The Watergate Cover-Up Thirty Years Later - "Yes" He Answered. He Was Deep Throat
In the three decades since the resignation of the only American president to be driven from office, the question that has refused to die is, "Who was Deep Throat?"
Deep Throat was the nickname, borrowed from a pornographic movie, given to the mysterious administration insider who guided two young and inexperienced Washington Post reporters as they sought to unravel the cat's cradle of lies and obfuscations, payoffs and cover-ups that history knows as Watergate.
The president was Richard M. Nixon. He was forced to resign 30 years ago August. The reporters were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But who was Deep Throat?
Over the years, a laundry list of logical suspects from the Nixon years denied the accusation, when asked, including Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and Patrick Buchanan. When his turn came, David Gergen said no almost tearfully. Diane Sawyer, the only woman under suspicion, shook her head as well. This mystery still waits for a solution.
Recently new, substantial and compelling information has surfaced pointing the finger at Charles M. Lichenstein, a special assistant to Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford and during the Reagan years, Deputy US Ambassador at the United Nations. He was also a past vice president of PBS, the ghost writer of Nixon’s “Six Crises” book and a fellow at Washington’s conservative Heritage Foundation. As a well connected and longtime Nixon insider, Lichenstein may have been the only person who had access to the wide range of information Deep Throat gave the reporters. He also, it turns out, was driven by an unusual, even inspiring, motive. And he is the only Deep Throat candidate to fit Woodward’s detailed description of the eccentric source.
Most importantly, he is the first person to confess to being the fabled mystery man.
He told me he was Deep Throat in an off the record conversation during a dinner party in the American UN suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York 20 some years ago. Three years later in 1984—the 10th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation— after two meetings with me and another journalist, he declined to participate in a magazine story about his role as Deep Throat. He explained that his Republican friends and colleagues would never understand and he would be ruined.
Could this be true? Could this be true? Could Chuck Lichenstein, a mild and scholarly bachelor—heavy smoker, midnight walker, former CIA trainer, Scotch drinker and called “The Bureaucrat’ behind his back by White House colleagues—be Deep Throat?
In official Washington, where lying is as ordinary as candor is rare, can we believe anyone?
Can we believe him?
Why would he confess his secret to a reporter he met a few hours earlier?
I presume he made the admission to me because I caught him off guard. I was intensely interested in what he was saying. Both of us had been Washington political observers/junkies for decades and could move quickly through the key issues such as Presidential character, Watergate and Deep Throat. That we had been refilling our glasses again and again with the excellent wine may have played a role. Later in l984, his reasons for not cooperating on a story revealing he was Deep Throat rang true and made his claim even more convincing. He said his Republican colleagues and former President Nixon would not have understood his role no matter what his intentions. He seemed rational and sensible. Saying he was Deep Throat was a peculiar claim to make if he was not. And he wasn’t seeking publicity. It was puzzling. I concluded he wanted people to know but he needed to deny it.
I didn’t think about it again until August 2002 when I read Lichenstein’s obituary in the New York Times. Later, in the Washington Post, I saw the notice of his memorial service at Gawler’s funeral home, where the Washington elite are prepared for their final hearing. I decided to attend.
Thus began an engaging pilgrimage into political history. The way was strewn with elusive and ambiguous facts, conflicting answers, multiple Deep Throats, provocative documents, ironic outcomes, detours, fascinating conversations with aging politicians who were once household words and a dramatic story of conflicted loyalties. This investigation raises a new assessment of Deep Throat as both a patriot and a loyal Nixon supporter. It provides an answer to why President Nixon thought he would not have to resign. It brings together forgotten connections and new insights and identifies popular misconceptions about the time 30 years ago when the Constitution of the United States was almost undermined by the President and his men. Key to Today’s Presidency Watergate has been described as the worst political crisis since the Civil War and the nation’s greatest scandal. Before l974, many, if not most, Americans respected, admired or gave the benefit of the doubt to their leaders, even the ones from the other political party. Politicians were almost patriotic gentlemen. Dwight Eisenhower and even Nixon himself publicly supported President Kennedy during the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban missile crisis follow-up. Watergate is also about the importance of an independent judiciary since it was Judge John Sirica who 31 years ago this past March used the threat of long prison sentences to force the burglars to reveal their White House connections.
It remains important now because it changed how we think about our Presidents and what they might be doing— money, crimes, enemy lists and cover-ups linked directly to the Oval Office. It solidified a growing distrust of government that had begun to split the country over the Vietnam War. It also changed our language—“smoking guns,” “expletitive deleted,” “executive privilege,” “follow the money” (as Deep Throat said to Woodward) and a series of Washington-gate scandals are just a few of many Watergate legacies.
This exploration of Deep Throat’s identity provides a simple narrative through the confusing Watergate saga, of how an attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee and the Republican President’s attempt to cover it up led to the exposure of other crimes and the conviction of top Administration officials and the President’s resignation.
The First Reaction After the memorial service, I called former US Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who had given a eulogy. I told her I wanted to talk about Lichenstein. We met at her office at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think-tank. I knew she admired Lichenstein, and I didn’t know how she would feel about suggesting he was Deep Throat. It was possible she might believe Deep Throat had been a despicable traitor. She might not like the idea at all.
“This is an odd question,” I began, “but what would you say if I told you Chuck told me he was Deep Throat?
“I am not surprised,” she instantly replied.
She said she and her husband—he had taught Lichenstein at Yale—had often discussed the possibility that their friend and colleague of more than 40 years had been Deep Throat. They had never asked him directly “because he was such a private person. How like him to tell someone outside our group,” she added.
I had approached the Ambassador first, because I thought if Lichenstein had been putting me on when he told me he was Deep Throat at the dinner and when I met with him again in l984, he would have shared the joke with Kirkpatrick, his boss and friend. She said he had not mentioned his conversations with me, nor did she think he would initiate or carry on a practical joke of that nature. At the end of our conversation, she gave me the name of friends and his executor and told me keep in touch with her as I talked to other people.
Her comments gave the story legs, as they say. The next interviews were not as clear-cut.
Everyone had different answers and theories about Deep Throat and Lichenstein. Some said yes, some said no, some said maybe. And many, who said no, said that they thought Deep Throat was a number of different people, a composite of sources to make the Woodward and Bernstein book more manageable and interesting, and maybe or probably Lichenstein was one of them. Some said Deep Throat had been a help, but he didn’t deserve all the credit he got. And besides, there was no way to ever know really who Deep Throat was because only Woodward had seen him. And it was in Woodward’s interest to have Deep Throat be a dramatic, mysterious, single source. The story became more and more complex.
Woodward and Deep Throat were in contact at most14 times over 17 months between June 19, l972, two days after the burglary, and November, l973, when Deep Throat confirmed the existence of an erased presidential tape. This included six telephone calls, five meetings in a garage, one in a tavern, one missed meeting and one maybe meeting according to All the President’s Men, the book. The movie of the same name featured Robert Redford as Woodward. Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat.
A Single Source? Was there really a single Deep Throat who guided the young reporters sifting through the maze of facts, fictions, and innuendoes in this conspiracy?
Or was Throat invented as a clever journalistic fictional character, a convenient composite of sources, designed to make the Watergate book and movie more dramatic and justify The Post’s cutting-edge stories?
We can never know. But, after numerous interviews and months of research, I have come to believe that if there was a single Deep Throat figure who gave guidance to a Post reporter in underground garages, Charles M. Lichenstein is the man. Or if Deep Throat was a number of people, the source in the garage was Lichenstein, the midnight walker. It is possible that there are a number of aging Nixon functionaries expecting that Woodward will turn up at their funeral and reveal their role.
However, Lichenstein fits the unusual profile in All the President’s Men book: smoker, Scotch-drinker, gossip, emotional, Nixon Administration official, etc. He left a provocative paper trail in his personal files linking him immediately to the FBI investigation of Watergate and to information known only to a few people and passed by Deep Throat to Woodward and Bernstein. He had access almost immediately after the burglary to what the FBI knew and did. In addition, prominent and reliable friends of Lichenstein are willing to say they believe it is true, could be true or probably is true. They say he had the information, knew the wide scope of the crime and had the motivation to talk to Woodward.
And Lichenstein told me he was Deep Throat.
Significantly, when he had a logical opportunity several years later to beg off from the story and say that he had been teasing over a good dinner and wine, he did not. At that subsequent meeting, he gave every indication of seriously considering the request to cooperate with a story about his role as Deep Throat. He did not volunteer more information, but that would not have been appropriate until he had decided to cooperate. Throughout two meetings, he listened to the proposal attentively and said he was not sure he would cooperate but was considering it. He later called to say he would not cooperate. Throughout our time together, the fact that he was Deep Throat was a given as was his fear that having his identify revealed would irreparably damage him.
And to further strengthen him as Deep Throat, my investigation reveals that at the Nixon White House, he was the mythic faceless bureaucrat, the mystery novel figure no one notices, the man who seems to not be there.
People proposing other candidates have worked backwards looking at the profile data from “All the President’s Men” first, and trying to see whom it might fit. This is the first time a candidate has been proposed and then found to meet the criteria. In fact, this is the first candidate to claim he was Deep Throat. Bob Woodward has promised to reveal Deep Throat’s identity after Throat’s death. In January, 2004, he told a colleague who mentioned with my permission my investigation of Lichenstein, “I will not respond. I have gotten out of the business of commenting on Deep Throat and I’m not going to comment now. Tell her (me) to call me.” I called several times and he did not return my calls. A Modern Icon Deep Throat has taken on a life of his own—beyond Woodward or Watergate. He has become an icon like Paul Revere warning the citizens of danger. Woodward himself has evolved from the hungry young investigative reporter to a writer of controversial exposes—Veil, about the CIA and most recently President Bush. He is now a member of the establishment himself reporting conversations with other insiders. He has been called the “king of access: and “ a reporting god.” Both Deep Throat and Woodward have traveled far from that underground garage.
