When the Going Was Good

Chapter 1.

One Big Scoop and a Wedding

May 2005

This could so easily have been where it all ended.

My wife, Anna, and I were on our way back to New York from the Bahamas. We'd spent ten days at the Ocean Club on our honeymoon and it was time to get back to work-or "the coffee cup" as we say in the Carter household.

I'm not what you would call the most relaxed flyer, and I tend to get to airports early because I don't want to compound the stress by having to rush to the gate. At the airport, while I fretted about the flight ahead, Anna's cell phone rang. I didn't have a mobile back then, and calling Anna's was the only way my kids or the office could get in touch with me. In those days I never left the house without a few quarters in my pocket for pay phones, along with a handkerchief (more about that later). Anna answered the call and handed me the phone. She whispered the words "David Friend!"

David, one of my deputies at Vanity Fair, where I'd been the editor for more than a decade, was indeed on the line. In the euphoria of marriage and honeymoon and all that, it had utterly slipped my mind that at ten thirty that morning Vanity Fair had released an article we'd been working on for the past two years. It revealed the identity of "Deep Throat," the highly secret source Bob Woodward relied on during his Watergate reporting with Carl Bernstein. As the Post itself had noted, the identity of Deep Throat was "among the most compelling questions of modern American history, dissected in books, in films, on the internet, and in thousands of articles and hundreds of television programs."

Two years of work and worry over a major story-at the time, the Holy Grail of journalism scoops-and here I was stuck on the day of its release in the tiny departure lounge of Nassau International Airport. I mouthed the words "Holy fuck!" to Anna. She mouthed back, "What?" David reminded me that, as we'd planned before my departure, he had called both Bob and Carl that morning at around nine thirty to tell them we were faxing them advance copies of our story naming Mark Felt, the former deputy director of the FBI, as Deep Throat. I asked what their reaction had been. David said they had thus far made no comment, but that word was trickling out and the phone lines at Vanity Fair were already jammed.

A more confident editor would probably have been elated at the news. I am not made of such vibrant stuff. My foremost worry was one that I'd had the whole time we were working on the article: that we had somehow gotten it wrong. The fact of the matter was, we weren't 100 percent sure we had the right man. A mistake of such magnitude becomes the stuff of legend and winds up in the first paragraph of your obituary. Also, this was a rough period for journalists. It was during the George W. Bush administration, and if you got something wrong, armies of righteous nitpickers on the right-and the left-would descend to lay waste to your career and possibly your livelihood. Our main worry was that there was in fact no Deep Throat: that it had been a journalistic device, a composite of several sources-perhaps ginned up, some even said, by Alice Mayhew, who was Woodward and Bernstein's editor at Simon & Schuster, to move the plot along in All the President's Men. I never bought into that rumor. Alice was the preeminent nonfiction editor of political books in the nation. And an aboveboard and formidable person in every way. I had played tennis with her as her doubles partner a few times out on Long Island, and whenever I missed a shot, she wouldn't say a word. She'd just give me a look that could have de-strung a racket on the other side of the court.

Ten days earlier, Anna and I had stood at the altar of a small Episcopalian church a short walk from our home in Connecticut, about to get married. It was, as it is for so many grooms, aside from the birth of my children, one of the happiest days of my life. I felt incredibly fortunate to be marrying this smart, beautiful woman before my kids and our relatives and friends. There were a number of hymns, including "Jerusalem," which I was told later had confused a number of our Jewish friends who were surprised to hear a hymn with that name in an Episcopalian service. Anna, in addition to having Scott as a surname, is a Scot, and her father, Sir Kenneth Scott, a distinguished former diplomat, and her brother Andrew both wore kilts. For the walk to our house, we thought bagpipers would be a nice touch and hired a group associated with the New York City Police Department. Along the way, Harry Benson, a Glaswegian whom I had worked with at Life and Vanity Fair, was taking some snaps. At one point he whispered to me that some of the tunes weren't Scottish at all. They were IRA anthems.

The weather was decent, and the wedding party had assembled on our terrace and spilled out into the garden. After dinner, we made our way to our barn, which conveniently had a stage. There, Tom Freston and John Mellencamp had an incredible wedding gift for us: Otis Day and the Knights of "Shama Lama Ding Dong" and "Shout" fame, the band that had performed so memorably in the movie Animal House. When the night was winding down, Anna and I were about to drive off to the Mayflower Inn, not far from us, for the first night of our marriage when we found Fran Lebowitz sitting beside our driver in the front seat. Fran was a big part of our lives. We had first met in the men's department of Bergdorf Goodman years earlier when she asked my advice on a tie she was buying for her father. A friendship developed and Fran became an integral part of our family, joining us for Christmas dinners as well as any number of trips to Los Angeles. But this was a bit more togetherness than we expected. It seemed that her ride to a friend's house, a town away, had left early, and so Fran was hitching a ride with us. In the boisterous delirium of the moment, and with the need to get us to the Inn and Fran to her destination, the office and our big scoop seemed a million miles away.

The identity of Deep Throat had been a guessing game in Washington and journalism circles for years. Everyone from Henry Kissinger to Diane Sawyer had been proposed as Woodward and Bernstein's secret informant. Our evidence that Felt was Deep Throat was, we believed, close to conclusive, but it came from secondhand sources. We were 95 percent sure-but that last 5 percent was unnerving, the difference between great success and humbling failure. If we were incorrect, it wouldn't quite be on a par with the London Sunday Times's 1983 publication of the fake Hitler diaries, an episode that its editor, Frank Giles, never lived down. But it would be close. After David's update, I realized I simply could not get on that plane unless I knew one way or another if we had the right man.

The journey to this moment had begun two years earlier, when I got a call from John O'Connor, a San Francisco-based lawyer. He said that he represented the man who was Deep Throat and that he and his client wanted the story to break in Vanity Fair. You get a lot of crank calls when you're an editor of a magazine, but I had a general policy of always taking the calls and looking into leads when they presented themselves. O'Connor and I talked for a time. He wouldn't reveal who his client was. But I was intrigued enough to say, "Let me have someone get back to you." I asked David if he was free and if he could come down to my office. We had worked together at Life in the mid-1980s and I'd brought him to Vanity Fair a few years after joining it myself. David had sort of an oddball role at the magazine. Unlike the other editors there, he had few fixed writers. He was listed on the masthead as editor of creative development, a title I must have given him, though I was never sure what it meant. I'm not sure he did either. But David was a dogged hand and, more important, because he wasn't always closing stories for the current issue, he was available. I told him about the phone call with O'Connor, gave him the number, and asked him to follow up.

Their conversations dribbled on for a few months. Eventually, we had a name: Mark Felt. Neither of us had ever heard of him. We learned that he had once been number two at the FBI. David and I would meet every few days about the story, but we had our doubts. Chief among them was Felt himself. He was in his early nineties by this time, he had suffered a stroke two years earlier, and he was starting to show signs of dementia. The evidence supporting his claim was strong but essentially circumstantial. He had said nothing about the matter for more than three decades. He had only acknowledged the truth to his family a year or so before O'Connor called me, after family members, having put various clues together, had confronted him. He admitted to them that, yes, he was Deep Throat, but he was reluctant to go public with the information. Felt was proud of his part in exposing the corruption and obstruction of justice he saw in Nixon's White House during the Watergate cover-up, but he also remained loyal to the men and women of the agency.

When David flew out to San Francisco to meet Felt in person, he found him in a diminished state. This meant we had to work around him to firm up the story. All we had to go on were...