The unarticulated presumption, which Sullivan, Litman and Rich are not alone in making, is that Felt-the FBI’s deputy director in June 1972, and subsequently the parking-garage interlocutor who steered Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to reportorial heights-was an honorable, selfless whistleblower intent on exposing the lawlessness rampant in the Nixon White House. New York magazine columnist Frank Rich has gone a step further and already announced his casting choice: James Comey is today’s Deep Throat. “Was it wrong for Deep Throat, as FBI official Mark Felt was then known, to guide the investigation?” Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan asked in June, in the midst of a column praising leaks and anonymous sources, and inviting more. The original Deep Throat “was instrumental in thwarting the conspiracy and bringing Nixon down,” Harry Litman, a former deputy assistant attorney general, approvingly wrote in the Los Angeles Times in May. Mark Felt-has become practically synonymous with the ideal of the noble leaker. In the years since Watergate, the Washington Post’s famous golden source-later revealed to be former FBI No. Max Holland is the author of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, which has just been published in paperback.Ĭolumnists, talking heads and op-ed writers are holding open auditions for a role that presumably needs to be filled if we are ever going to get to the bottom of what seems fated to be dubbed, for better or worse, Russiagate: a new Deep Throat.
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