In addition, an incredible number of Watergate groupies are still sleuthing the mystery. The investigative reporting class of the Department of Journalism at the University of University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign recently spent four years trying to identify Deep Throat. As they explain on their extensive website, “the secrecy has caused the importance of Throat’s contribution to be exaggerated and has unfairly cast suspicion on many people through published accounts based on speculation.” They scold Woodward. “’I will never quote you, not even as an anonymous source’ Woodward promises in the film version,” they point out.
“Having in those words revealed to movie audiences that he had a source,” the student website says, “he then appears to violate the agreement by quoting him, telling everyone when and where they met, the information Throat provided, and their means of contact…So rather than concealing a source, Woodward, Bernstein and (Washington Post editor Ben) Bradlee have promoted a guessing game…chuckling up their sleeves, chortling,’ We know something you don’t know and we’re not telling.’”
The students do not mention Lichenstein in their list of possible Deep Throat candidates, nor does the Washington Post website. $5 Million Sale In April, 2003 Woodward and Bernstein sold their notes on the Watergate story for $5 million to the University of Texas at Austin. However, papers involving Deep Throat and other sources will remain in the custody of the reporters protected from disclosure at this time. Woodward said this is about 1 to 2 percent of the archives. “In the event that Woodward and Bernstein die before ‘Deep Throat’ or the other confidential sources, they said, a trustee named by them will have custody of the documents that reveal the sources’ identities. Eventually , all the materials will be turned over to the (university),” The Post reported. “Woodward declined to say whether he had asked Deep Throat for permission to reveal his identity.”
In the last four years, two Nixon White House counsels, John Dean, whose testimony to Congress revealed much of the scandal, and Leonard Garment, who replaced Dean at the White House, have each written 200 plus page books identifying Deep Throat. The books each built a case for its candidate— different candidates. And each ended his book with the particular candidate denying he was Deep Throat and threatening to sue. These Deep Throat candidates were even more obscure Nixon White House staffers than Lichenstein, who went on to become an ambassador.
Garment now thinks Lichenstein is a likely candidate, if indeed there is a single Deep Throat. However, he is a strong proponent of Deep Throat as a “chorus of many voices.” He believes that Throat has achieved such unexpected mythic proportions that neither the reporters nor the Post will ever identify him.
Garment says, “Deep Throat and Nixon are the worry beads of American politics and we keep fingering them trying to get a sense of what happened 30 years ago and what it means now.” Numerous websites are devoted to it; 200,001 references pop up on Netscape for “Watergate” and 833,000 for Deep Throat, which, of course, also refers to the original pornographic movie as well as a computer virus of that name. Amazon has 230 books listed, old and new, with second-hand G. Gordon Liddy’s selling for 97 cents and fellow burglar James McCord’s going for $50. A video of “All the President’s Men” movie is sold with a learning guide to schools to help develop courage and teamwork in students age 12 and up with an “ethical emphasis on trustworthiness; responsibility; fairness and citizenship.”
Facts In l976—the only time Lichenstein’s name has been mentioned publicly until now, he jocularly told Esquire Magazine: “I am not and never have been Deep Throat. It might have been nice…but I would like to meet him.”
In recent years Post reporter Woodward, the only person certain to know the identity or identities of Deep Throat, has said that the actual Deep Throat had publicly denied he was Deep Throat.
What are the facts?
Lichenstein was the ghostwriter for Nixon’s 1962 book, Six Crises, according to the Washington Post.
His resume shows that he was everywhere that Deep Throat had to be. He had access to the information that could connect all the dots of the cabal. Nixon himself, longtime Nixon staffers, the FBI, the CIA, and the Republican National Committee—they all trusted him. He had been director of research for the Republican National Committee and for the 1964 Goldwater campaign. He had also been a former CIA trainer. Again, he fits the oddball profile of Deep Throat drawn by Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men.
Lichenstein described himself to the Washington Post in the l980s as “a principled pragmatist.
He was on the scene in the Nixon years in a number of jobs, not only as an assistant to the President but as an assistant to the late HEW secretary Robert Finch— who denied that he was Deep Throat—and an assistant to FCC chairman Dean Burch.
Saving Nixon Longtime colleagues—distinguished and reliable conservatives— say Lichenstein was an astute observer who could have guided the Washington Post reporters through the confusion of the complex scandal. These same friends say he probably saw himself as trying to save the Nixon presidency. “He was an intelligent and loyal man who saw greatness in Nixon, but understood his shadow side. He recognized important wrong doing and its threat to constitutional government and acted to stop it,. He had spent much of his life trying to save Richard Nixon from himself,” one close associate who declined to be identified, said.
This casts a new light on Deep Throat’s motives; he is usually pictured as a disgruntled or disgusted White House insider, not as a Nixon loyalist or a patriot dedicated to preserving the integrity of government. . Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lichenstein’s boss at the UN and longtime friend who said she is “not surprised” that he had said he was Deep Throat, added, “I can’t say yes or no. It is a hypothesis worth entertaining. It is conceivable but I do not know.”
Ambassador Kirkpatrick described Lichenstein as “a serious patriot” and said, “he was repulsed” from the beginning (of Nixon’s presidency) by Nixon lieutenants H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and their methods. “He passionately disapproved of Haldeman and Ehrlichman.”
Both were forced to resign because of their roles in the Watergate cover-up. “Chuck felt they were bad people who had done great harm to Nixon, the Republican Party and the country,” Kirkpatrick said.
However, she said, Lichenstein was fond of Nixon, maintained ties with him over the years after the resignation and went to his funeral.
She recalled that Lichenstein was mugged on a late night stroll during Nixon’s California gubernatorial campaign in 1962. In LA, as everywhere else, he walked for miles day and night, just as he did over the years in Washington from his Capitol Hill townhouse. He rarely owned a car, “His injuries,” Kirkpatrick said, “were severe and it wasn’t clear that he would live. He was unconscious for a few days, and the first person he saw when he came to was Nixon, who was sitting beside his bed.”
UN Dinner Party Conversation In the early l980s, Lichenstein told me he was Deep Throat. At the time, while preparing a story on Ambassador Kirkpatrick for People Magazine, I met with Kirkpatrick, Lichenstein and others at a dinner in America’s UN suite at the Waldorf.
Though Lichenstein and I had never met, we had friends in common. He knew of me from Washington journalism where I was on the local evening news as well as writing a newspaper column, running the People Washington Bureau and a senior producer at NBC News. We had quick rapport and could talk in Beltway shorthand.
He sat beside me and we began to discuss Watergate. I told him my Washington party conversation theory that the break-in had been triggered by Democratic trickster Dick Tuck. Tuck had ridiculed Nixon during his 1962 gubernatorial campaign by having a sign hung across a San Francisco Chinatown street asking about the controversial Howard Hughes loan to Nixon’s brother. The sign was in Chinese and Nixon unwittingly posed for photographs under it surrounded by giggling Chinese At the luncheon following, Tuck arranged that the fortune cookies read in English, “What about the Hughes’ loan?” Candidate Nixon was not amused.
Nor was Nixon amused, I reminded Lichenstein, when Tuck had arranged after the famous 1960 Kennedy-Nixon television debate for an older woman in tennis shoes to rush up to Nixon in a small California airport and say, “ Don’t worry, Dick, you’ll do better next time.”
My theory was that Nixon and his staff could not separate funny, dirty political tricks from illegal ones. In recent conversations, former Nixon communication director Herb Klein agreed that Tuck’s activities had been a major motivating factor that led some White House staffers to the Watergate break-in and other attacks on Democrats. “One half of the theory that Tuck caused it is correct. (Jeb) Magruder was trying to do something more modern and trying to top the campaigns we had run. I would give Tuck the schedule and when he went to the phone booth I would send someone to the next phone booth,” Klein said.
At the UN dinner, Lichenstein disagreed with the Tuck theory in detail. Speaking of how he was at the White House at the time of Watergate, he indicated that Watergate was serious and intentionally criminal. He spoke with authority and mentioned many of the legendary Watergate names and indicated they were close colleagues and friends: Mark Felt and Patrick Gray of the FBI, both of whom were also Deep Throat candidates, Rosemary Woods Nixon’s longtime personal assistant, etc.
The Yale Connection As we left the subject and sipped more wine, he talked about his days as a professor. I asked where he taught and he answered, “ Yale.”
It has been rumored for years in the Washington press corps, that Woodward and Deep Throat had Yale connections. Woodward and Lichenstein graduated from Yale, some years apart.
Intuitively, almost without thinking, I said to Lichenstein, “You’re Deep Throat, aren’t you?”
He looked surprised and quickly said, “Yes.” And after a pause, “That’s off the record.”
At the time, there was nothing I could do with the story without his cooperation.
In l983, n Schecter, the Washington editor of Esquire, and I asked Amb. Lichenstein if he would be willing on the 10th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation to talk about his role in Watergate as Deep Throat. He gave no indication that he had been joking during our dinner conversation of three years before. He treated the matter with seriousness and concern, something his friends agree he would have not done had he not been Deep Throat. He indicated that he was seriously considering my request but was troubled about the effect of disclosure on his colleagues, friends and career. Schecter recently recalled, “We had dinner at the Coach House near Washington Square upstairs in a private room. It was a relaxed mood. We exchanged stories and discussed the issues of the day. He neither confirmed or denied that he was Deep Throat but we went round and round about how important it was for him to tell his story of why he provided information to Woodward and Bernstein. We argued that the Watergate story had to be put into perspective. His experience, his reasons , his fear of the consequences of Watergate would vindicate any criticism. “It was a long dinner we had a rich, deep French burgundy with duck and we moved back and forth , always coming back to the Watergate, trying to get him to describe how he had met with Woodward. He would not take the bait , pushing it away gently and sliding around the issue, but never urging us to stop the questioning. We could sense him evaluating the problem of coming out from deep cover. He promised to consider our proposal to work with him on a first person article for ESQUIRE.”
