Len Garment had a book a couple years ago that pegged Deep Throat as John Sears. Sears was pretty unknown at the time. For what it's worth, this review of Garment's book has some stuff which points away from Buchanan. Sears denies it, of course. From query.nytimes.com :
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. |
