Inside Watergate's Last Chapter

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"Total b________," replies Bernstein. It's true the first draft of the book didn't have Deep Throat in it, he says, but it didn't have Woodward and Bernstein either, and that doesn't make them inventions. Scott Armstrong, a former Senate Watergate committee investigator and onetime Woodward collaborator on The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, thinks Deep Throat's role was somewhat distorted by the high drama of shadowy garage encounters with Woodward that were featured in the book's movie version, in which the journalist is played by Robert Redford. Says Armstrong: "Bob gave Redford some s___ once about pulling Deep Throat out of context." Armstrong also notes that Woodward and Bernstein had lots of equally important sources for their stories. "Before this week," he says, "there were at least 10 people in Washington who would have passed polygraphs saying they were the real Deep Throat."

Felt, for his part, had good reason to speak up now, according to Vanity Fair: mortality and money. A leading suspect for years, he had always firmly denied he was Deep Throat, including in his memoir, The FBI Pyramid from the Inside, published in 1979. But at 91, wrote author John O'Connor, a lawyer for the family, Felt, who had a stroke in 2001, is frail and suffers from confusion and memory loss. Members of his family, led by daughter Joan, said they wanted the world to know what Felt did before he died. Although he had admitted his secret identity to intimates and family in recent years, he was still reluctant to disclose it to the public, fearing that others, especially his confreres in the FBI, would judge it dishonorable. But his family argued posterity would regard Felt as a "true patriot" who "did the right thing" and now deserves the credit.

And the money. The Felt family saw how Woodward and Bernstein had cashed in on the Deep Throat mystery in the book and the movie. According to O'Connor, whom Vanity Fair paid about $10,000 for the story, Woodward had deflected the family's efforts to collaborate on a Deep Throat book. Now the Felts wanted their share. "Bob Woodward's gonna get all the glory for this," Joan, a mother of two, told her father, "but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I've run up for the kids' education." Felt's competence to produce a memoir at this point is in question, but he seemed eager to try last week when he cheerfully told reporters besieging his daughter's California house, where he lives, "I'll arrange to write a book or something and get all the money I can." O'Connor and Felt's agent, David Kuhn, met with publishers in New York City last week, but opinion was divided on how large an advance such a book would get. Caught by surprise at the sudden exposure of a secret he had obviously hoped to publish once Deep Throat was dead, Woodward is rushing to print next month with a slender volume recounting his relationship with Felt.