I met with him again and he agonized about the publicity. I would have been surprised if he had cooperated. He finally called to say he could not agree to do the story. His colleagues and friends would not understand, he said.
Memorial Service At the memorial service, friends said Lichenstein had not been ill and had thought he was undergoing a minor routine procedure involving a heart stent when he died. He had declined a ride to the hospital from friends and went by cab. He had not put his papers or estate in order. If he was intending to leave a statement about being Deep Throat, as his former CIA friend Herbert Meyer believes he would have done had he been Deep Throat, he apparently did not feel it was an urgent matter. Meyer is an advocate of Deep Throat as a composite and believes it likely that Lichenstein may have been one of number of people who gave the Post reporters guidance and did not want to be identified. Myers says he was misquoted several times by Woodward in Veil. Garment volunteers he was the heretofore unidentified “senior presidential aide” who had called President Nixon “a felon” in his Old Executive Office Building office as reported by Woodward in All the President’s Men. This “senior presidential aide” was not Deep Throat according to the book, but another anonymous source. Garment’s point is that there were many anonymous sources. And Woodward and Bernstein refer to a number of confidential sources in the papers they are not turning over to the University of Texas immediately.
In her eulogy, Ambassador Kirkpatrick lauded Lichenstein as a great patriot and former NBC and PBS President Larry Grossman praised him. Speakers repeatedly recalled how he liked to help young men learn about Washington and move forward in their jobs, which among other things is what Deep Throat had done for reporters Woodward and Bernstein. His fondness for good wine and stories was frequently mentioned.
His service at the UN was recalled. There, as the New York Times reported it, he had had a brief 15 minutes of fame. In September 1983, as the chief alternate U.N. delegate for the United States, he made his most memorable remarks -- stemming from a complicated political and diplomatic confrontation that had been brewing for weeks.
The Soviets had shot down a Korean Air Lines jet that strayed into its airspace, killing all 269 passengers. The governors of New York and New Jersey had refused to allow Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's plane to land at their civilian airports, only at a military airport. That prompted a Soviet diplomat to ask whether the United States was the most suitable location for the United Nations.
Ambassador. Lichenstein replied that those who did not feel welcome could leave. "We will put no impediment in your way," he said. The members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations "will be down at dockside waving you a fond farewell as you sail into the sunset," he said. ( Of course, they would not have been sailing into the sunset.)
Lichenstein noting the US offer to land at a military airfield said, "I wish to assure you we won't even shoot it down if it strays from its designated path."
Many Democrats called for Lichenstein's resignation, but President Ronald Reagan cheered. He said the delegate had "the hearty approval of most people in America."
The American mission issued a news release dissociating itself from the remark, but Lichenstein told the Associated Press on March 2, l984, he never regretted it. The AP reported that he went on to say that the United Nations “does not take itself seriously and the U.N. is constantly shooting itself in both feet and in its head and that it fails to perform very seriously.”
"I received thousands of letters," he told The Washington Post. "People stopped me on the streets of New York; they honked their horns and shouted, 'Right on!' Practically every cop in Manhattan South gave me the high sign."
Unconventional Journalistic Source Lichenstein was not a conventional diplomat. Nor was Deep Throat “a conventional journalistic source” according to former Nixon White House counsel Garment in his 2000 book, In Search of Deep Throat. The 280-page book profiles Deep Throat and analyzes a number of possible candidates.
“ Only occasionally did (Deep Throat) supply the reporters with new facts. Instead, he gave them confirmation, usually cryptic, of information they had gathered elsewhere,” Garment wrote. “More important, Deep Throat provided Woodward and Bernstein with a general ‘perspective’ to use his word, on the disparate pieces of information that the two journalists were uncovering. He was the reporters’ guide through the confusion of Watergate.
“This general guidance was more important to the reporters than any specific fact that Deep Throat could have provided. During most of the period in which Deep Throat spoke to Woodward, the Watergate scandal was still being successfully covered up. The things that the reporters were being told by their other sources seemed not only unfamiliar but actually bizarre, difficult to fit into any familiar notions of how politics worked. In addition much of this information consisted of accusations—accompanied by scant evidence or no evidence at all—against very powerful political figures,” Garment wrote.
“The reporters needed added confidence to write their stories and to persuade their editors to print them. Deep Throat, because of his acumen and 'insider’ status, provided this confidence.”
Garment went on to say that “Deep Throat, as presented in All the President’s Men, was a vivid and dramatic character. He was the perfect protagonist in a book filled with villains—an insider who dared to do dangerous things, a man mysteriously yet concretely present at times and places of his own designation.
“The descriptions of Deep Throat in All the President’s Men were usually ambiguous on the questions of his identity and motivation. Deep Throat could have been moved by a desire to unmask political evil and destroy the Nixon presidency in the process. On the other hand, he could have been trying to save Nixon, by forcing him to take action, rather than scheming to destroy him. That was the lesson that Woodward and Bernstein took from Deep Throat’s repeated insistence, ‘ I have to do this my way.’”
Garment also wrote. Later, “I asked (Bob Woodward) why Deep Throat, after all these years, would not be willing or even eager to have his identity known. After all, large portions of the politically sentient populace considered him a hero for the risks he had taken…Woodward answered that, in l972 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. “
This description, of course, fits Lichenstein.
More significantly, when I approached Garment in November 2002, unknown to me, I was not the first person to strongly propose Lichenstein as a Deep Throat candidate to him. In 2000, shortly after publication of his book, Garment received a letter from a man who said his wife had been Lichenstein’s colleague at PBS and they thought he was Deep Throat.
Garment called Lichenstein, whom he had known at the Nixon White House. On Jan. 29, 2001, they went to lunch. Garment asked him if he was Deep Throat. “He declined to confirm it,’ Garment said. “He was laughing and cheerful, and said, no. It was different from the others when they were asked. They were quite upset. Some threatened lawsuits.”
“I wish I had pursued it, Garment says, “now that I know about Lichenstein’s sense of privacy and the complexity of his decision. He seems like a better candidate.” Garment turned his folder on Lichenstein over to me and wished me luck. The notes helped me flesh out Lichenstein’s resume, the surprisingly little media notice about him over the years except in The Washington Post and put me in contact with two friends who believed he was Deep Throat. There was also a provocative letter from Lichenstein to Garment.
Low Profile Deep Throat The day after their January, 2001 lunch, Lichenstein wrote Garment. He referred to their discussion of a theory raised by former Post reporter James Mann in an Atlantic Monthly article in l992 on the 20th anniversary of Watergate. Mann, who said he remembered Woodward talking about a “friend at the FBI,” raised the possibility that Deep Throat was an FBI source or sources trying to protect the FBI from criticism and White House interference in the Watergate burglary investigation. Lichenstein, on Heritage Foundation letterhead, wrote that Mann’s “take on the matter is both businesslike and thought-provoking. The more I think about it…the stronger becomes his case for a relatively low-profile DT. Speculation always has centered on this or that Biggies, or kind of Biggie, or Biggie wannabe—natural but likely misleading,” Lichenstein wrote. Of course, Lichenstein, himself, would be a low profile Deep Throat. He went on, “Especially with respect to the trade craft (subterranean parking garages, circled page numbers in The NYT) and motivation (to defend the FBI against all enemies), Mann’s case is compelling… although I strongly believe that (former FBI Director) Pat Gray, after just a couple of false starts and a very few days, did not at all impede but rather pursued the investigation hard, the in-house suspicion was palpable during my frequent visits to his chambers at DOJ. His confidences to me, and his most searching questions, invariably took place one-on-one—not even Kinley and the other personal aides present. And, although the agents were unfailingly respectful to me, they were not forthcoming. They were ‘us’ and I was one of ‘them.’’’
The end of Lichenstein’s January, 2001 letter to Garment has a teasing quality. He writes:
“The ‘FBI sources(s)’ moreover would help account for the possibility that DT was indeed multiple sources—not always the exact same agent or assistant or een(sic) deputy director.
“I’m not yet prepared to vote. But, so far, this new (for me) candidate is appealing.
“Let’s by all means continue the dialogue.’ Lichenstein concluded.
Garment did not meet with Lichenstein again nor did the dialogue continue.
“His Pontificating Eminence” In the early 80s when Lichenstein told me he was Deep Throat he said he had been a White House liaison to the FBI during Watergate and that Patrick Gray was a close friend. Amb. Kirkpatrick and other colleagues said he had been a longtime friend of Gray’s.
In addition to this description in the letter to Garment of his inside track to FBI sources, there are more compelling letters and memos in Lichenstein’s personal files putting him in the middle of the Watergate investigation. These papers—with Gray’s handwritten notes— indicate he was advising Gray within weeks of the June 17 burglary on a controversial deposition from a key assistant to treasurer Jeb Magruder at the Committee to Re-elect the President. It was background information about this specific issue that Deep Throat gave to Woodward to help The Post reveal that the Committee’s money had been used to finance the burglary and other attempts to discredit Democrats. And, most importantly, the information that the money was controlled by high administration officials. This was the major help that Deep Throat gave The Post and is the central story of the movie All the President’s Men.
