When reporters have fooled you because you assumed they were being honest, did you give those reporters too much credit or too little? After William Gaines, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his investigative journalism at the Tribune, retired from the paper in 2001 to teach journalism at the University of Illinois, he led his students in the unraveling of his business’s greatest mystery: Who was the Watergate scandal’s Deep Throat?
To many journalists who’d lived through Watergate, naming Felt closed the book on the era. But Gaines still had questions about the Felt-Woodward relationship. He teamed up with Max Holland, author of the online newsletter Washington Decoded, to pursue them, and in 2007 Gaines and Holland published the critique “Deep Throat 3.0.” Gaines argued that Felt had been a lot more central to the Post‘s Watergate coverage than Woodward ever acknowledged, and Holland made the case that Woodward frequently compromised Felt’s interests to serve the Post‘s and his own. The most dramatic example of this was his revealing that there was a Deep Throat at all.
“I wanted him to be a coauthor,” Holland went on, “because I thought that it would be unfair if history remembered him for being so prominently wrong about Deep Throat’s identity, which is what I feared his obit would say about his Watergate period. Instead, I thought he should be remembered for helping to expose the truth about Felt and why he did what he did. In retrospect, Bill’s big mistake in 2003 had been to take Woodward and Bernstein at their word and too literally.”
