, of course,
invites him to lunch.
All Garment can do is give us a plausible case. He has convinced himself.
Ben Bradlee once said that if all the clues about Deep Throat scattered
through The Washington Post and through ''All the President's Men'' and
''The Final Days,'' Woodward and Bernstein's two books, were fed into
a computer, along with available facts about all the key suspects (such as
who was out of town on the dates of those garage meetings) the identity
of Deep Throat could probably be established with considerable
certainty. Garment adds one element that no computer could (yet)
incorporate. He knew virtually all the potential suspects personally and
can measure them not just against facts (Deep Throat was taller than
Woodward) but also against their personalities as he knew them.
Garment was Richard Nixon's last White House counsel, successor to
the fallen John Dean. In the midst of Watergate, he says, he had no
interest in the Deep Throat question. ''The pressures of reality had driven
out any capacity I might otherwise have had for speculating about who
and what had produced that reality.'' Despite Garment's efforts, Nixon's
presidency collapsed. Garment went back to the practice of law (he is of
counsel to the Washington firm Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson &
Hand). His interest in Deep Throat did not emerge until 20 years later,
when he began work on a memoir, ''Crazy Rhythm,'' which was
published in 1997 and is by far the most emotionally perceptive of all the
Watergate memoirs. With the memoir done, Garment embarked on his
hunt for Deep Throat.
One figure stands out as indispensable to Garment's search. That is
Woodward himself. Woodward, of course, has declined to identify Deep
Throat. But as Garment tells it he regularly dropped bread crumbs that
kept the trail visible. He announced that Alexander Haig was not Deep
Throat so the question would not hang over Haig's 1988 presidential
campaign. He ''waved me off'' Patrick Gray of the F.B.I., Garment
reports. He told John Dean during an author's tour that Deep Throat had
been publicly identified but had denied being Deep Throat. Then
Garment asked Woodward (over lunch, naturally) why Deep Throat had
not simply come forward himself, since much of the country would now
consider him a hero: ''Woodward answered that, in 1972 and early
1973, Deep Throat had been, if not wholly unknown, at least relatively
anonymous. In the years since then, Deep Throat's 'public persona' --
Woodward's exact words -- had changed. His 'public persona' after
Watergate was inconsistent with his actions during Watergate days.''
From this Garment surmises that Deep Throat's post-Watergate clients,
audience or constituency might not have approved of his role consorting
with a reporter from The Washington Post. For a long time, this led him
to believe that Deep Throat was Robert F. Bennett, who at the time ran a
public relations company with strong ties to both the White House and
the C.I.A. Bennett went on to become a senator from the conservative
state of Utah. Over time, this theory collapsed, however. The facts didn't
fit together. Deep Throat as portrayed by Woodward and Bernstein was
a smoker and a drinker. Senator Bennett is a devout Mormon. Crushed
and depressed by the failure of his Bennett theory, Garment has a eureka
moment in 1999, while reading an article in a journalism review criticizing
Woodward. He has accepted at face value most of Woodward's claims
about Deep Throat, but he comes to realize, he writes, that Woodward
might be literally honest but, shall we say, cagey in the impressions he
leaves. This leads him to believe that Sears was both a source for
Bernstein (which Sears confirms) and at the same time Deep Throat to
Woodward. To Garment's eye Sears, who as a northeasterner (from
Syracuse) was always somewhat suspect on the right, fit the portrait of
someone little known at the time of Watergate whose later professional
persona was at odds with the role played by Deep Throat: his career,
one way or another, was still bound up with Republican politics.
One small mystery at the end of this book is that Woodward, so visible
throughout, just vanishes. There is no lunch at which he waves Garment
off the Sears theory or nods knowingly but refuses to confirm or deny it.
So I did what most readers will not be able to do. I called Woodward,
who dismissed Garment's theory. ''He's got it wrong,'' Woodward said.
''Sears does not fit the description.'' When Deep Throat was described in
''All the President's Men'' as someone high in the executive branch, it was
meant literally, Woodward said; Deep Throat was not, as Garment has it,
someone who had close ties high in the executive branch.
So all we are left with is the denials of Sears and Woodward, and
Garment's conviction that he has solved the riddle. ''When I finally
concluded that John Sears was Deep Throat, I realized that I had
discovered not just the answer to one particular puzzle but something
more general -- sobering and a little bit saddening -- about American
politics of the past 25 years,'' Garment concludes.
''My opinion is that Sears took the actions he did because of mixed
motives, as is the case with all humans; but if there was a dominant
political impulse moving him, it was a sense that the marriage of realism
and idealism in our politics, a delicate union to begin with, was on the
rocks. The political arena, he thought, was in danger of becoming just a
war between the knife-wielders and the moralists. Sears was right, of
course; he could not have known that the drama of which he was a part
was about to drive the wedge between the two camps even deeper.''
If John Sears, the thoughtful, even occasionally poetic believer in politics,
was Deep Throat, let us hope he will leave us his own book on how he
feels about the world he helped create. |