The close relationship to Gray, who did not answer requests to be interviewed about Lichenstein, was revealed in humorous handwritten notes from Gray on FBI stationary in Lichenstein’s files. One dated Sept. l, l972, from “His Pontificating Eminence” (Gray) to “The Honorable CML thanks Lichenstein for help in editing a speech:
“As usual your grasp of the levers of power is ever sure and certain too! Before you had the opportunity to remove some of the hard-line in the text. I did a wee bit of excising. Combine yours and mine and we now have the patient running fast around left end to avoid the scalpel! Oh well, t’is done..and it reads rather well..what it says is another matter. Regardless, I appreciate and value highly your very kind assistance. HPE alias G…”
This is another proof of Lichenstein’s access to the FBI through Gray, And that with his White House employment and his longtime friendship—since l960—with Rosemary Woods gave him access to everything Deep Throat told Woodward in “All the President’s Men.” No other Deep Throat candidate has been suggested who had complete access to the information given Woodward.
A Convinced Professor Dr. Carl E. Nash, retired Director of Strategic Planning and Evaluation at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and an adjunct professor at George Washington University, was a neighbor of Lichenstein since the l970s. His former wife worked with Lichenstein and they became friends.
Nash and a colleague, the late Larry Jenney, who had been in the CIA with Lichenstein, were convinced that Lichenstein was Deep Throat, Nash says. They believed that he not only had the access, but he had the academic and undercover skills. They asked him if he was Deep Throat and told him their reasons. They discussed it a number of times over the years, Nash says, and “Chuck would laugh and unconvincingly say it wasn’t him. We would ask when he was going to write a book about being Deep Throat.”
It was Nash who wrote Garment after the publication of his book to say that Lichenstein was Deep Throat.
“It had to be him. He was a faceless man,” Nash explains. “Everyone knew him, but no one paid attention to him. He was a small, sandy man, you wouldn’t notice. But although he was a Republican loyalist, he was deeply moral. He was an innocuous man. No one would ever suspect him of anything. He was a night owl. I can easily imagine him meeting in garages in the dead of night.
“He was unremarkable looking. He walked everywhere and got around without notice. The people who lived across the street from him for years—people I know—didn’t even know he was there. He was phantom-like.”
Nash was and is so convinced that a week after Lichenstein’s funeral in September, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post about Lichenstein’s “critical and heroic role in American history.
Unacknowledged Letter “Chuck lived alone in a modest Capitol Hill home,” he wrote the Post. He did not own a car, and commuted to work on foot. He would venture out late at night without raising anyone’s suspicion. He was from Yale and knew Bob Woodward from that connection. He worked as a Central Intelligence Agency trainer. As a result, he knew how to communicate and act surreptitiously.
“He was a deeply principled conservative who was well known and trusted within the Nixon White House. He was thoughtful, had a wonderful sense of humor, and as little ego as any individual I have known. He was also deeply offended by the Watergate scandal and the activities of Nixon and his operatives to cover up that scandal.
“Although Chuck never actually exposed the Watergate operatives, he provided critical guidance to Bob Woodward in his attempts to report on Watergate. Woodward, in turn, protected his identity until the end.
“RIP, Deep Throat, and thank you.” Nash concluded his letter.
The letter was not printed, nor was it acknowledged. A few months later, Nash said, he met Woodward at a party and discussed Liechtenstein and Deep Throat. “He did not deny Liechtenstein was Deep Throat,” Nash said, “ but he said it was a much more complex situation.”
Another Believer Deanna Collingwood, Vice President of Government and Foundation Relations for PBS Station KERA in Dallas worked with Lichenstein at PBS during the late 70s and shared an office with him when they both left. “I had no proof, but I always thought he was Deep Throat. He was someone, who was always watching what was going on and he was very wise. He had a way of chatting up people.
“He liked helping people and he liked deep conversations. After the Esquire article appeared, I asked him if he was Deep Throat and he stuttered. It was the only time I ever heard him stutter. I felt that I was on the right trail, but I never asked again. He was a private person.
Dave Gergen In l976—the only time Lichenstein’s name was mentioned publicly as a possible Deep Throat— former Nixon speechwriter, and now journalist and Harvard professor David Gergen and several of his friends told Taylor Branch, who was writing a story for Esquire that Deep Throat was Lichenstein. They were trying to take the heat off Gergen, who had been fingered as Deep Throat by John Dean, Nixon’s former White House counsel.
Gergen told me that Lichenstein “was always mysterious to me. I was never clear as to what he did or whom he worked for. Whose payroll was he on? Was he in a position in the information flow?
“Always a shadowy guy, fascinating and smart. I can’t remember why I said he was Deep Throat 25 years ago. I can’t place why I thought that. But he kept strange hours, had all these peculiarities. And no one who was Deep Throat could have led a normal life.”’
In Esquire, Taylor Branch, who called Lichenstein “the bureaucrat”, wrote that he called Lichenstein on vacation in Scotland and told him “he could save Gergen from a big mistake by stepping forward.” Branch wrote:
“I would love to do that,” chuckled the Bureaucrat, “but I am not and never have been Deep Throat. It might have been nice, though I’ve never met Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. I was interviewed by one of their investigators for The Final Days. I was a source for that. And I tell you this: if I had known in l972 what I found out from Pat Gray later, I might have been some kind of Deep Throat. But I don’t think I’d have met Woodward in the dark. I would have just called my friends in the press and told them what I knew. I’m not Deep Throat, but I’d like to meet him.”
Lichenstein’s files reveal he was advising Gray on Watergate matters about the very information that Deep Throat give Woodward. He knew what Gray knew immediately in the summer of l972 within two weeks of the burglary..
There is additional evidence he did help Woodward and Bernstein with The Final Days. Among Lichenstein’s papers is a large manila envelope from Woodward and Bernstein hand delivered to him at the White House during the Ford administration with an outline of stories which had appeared in The Post and The New York Times from April 30, 1974 to August 10, when the President resigned.
It is not clear how Woodward and Bernstein would have located the anonymous Lichenstein, who had the lowest of profiles within the White House, much less outside, if one of them had not known him in another context. Searching for such links between Woodward and possible Deep Throat contenders led to the Deep Throat-Yale connection rumored in the press corps and the Watergate books over the years. Gergen and others Throat candidates also attended Yale.
It seems unlikely that Woodward and Bernstein worked through the White House telephone directory asking people they did not already know about the final days of the Nixon presidency or that Lichenstein would have agreed to help with The Final Days if he had not already known one of them. Lichenstein’s papers also a include a notebook of four speeches he wrote for Nixon and analytical outlines dated April 30, l974 putting a positive spin on the President’s actions in connection with the Watergate scandal and suggesting ways to explain the President’s actions as he turns over tapes to the House Judiciary committee. The premise of the outlines and speeches is that the President had no knowledge prior to March 21, l973 of any cover-up. The background memos decry “the shifting charges against the President.”
The speech notes say of Nixon: “A good and decent man who ended war, stopped city riots, opened the doors of peace, engendered domestic stability, and gained the respect of the world is now the victim of a massive partisan assault.
The Final Days Lichenstein is mentioned three times in The Final Days. The first time on page 347 on July 31, 1974, he is described as a member of a new team supervising the mobilization of an organized defense rebutting the articles of impeachment. He is identified as White House counsel Dean Burch’s deputy and other members of the defense team are Al Haig, Ron Ziegler, Patrick Buchanan, Ray Price, William Timmons, Fred Buzhardt, James St. Clair, and Burch, a number of whom over the years have denied being Deep Throat.
Lichenstein is mentioned in the book again on page 359 on August 1 when Buzhardt tells the defense group they could not read the transcripts of the President’s tapes, which were to be turned over to Judge Sirica.
The book reports, “Lichenstein thought that Buzhardt’s demeanor typified the lunacy of trying to conduct a defense from the darkness, and he was enraged. If the staff had only Buzhardt’s interpretation to rely on, they might all end up facing criminal charges. He was still quaking from Buzhardt’s misreading of all the other tapes, and of the edited transcripts. Buzhardt, he thought, read the same words but understood meanings that ordinary mortals did not. Burch shared his deputy’s apprehensions to some extent, but he did not share Lichenstein’s feelings of animosity. The mere mention of Buzhardt’s name could put the even-keeled Lichenstein in a state. “Literally crazy…insane…he apprehends a reality that is not the same as ours,” he said of the lawyer.”
In Woodward and Bernstein’s earlier book, All the President’s Men, they describe Deep Throat as both “emotional” and “frightened.”
By this time, Lichenstein/Deep Throat has known his plan to save Nixon by forcing the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman the previous April and exposing other White House staffers closer to the dirty tricks and cover-up is not working. He could have learned that the President was involved in the cover-up of the burglary from the beginning from Rosemary Woods in the fall of l973 when she was transcribing the damning tapes. It is all but certain that Lichenstein had not known of the President’s direct involvement in the cover-up when he began to help Woodward.
Although Ambassador Kirkpatrick and other Republican friends think Lichenstein was a hero if he was Deep Throat, Gergen said, “I am not sure everyone would agree.”
A case in point is Delores Jones Forward, Bob Finch’s secretary —Former Health Education and Labor Secretary and Presidential assistant Finch died in l995, She said that Chuck was “ such a loyal Republican from the beginning years with Nixon (1960) he couldn’t have done it.” She also said that Rosemary Woods has Alzheimer’s and is in a nursing home. Finch had denied that he was Deep Throat.
Two Post Stories A story in The Washington Post in March, l984 by James Conaway reports:
“Charles Lichenstein, the man who told the U.N. Where to Go. “Charles Lichenstein, 125 pounds of neo-conservatism in blue corduroy bedroom slippers, has left his post as alternate U.S. representative to the U. N. to be a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
“’The U.N. is an intricate charade,’ he says, padding around unpacked cartons in his Capitol Hill townhouse, hotbed of right-wing reverberations for lo these 35 years—since Lichenstein, now 57, first came to Washington. His political credits include editing a newspaper for the CIA, and assisting Richard Nixon in writing “Six Crises” but his televised invitation to anti-U.S. delegates made him famous. (The UN story).
The Post story goes on to report: “A bachelor, Lichenstein taught political science at Notre Dame until William Casey, now director of the CIA, recruited him for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign…. ”I am a Republican,” says Lichenstein, as close to fervor as an academic can reasonably get. “A conservative who feels a great affinity for what is now called neo-conservatism. It’s not so neo.” It stands, he says, for principled pragmatism. We’re not naïve or romantic about wholesale changes in the evolution of American institutions. We rely on the markets for a wide range of decisions.”
He helped Vice President Nixon run for president in l960. “If somebody wanted to know what Nixon thought about X,” he says, “I’d give them a briefing.” The Nixon Lichenstein knew was just another withdrawn scholar, he says. “He was very shy, very private. He preferred the solitude of the study and the companionship of his closest friends. The public persona is something he forced himself to develop.’ Nixon’s presidency was “most successful…but he made some key errors. He’s re-emerging from the isolation now. He will make a stronger contribution to American life. He is his own foundation.”
Post Story #2 Lichenstein did not surface again in The Post or elsewhere until thirteen years later in June, l997 when reporter George Lardner Jr. tracked him down for a brief quote at the end of a long Washington Post story about the release of Nixon tapes.
“’Nixon always believed that crisis somehow improves the man, that only through adversity does one learn his own quality,’ says former ambassador Charles M. Lichenstein, a former Nixon aide and chief ghostwriter for Nixon’s first book, “Six Crises.”
“’Personally, I think (Nixon) used that (theme) too hard,’ Lichenstein said in an interview. “’I think he was better off in his last years when he wasn’t fighting anybody anymore. The books he did on foreign policy, for instance, were written from a more relaxed posture and they flowed better.’”
John Dean John Dean, the former White House counsel who refused to take the blame for Watergate, doesn’t think Lichenstein is Deep Throat. He doesn’t believe he had access, despite his close friendships with Rosemary Woods to the information Woodward says he got from Deep Throat about the erased tape. Dean was the person who originally told Taylor Branch that Deep Throat was David Gergen and more recently accused a Washington lawyer of being Deep Throat in his recent book which ended with the lawyer’s denial and a threat to sue.
Dean also says that Deep Throat gave Woodward a lot of misleading information. He says he is going to get back on Deep Throat’s identity soon .
However, Lichenstein fulfills all but one of Dean’s criteria for Deep Throat at outlined in his book “Unmasking Deep Throat History’s Most Elusive Source.” It is dedicated to University of Illinois Journalism Professor William C. Gaines, whose students have been pursuing the story.
Dean’s Deep Throat criteria, distilled from All The President’s Men Include:
• Bachelor, or lived like one •Thinks and talks like a lawyer •Understood journalism •Worked at the Nixon White House •Not an investigator or co-conspirator •Didn’t like Woodward to call him at the office •Nervous, even jaw-quivery frightened about Watergate •Could not conceal his emotions •Capable of being rowdy, drinking too much (this is may have been true when Lichenstein was younger) •Smoked cigarettes, drank Scotch, knew much literature well. (An accolade from the head of the Heritage Foundation refers to CL smoking on the sidewalk in front of the building while he lectures interns.) •Heavy beard in dead of night (not sure) •Someone in the inner circle
None of his friends remember whether Lichenstein, had a heavy beard in dead of night.
Nay Sayers Former Nixon White House Communications Director Herb Klein believes Deep Throat is not one person, and not Lichenstein. ‘I don’t think it’s him. I don’t think he had the availability of information. I don’t think he would believe he could save the President by doing this.
“ He was a great loyalist. Too smart to think it would help. I don’t think he liked Haldeman and Ehrlichman and he would have liked to get rid of them, but this was a damaging way to get rid of them. Not that getting rid of them would not have been beneficial.
“I first met Chuck in l960. He was looked on as a brilliant speechwriter. In the ’60 and ’62 campaigns, he was part of a small group around Nixon. Sort of strange, great intellectual capacity, but never knew the inside. I cannot imagine that he knew enough to be Deep Throat.
Woodward & Bradlee Woodward describes Deep Throat this way in a recent interview on the Post Watergate website: “The source known as Deep Throat (a very unfortunate name given to the source by the managing editor of The Washington Post) provided a kind of road map through the scandal. His one consistent message was that the Watergate burglary was just the tip of the iceberg, part of a scheme and a series of illegal activities that amounted to a subversion of government. The interlocking nature of the crimes gave it weight and provided the context, and in fact one of the incentives for us to continue our investigations.”
Ben Bradlee, former Post editor, on the Post website says: “I think he (Deep Throat) had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.” He told the Yale Daily News that the newspaper would only reveal Deep Throat’s identity after his death and that the quality of American journalism is improving because “there are no drunks left in our business.”
The Watergate story has deeply affected American journalism A gaggle of talking heads on Fox in 2003 were gnashing about how it has ruined a generation of reporters looking for personal Deep Throats and wrong-doing in every institution as a ladder to success.
Pure Fiction Garment in his book said “Those who view Deep Throat as a pure fiction say that he was simply a gimmick, beginning to end, invented to make Woodward and Bernstein’s story more dramatic. Those who make the ‘composite’ version of the argument contend that Deep Throat was a combination of sources whom the authors blended into a one-man Greek chorus.” The chorus had to take the form of one man, in this view, because only a single voice would give the needed narrative structure and pace to the story of a news-gathering process that was otherwise fragmentary, desultory, and dull. like most good journalistic investigations.”
Alice Mayhew, editor of Dean’s first book, Blind Ambition, had also been Woodward and Bernstein’s’ editor in the preparation of All the President’s Men. Mayhew told Dean that she was the one who had invented the detective story structure for the reporters’ book according to Garment. Garment wrote that Mayhew also told Dean that she did not believe there was a single source for Deep Throat.
Never Knowing Jonathan Schell in The Time of Illusion sums up the impossibility of ever really knowing exactly what happened during the Watergate years. He writes: “The Nixon Administration was characterized by, among other things, fragmentation. What the Nixon men thought was unconnected to what they said. What they said was unconnected to what they did. What they did or said they were doing at one moment was unconnected to what they did or said they were doing the next moment…. In a democracy, people must know what is going on and know it immediately after it happens, if they are to make their judgments about where the country should be going and who should lead it there In the Nixon years, information about public affairs came in bits and scraps, often out of sequence and after long delays; and the coherence and meaning of the public record was lost. Later as the record of the administrations covert activates was made available, some of the gaps were filled in, but by then the parts that had been learned earlier were fading from memory, and people were left with a pile of shreds. It was as though they had been invited to listen to a large orchestral composition, but then had heard each of the instruments separately; one after another, and with long waits in between. They had heard interminable notes, played hour after hour, but they had never heard the composition.”
Schell goes on to explain the biggest Watergate mystery, why it had been impossible for Deep Throat or anyone to save President Nixon from himself.
“The conspirator who is a public official not only must know the facts, in order get on with the cover-up, while seeming not to know the facts, in order to escape indictment for misprision, but also must, in his public role as investigator, seem actively to seek the facts while secretly making sure he does not find them. When the sleuth and the criminal are united in one person, as they were in the person of the President during the Watergate cover-up, one is presented with the spectacle of a man following his own footsteps in circles while taking care never to discover where they lead.”
Why Nixon Did It Herb Klein explained it this way, “Nixon felt all along, if he stonewalled, he could get away with it in light of what Kennedy and LBJ had gotten away with. But he didn’t figure on the bloodthirsty press or the Democrats in Congress, Most of the press ignored the story in the beginning—just CBS and the Post and then when things started coming out, they were angry with Ziegler and Warren., (the press secretaries.)”
Garment explains: “. If (Nixon) rejected the route of confession and apology, there was some rationally based reason. Because there was no such rational consideration connected with the Watergate burglary itself, the reason must have involved things that went beyond the burglary. That reason now seems plain. Identifying all the people who would have to be identified in order to make an apology credible, and identifying the organizational and funding sources of the caper, would have made it possible for investigators to uncover a host of additional sleazy activities. There were the FBI wiretaps, those under a thin-cove of national security, and those that were clearly and uncomfortably naked. There were the wiretaps that the FBI had been unwilling to carry out, and for which the White House had found it necessary to engage other operators. There were the campaign finance illegalities in which Liddy and considerably more prominent others had participated. There were the spying and dirty tricks carried out under the direction of the White House proper, not merely by some campaign organization with a degree of deniability.
“There were the illegalities connected with the Watergate operation itself. There was the cover-up that had already began, involving the movement of impossible –to- explain hush money, not to mention (Republican operative) Tony Ulasewicz, who had so many cover-up calls to make from pay phones that he took to wearing an old-fashioned bus conductor’s coin belt. There was the random and mindless illegality, like the backdating for tax purposes, of the deed by which Nixon gave his papers to the Library of Congress.
“Thus the arrests at the Watergate would end by revealing everything. Nixon took the arguably rational course when he decided that instead of confessing to a part of the operations and seeing the rest exposed, one by one, he would attempt to paper over the entire mess.”
In Closing Lichenstein, now in the great think tank in the sky, can never be grilled on 24-hour-television news, be forced to listen to recriminations from conservative Republican colleagues and friends, asked to explain the Watergate scandal in a 30 second sound bite or be feted by most as a national hero.
And perhaps to avoid all of that, he—an intensely private man — never stepped forward publicly as Deep Throat.
-30- Additional Information Lichenstein’s CV Lichenstein began his career in the CIA from ’52 to ’56 where he edited a newspaper and directed special projects in the office of training. He returned to Yale where he taught from ’57-58. He taught at Notre Dame for a year and then went to work with Nixon’s campaigns from l959 to l963 He was close friends of Rosemary Woods and all the original California Nixon mafia.
In l963 he was recruited by William Casey (later CIA head) to work on the Goldwater campaign and was director of research for the Goldwater Campaign and the Republican National Committee from l963 to 1965.
From l965 to 1968 he was founder of the Free Society Association in Washington, D. C.
From l969-71 he was special asst. to Robert Finch both at HEW and when Finch become a counselor to President Nixon. Lichenstein then was special assistant. and administrative assistant to Chairman Dean Burch at the FCC from l971 to l974. In 1974 he became special assistant to President Nixon and stayed on as a special assistant to Ford. From ’75 to ’79 he was vice president of PBS in Washington and then became a consultant to AEI for Public Policy Research, the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and the National Strategy Information Center.
Then it was onto the UN and after that the Heritage Foundation.
Other interesting Sidelights
1. Spy Tradecraft Referring to what Lichenstein had called “tradecraft”, in his book Garment had questioned the method of communication between Deep Throat and Woodward. “When Deep Throat wanted to meet with Woodward, Woodward had only to pick up his morning New York Times (delivered to his apartment building by 7:00A.M.) and turn to page 20, where Deep Throat would have drawn a clock face with hands pointing to the time of the proposed meeting.
“Woodward said in (his) book that he did not know how Deep Throat managed the logistics of this tortured mode of communication via the New York Times. For reasons unknown, the investigative reporter seems never to have asked,’ writes Garment.
(A recent observer said the communication might easily be explained by Deep Throat marking his personal copy of the Times and then strolling into Woodward’s apartment house and trading Woodward’s copy for his.)
2..On page 40 in The Final Days on August 5, when the defense team is told of the cover-up tape, the smoking gun and that the game is over, Ken Clawson said to Lichenstein, “Unfortunately, there isn’t a market for right-wing journalists.”
3. The CIA Connection In the 1976 Esquire article, Taylor Branch had not wanted Lichenstein to be Deep Throat. “His employment record had the feel of a CIA man, which bothered me. I wanted to think of Deep Throat as a tortured good guy instead of some manipulator. A CIA man would scramble the case even more.”
It has not been possible to find out what if any ties Lichenstein, who worked for the CIA from l952 to 1956, maintained with the agency. William Casey, later head of the CIA, recruited Lichenstein to work on the l964 Goldwater campaign and the men remained good friends until Casey’s death in l987. Two CIA veterans—both top officials—Clair George and Herbert Meyer, a longtime friend of Lichenstein’s, assured me immediately that he had not been on the CIA payroll during the Nixon years.
4. Gerald Warren, former Nixon deputy press secretary, who had been one of several Deep Throat candidates spotlighted by the University of Illinois journalism students, denied it on September 30. 2003. “Nobody who dealt with the press could possibly be Deep Throat. …they could not be able to defend the president publicly knowing what Deep Throat knew,” he said.
He went on to say in his denial that Deep Throat was not just one person but a composite, a number of different sources giving Woodward and Bernstein bits and pieces of information.”
He said recently he did not believe that Lichenstein had been Deep Throat. “ I didn’t see him in the loop. But if he had the information from Pat Gray and he was Deep Throat, he would have revealed himself after Nixon’s death as Deep Throat. He wanted to be a big guy.”
5. The Weekly Standard Longtime Liechtenstein friend, Claudia Winkler described him in a post funeral tribute column in The Weekly Standard: “He was an animated, learned, and tireless talker about history, literature, music and wine as well as politics and world affairs. Always, though, he looked back with relish on his UN years—historic years when the Cold War was being won partly by the clarity and tenacity of people like him.”
6. In the mid l970s, in a promo for the movie All the President’s Men with Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, Woodward said, “The identity of Deep Throat will come out someday. I am surprised it hasn’t come out already. I think mostly it is clear from the book and I hope form the movie that he was somebody who was conscience-stricken, somebody who crossed lines that somebody in that sort of responsible position doesn’t cross but crossed them for the best of reasons.”
7.Garment in his book had this to say, ‘”Deep Throat’s most important act was to blow the whistle not on particular crimes, but on the rising tide of a repugnant style of politics. Somehow, this act brought about the opposite of what he intended. For this reason, too, Deep Throat’s identity and the circumstances surrounding his actions have remained a matter of perennial interest.”
8. On a 2003 talk show, on which Woodward appeared, there was a discussion of revealing Deep Throat in a new edition of John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” which Caroline Kennedy was putting together.
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©Clare Crawford-Mason, 2003 CC-M Productions
Deep Throat was the nickname, borrowed from a pornographic movie, given to the mysterious administration insider who guided two young and inexperienced Washington Post reporters as they sought to unravel the cat's cradle of lies and obfuscations, payoffs and cover-ups that history knows as Watergate.
The president was Richard M. Nixon. He was forced to resign 30 years ago August. The reporters were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But who was Deep Throat?
Over the years, a laundry list of logical suspects from the Nixon years denied the accusation, when asked, including Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and Patrick Buchanan. When his turn came, David Gergen said no almost tearfully. Diane Sawyer, the only woman under suspicion, shook her head as well. This mystery still waits for a solution.
Recently new, substantial and compelling information has surfaced pointing the finger at Charles M. Lichenstein, a special assistant to Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford and during the Reagan years, Deputy US Ambassador at the United Nations. He was also a past vice president of PBS, the ghost writer of Nixon’s “Six Crises” book and a fellow at Washington’s conservative Heritage Foundation. As a well connected and longtime Nixon insider, Lichenstein may have been the only person who had access to the wide range of information Deep Throat gave the reporters. He also, it turns out, was driven by an unusual, even inspiring, motive. And he is the only Deep Throat candidate to fit Woodward’s detailed description of the eccentric source.
Most importantly, he is the first person to confess to being the fabled mystery man.
He told me he was Deep Throat in an off the record conversation during a dinner party in the American UN suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York 20 some years ago. Three years later in 1984—the 10th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation— after two meetings with me and another journalist, he declined to participate in a magazine story about his role as Deep Throat. He explained that his Republican friends and colleagues would never understand and he would be ruined.
Could this be true? Could this be true? Could Chuck Lichenstein, a mild and scholarly bachelor—heavy smoker, midnight walker, former CIA trainer, Scotch drinker and called “The Bureaucrat’ behind his back by White House colleagues—be Deep Throat?
In official Washington, where lying is as ordinary as candor is rare, can we believe anyone?
Can we believe him?
Why would he confess his secret to a reporter he met a few hours earlier?
I presume he made the admission to me because I caught him off guard. I was intensely interested in what he was saying. Both of us had been Washington political observers/junkies for decades and could move quickly through the key issues such as Presidential character, Watergate and Deep Throat. That we had been refilling our glasses again and again with the excellent wine may have played a role. Later in l984, his reasons for not cooperating on a story revealing he was Deep Throat rang true and made his claim even more convincing. He said his Republican colleagues and former President Nixon would not have understood his role no matter what his intentions. He seemed rational and sensible. Saying he was Deep Throat was a peculiar claim to make if he was not. And he wasn’t seeking publicity. It was puzzling. I concluded he wanted people to know but he needed to deny it.
I didn’t think about it again until August 2002 when I read Lichenstein’s obituary in the New York Times. Later, in the Washington Post, I saw the notice of his memorial service at Gawler’s funeral home, where the Washington elite are prepared for their final hearing. I decided to attend.
Thus began an engaging pilgrimage into political history. The way was strewn with elusive and ambiguous facts, conflicting answers, multiple Deep Throats, provocative documents, ironic outcomes, detours, fascinating conversations with aging politicians who were once household words and a dramatic story of conflicted loyalties. This investigation raises a new assessment of Deep Throat as both a patriot and a loyal Nixon supporter. It provides an answer to why President Nixon thought he would not have to resign. It brings together forgotten connections and new insights and identifies popular misconceptions about the time 30 years ago when the Constitution of the United States was almost undermined by the President and his men. Key to Today’s Presidency Watergate has been described as the worst political crisis since the Civil War and the nation’s greatest scandal. Before l974, many, if not most, Americans respected, admired or gave the benefit of the doubt to their leaders, even the ones from the other political party. Politicians were almost patriotic gentlemen. Dwight Eisenhower and even Nixon himself publicly supported President Kennedy during the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban missile crisis follow-up. Watergate is also about the importance of an independent judiciary since it was Judge John Sirica who 31 years ago this past March used the threat of long prison sentences to force the burglars to reveal their White House connections.
It remains important now because it changed how we think about our Presidents and what they might be doing— money, crimes, enemy lists and cover-ups linked directly to the Oval Office. It solidified a growing distrust of government that had begun to split the country over the Vietnam War. It also changed our language—“smoking guns,” “expletitive deleted,” “executive privilege,” “follow the money” (as Deep Throat said to Woodward) and a series of Washington-gate scandals are just a few of many Watergate legacies.
This exploration of Deep Throat’s identity provides a simple narrative through the confusing Watergate saga, of how an attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee and the Republican President’s attempt to cover it up led to the exposure of other crimes and the conviction of top Administration officials and the President’s resignation.
The First Reaction After the memorial service, I called former US Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who had given a eulogy. I told her I wanted to talk about Lichenstein. We met at her office at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think-tank. I knew she admired Lichenstein, and I didn’t know how she would feel about suggesting he was Deep Throat. It was possible she might believe Deep Throat had been a despicable traitor. She might not like the idea at all.
“This is an odd question,” I began, “but what would you say if I told you Chuck told me he was Deep Throat?
“I am not surprised,” she instantly replied.
She said she and her husband—he had taught Lichenstein at Yale—had often discussed the possibility that their friend and colleague of more than 40 years had been Deep Throat. They had never asked him directly “because he was such a private person. How like him to tell someone outside our group,” she added.
I had approached the Ambassador first, because I thought if Lichenstein had been putting me on when he told me he was Deep Throat at the dinner and when I met with him again in l984, he would have shared the joke with Kirkpatrick, his boss and friend. She said he had not mentioned his conversations with me, nor did she think he would initiate or carry on a practical joke of that nature. At the end of our conversation, she gave me the name of friends and his executor and told me keep in touch with her as I talked to other people.
Her comments gave the story legs, as they say. The next interviews were not as clear-cut.
Everyone had different answers and theories about Deep Throat and Lichenstein. Some said yes, some said no, some said maybe. And many, who said no, said that they thought Deep Throat was a number of different people, a composite of sources to make the Woodward and Bernstein book more manageable and interesting, and maybe or probably Lichenstein was one of them. Some said Deep Throat had been a help, but he didn’t deserve all the credit he got. And besides, there was no way to ever know really who Deep Throat was because only Woodward had seen him. And it was in Woodward’s interest to have Deep Throat be a dramatic, mysterious, single source. The story became more and more complex.
Woodward and Deep Throat were in contact at most14 times over 17 months between June 19, l972, two days after the burglary, and November, l973, when Deep Throat confirmed the existence of an erased presidential tape. This included six telephone calls, five meetings in a garage, one in a tavern, one missed meeting and one maybe meeting according to All the President’s Men, the book. The movie of the same name featured Robert Redford as Woodward. Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat.
A Single Source? Was there really a single Deep Throat who guided the young reporters sifting through the maze of facts, fictions, and innuendoes in this conspiracy?
Or was Throat invented as a clever journalistic fictional character, a convenient composite of sources, designed to make the Watergate book and movie more dramatic and justify The Post’s cutting-edge stories?
We can never know. But, after numerous interviews and months of research, I have come to believe that if there was a single Deep Throat figure who gave guidance to a Post reporter in underground garages, Charles M. Lichenstein is the man. Or if Deep Throat was a number of people, the source in the garage was Lichenstein, the midnight walker. It is possible that there are a number of aging Nixon functionaries expecting that Woodward will turn up at their funeral and reveal their role.
However, Lichenstein fits the unusual profile in All the President’s Men book: smoker, Scotch-drinker, gossip, emotional, Nixon Administration official, etc. He left a provocative paper trail in his personal files linking him immediately to the FBI investigation of Watergate and to information known only to a few people and passed by Deep Throat to Woodward and Bernstein. He had access almost immediately after the burglary to what the FBI knew and did. In addition, prominent and reliable friends of Lichenstein are willing to say they believe it is true, could be true or probably is true. They say he had the information, knew the wide scope of the crime and had the motivation to talk to Woodward.
And Lichenstein told me he was Deep Throat.
Significantly, when he had a logical opportunity several years later to beg off from the story and say that he had been teasing over a good dinner and wine, he did not. At that subsequent meeting, he gave every indication of seriously considering the request to cooperate with a story about his role as Deep Throat. He did not volunteer more information, but that would not have been appropriate until he had decided to cooperate. Throughout two meetings, he listened to the proposal attentively and said he was not sure he would cooperate but was considering it. He later called to say he would not cooperate. Throughout our time together, the fact that he was Deep Throat was a given as was his fear that having his identify revealed would irreparably damage him.
And to further strengthen him as Deep Throat, my investigation reveals that at the Nixon White House, he was the mythic faceless bureaucrat, the mystery novel figure no one notices, the man who seems to not be there.
People proposing other candidates have worked backwards looking at the profile data from “All the President’s Men” first, and trying to see whom it might fit. This is the first time a candidate has been proposed and then found to meet the criteria. In fact, this is the first candidate to claim he was Deep Throat. Bob Woodward has promised to reveal Deep Throat’s identity after Throat’s death. In January, 2004, he told a colleague who mentioned with my permission my investigation of Lichenstein, “I will not respond. I have gotten out of the business of commenting on Deep Throat and I’m not going to comment now. Tell her (me) to call me.” I called several times and he did not return my calls. A Modern Icon Deep Throat has taken on a life of his own—beyond Woodward or Watergate. He has become an icon like Paul Revere warning the citizens of danger. Woodward himself has evolved from the hungry young investigative reporter to a writer of controversial exposes—Veil, about the CIA and most recently President Bush. He is now a member of the establishment himself reporting conversations with other insiders. He has been called the “king of access: and “ a reporting god.” Both Deep Throat and Woodward have traveled far from that underground garage.
In addition, an incredible number of Watergate groupies are still sleuthing the mystery. The investigative reporting class of the Department of Journalism at the University of University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign recently spent four years trying to identify Deep Throat. As they explain on their extensive website, “the secrecy has caused the importance of Throat’s contribution to be exaggerated and has unfairly cast suspicion on many people through published accounts based on speculation.” They scold Woodward. “’I will never quote you, not even as an anonymous source’ Woodward promises in the film version,” they point out.
“Having in those words revealed to movie audiences that he had a source,” the student website says, “he then appears to violate the agreement by quoting him, telling everyone when and where they met, the information Throat provided, and their means of contact…So rather than concealing a source, Woodward, Bernstein and (Washington Post editor Ben) Bradlee have promoted a guessing game…chuckling up their sleeves, chortling,’ We know something you don’t know and we’re not telling.’”
The students do not mention Lichenstein in their list of possible Deep Throat candidates, nor does the Washington Post website. $5 Million Sale In April, 2003 Woodward and Bernstein sold their notes on the Watergate story for $5 million to the University of Texas at Austin. However, papers involving Deep Throat and other sources will remain in the custody of the reporters protected from disclosure at this time. Woodward said this is about 1 to 2 percent of the archives. “In the event that Woodward and Bernstein die before ‘Deep Throat’ or the other confidential sources, they said, a trustee named by them will have custody of the documents that reveal the sources’ identities. Eventually , all the materials will be turned over to the (university),” The Post reported. “Woodward declined to say whether he had asked Deep Throat for permission to reveal his identity.”
In the last four years, two Nixon White House counsels, John Dean, whose testimony to Congress revealed much of the scandal, and Leonard Garment, who replaced Dean at the White House, have each written 200 plus page books identifying Deep Throat. The books each built a case for its candidate— different candidates. And each ended his book with the particular candidate denying he was Deep Throat and threatening to sue. These Deep Throat candidates were even more obscure Nixon White House staffers than Lichenstein, who went on to become an ambassador.
Garment now thinks Lichenstein is a likely candidate, if indeed there is a single Deep Throat. However, he is a strong proponent of Deep Throat as a “chorus of many voices.” He believes that Throat has achieved such unexpected mythic proportions that neither the reporters nor the Post will ever identify him.
Garment says, “Deep Throat and Nixon are the worry beads of American politics and we keep fingering them trying to get a sense of what happened 30 years ago and what it means now.” Numerous websites are devoted to it; 200,001 references pop up on Netscape for “Watergate” and 833,000 for Deep Throat, which, of course, also refers to the original pornographic movie as well as a computer virus of that name. Amazon has 230 books listed, old and new, with second-hand G. Gordon Liddy’s selling for 97 cents and fellow burglar James McCord’s going for $50. A video of “All the President’s Men” movie is sold with a learning guide to schools to help develop courage and teamwork in students age 12 and up with an “ethical emphasis on trustworthiness; responsibility; fairness and citizenship.”
Facts In l976—the only time Lichenstein’s name has been mentioned publicly until now, he jocularly told Esquire Magazine: “I am not and never have been Deep Throat. It might have been nice…but I would like to meet him.”
In recent years Post reporter Woodward, the only person certain to know the identity or identities of Deep Throat, has said that the actual Deep Throat had publicly denied he was Deep Throat.
What are the facts?
Lichenstein was the ghostwriter for Nixon’s 1962 book, Six Crises, according to the Washington Post.
His resume shows that he was everywhere that Deep Throat had to be. He had access to the information that could connect all the dots of the cabal. Nixon himself, longtime Nixon staffers, the FBI, the CIA, and the Republican National Committee—they all trusted him. He had been director of research for the Republican National Committee and for the 1964 Goldwater campaign. He had also been a former CIA trainer. Again, he fits the oddball profile of Deep Throat drawn by Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men.
Lichenstein described himself to the Washington Post in the l980s as “a principled pragmatist.
He was on the scene in the Nixon years in a number of jobs, not only as an assistant to the President but as an assistant to the late HEW secretary Robert Finch— who denied that he was Deep Throat—and an assistant to FCC chairman Dean Burch.
Saving Nixon Longtime colleagues—distinguished and reliable conservatives— say Lichenstein was an astute observer who could have guided the Washington Post reporters through the confusion of the complex scandal. These same friends say he probably saw himself as trying to save the Nixon presidency. “He was an intelligent and loyal man who saw greatness in Nixon, but understood his shadow side. He recognized important wrong doing and its threat to constitutional government and acted to stop it,. He had spent much of his life trying to save Richard Nixon from himself,” one close associate who declined to be identified, said.
This casts a new light on Deep Throat’s motives; he is usually pictured as a disgruntled or disgusted White House insider, not as a Nixon loyalist or a patriot dedicated to preserving the integrity of government. . Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lichenstein’s boss at the UN and longtime friend who said she is “not surprised” that he had said he was Deep Throat, added, “I can’t say yes or no. It is a hypothesis worth entertaining. It is conceivable but I do not know.”
Ambassador Kirkpatrick described Lichenstein as “a serious patriot” and said, “he was repulsed” from the beginning (of Nixon’s presidency) by Nixon lieutenants H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and their methods. “He passionately disapproved of Haldeman and Ehrlichman.”
Both were forced to resign because of their roles in the Watergate cover-up. “Chuck felt they were bad people who had done great harm to Nixon, the Republican Party and the country,” Kirkpatrick said.
However, she said, Lichenstein was fond of Nixon, maintained ties with him over the years after the resignation and went to his funeral.
She recalled that Lichenstein was mugged on a late night stroll during Nixon’s California gubernatorial campaign in 1962. In LA, as everywhere else, he walked for miles day and night, just as he did over the years in Washington from his Capitol Hill townhouse. He rarely owned a car, “His injuries,” Kirkpatrick said, “were severe and it wasn’t clear that he would live. He was unconscious for a few days, and the first person he saw when he came to was Nixon, who was sitting beside his bed.”
UN Dinner Party Conversation In the early l980s, Lichenstein told me he was Deep Throat. At the time, while preparing a story on Ambassador Kirkpatrick for People Magazine, I met with Kirkpatrick, Lichenstein and others at a dinner in America’s UN suite at the Waldorf.
Though Lichenstein and I had never met, we had friends in common. He knew of me from Washington journalism where I was on the local evening news as well as writing a newspaper column, running the People Washington Bureau and a senior producer at NBC News. We had quick rapport and could talk in Beltway shorthand.
He sat beside me and we began to discuss Watergate. I told him my Washington party conversation theory that the break-in had been triggered by Democratic trickster Dick Tuck. Tuck had ridiculed Nixon during his 1962 gubernatorial campaign by having a sign hung across a San Francisco Chinatown street asking about the controversial Howard Hughes loan to Nixon’s brother. The sign was in Chinese and Nixon unwittingly posed for photographs under it surrounded by giggling Chinese At the luncheon following, Tuck arranged that the fortune cookies read in English, “What about the Hughes’ loan?” Candidate Nixon was not amused.
Nor was Nixon amused, I reminded Lichenstein, when Tuck had arranged after the famous 1960 Kennedy-Nixon television debate for an older woman in tennis shoes to rush up to Nixon in a small California airport and say, “ Don’t worry, Dick, you’ll do better next time.”
My theory was that Nixon and his staff could not separate funny, dirty political tricks from illegal ones. In recent conversations, former Nixon communication director Herb Klein agreed that Tuck’s activities had been a major motivating factor that led some White House staffers to the Watergate break-in and other attacks on Democrats. “One half of the theory that Tuck caused it is correct. (Jeb) Magruder was trying to do something more modern and trying to top the campaigns we had run. I would give Tuck the schedule and when he went to the phone booth I would send someone to the next phone booth,” Klein said.
At the UN dinner, Lichenstein disagreed with the Tuck theory in detail. Speaking of how he was at the White House at the time of Watergate, he indicated that Watergate was serious and intentionally criminal. He spoke with authority and mentioned many of the legendary Watergate names and indicated they were close colleagues and friends: Mark Felt and Patrick Gray of the FBI, both of whom were also Deep Throat candidates, Rosemary Woods Nixon’s longtime personal assistant, etc.
The Yale Connection As we left the subject and sipped more wine, he talked about his days as a professor. I asked where he taught and he answered, “ Yale.”
It has been rumored for years in the Washington press corps, that Woodward and Deep Throat had Yale connections. Woodward and Lichenstein graduated from Yale, some years apart.
Intuitively, almost without thinking, I said to Lichenstein, “You’re Deep Throat, aren’t you?”
He looked surprised and quickly said, “Yes.” And after a pause, “That’s off the record.”
At the time, there was nothing I could do with the story without his cooperation.
In l983, n Schecter, the Washington editor of Esquire, and I asked Amb. Lichenstein if he would be willing on the 10th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation to talk about his role in Watergate as Deep Throat. He gave no indication that he had been joking during our dinner conversation of three years before. He treated the matter with seriousness and concern, something his friends agree he would have not done had he not been Deep Throat. He indicated that he was seriously considering my request but was troubled about the effect of disclosure on his colleagues, friends and career. Schecter recently recalled, “We had dinner at the Coach House near Washington Square upstairs in a private room. It was a relaxed mood. We exchanged stories and discussed the issues of the day. He neither confirmed or denied that he was Deep Throat but we went round and round about how important it was for him to tell his story of why he provided information to Woodward and Bernstein. We argued that the Watergate story had to be put into perspective. His experience, his reasons , his fear of the consequences of Watergate would vindicate any criticism. “It was a long dinner we had a rich, deep French burgundy with duck and we moved back and forth , always coming back to the Watergate, trying to get him to describe how he had met with Woodward. He would not take the bait , pushing it away gently and sliding around the issue, but never urging us to stop the questioning. We could sense him evaluating the problem of coming out from deep cover. He promised to consider our proposal to work with him on a first person article for ESQUIRE.”
I met with him again and he agonized about the publicity. I would have been surprised if he had cooperated. He finally called to say he could not agree to do the story. His colleagues and friends would not understand, he said.
Memorial Service At the memorial service, friends said Lichenstein had not been ill and had thought he was undergoing a minor routine procedure involving a heart stent when he died. He had declined a ride to the hospital from friends and went by cab. He had not put his papers or estate in order. If he was intending to leave a statement about being Deep Throat, as his former CIA friend Herbert Meyer believes he would have done had he been Deep Throat, he apparently did not feel it was an urgent matter. Meyer is an advocate of Deep Throat as a composite and believes it likely that Lichenstein may have been one of number of people who gave the Post reporters guidance and did not want to be identified. Myers says he was misquoted several times by Woodward in Veil. Garment volunteers he was the heretofore unidentified “senior presidential aide” who had called President Nixon “a felon” in his Old Executive Office Building office as reported by Woodward in All the President’s Men. This “senior presidential aide” was not Deep Throat according to the book, but another anonymous source. Garment’s point is that there were many anonymous sources. And Woodward and Bernstein refer to a number of confidential sources in the papers they are not turning over to the University of Texas immediately.
In her eulogy, Ambassador Kirkpatrick lauded Lichenstein as a great patriot and former NBC and PBS President Larry Grossman praised him. Speakers repeatedly recalled how he liked to help young men learn about Washington and move forward in their jobs, which among other things is what Deep Throat had done for reporters Woodward and Bernstein. His fondness for good wine and stories was frequently mentioned.
His service at the UN was recalled. There, as the New York Times reported it, he had had a brief 15 minutes of fame. In September 1983, as the chief alternate U.N. delegate for the United States, he made his most memorable remarks -- stemming from a complicated political and diplomatic confrontation that had been brewing for weeks.
The Soviets had shot down a Korean Air Lines jet that strayed into its airspace, killing all 269 passengers. The governors of New York and New Jersey had refused to allow Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's plane to land at their civilian airports, only at a military airport. That prompted a Soviet diplomat to ask whether the United States was the most suitable location for the United Nations.
Ambassador. Lichenstein replied that those who did not feel welcome could leave. "We will put no impediment in your way," he said. The members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations "will be down at dockside waving you a fond farewell as you sail into the sunset," he said. ( Of course, they would not have been sailing into the sunset.)
Lichenstein noting the US offer to land at a military airfield said, "I wish to assure you we won't even shoot it down if it strays from its designated path."
Many Democrats called for Lichenstein's resignation, but President Ronald Reagan cheered. He said the delegate had "the hearty approval of most people in America."
The American mission issued a news release dissociating itself from the remark, but Lichenstein told the Associated Press on March 2, l984, he never regretted it. The AP reported that he went on to say that the United Nations “does not take itself seriously and the U.N. is constantly shooting itself in both feet and in its head and that it fails to perform very seriously.”
"I received thousands of letters," he told The Washington Post. "People stopped me on the streets of New York; they honked their horns and shouted, 'Right on!' Practically every cop in Manhattan South gave me the high sign."
Unconventional Journalistic Source Lichenstein was not a conventional diplomat. Nor was Deep Throat “a conventional journalistic source” according to former Nixon White House counsel Garment in his 2000 book, In Search of Deep Throat. The 280-page book profiles Deep Throat and analyzes a number of possible candidates.
“ Only occasionally did (Deep Throat) supply the reporters with new facts. Instead, he gave them confirmation, usually cryptic, of information they had gathered elsewhere,” Garment wrote. “More important, Deep Throat provided Woodward and Bernstein with a general ‘perspective’ to use his word, on the disparate pieces of information that the two journalists were uncovering. He was the reporters’ guide through the confusion of Watergate.
“This general guidance was more important to the reporters than any specific fact that Deep Throat could have provided. During most of the period in which Deep Throat spoke to Woodward, the Watergate scandal was still being successfully covered up. The things that the reporters were being told by their other sources seemed not only unfamiliar but actually bizarre, difficult to fit into any familiar notions of how politics worked. In addition much of this information consisted of accusations—accompanied by scant evidence or no evidence at all—against very powerful political figures,” Garment wrote.
“The reporters needed added confidence to write their stories and to persuade their editors to print them. Deep Throat, because of his acumen and 'insider’ status, provided this confidence.”
Garment went on to say that “Deep Throat, as presented in All the President’s Men, was a vivid and dramatic character. He was the perfect protagonist in a book filled with villains—an insider who dared to do dangerous things, a man mysteriously yet concretely present at times and places of his own designation.
“The descriptions of Deep Throat in All the President’s Men were usually ambiguous on the questions of his identity and motivation. Deep Throat could have been moved by a desire to unmask political evil and destroy the Nixon presidency in the process. On the other hand, he could have been trying to save Nixon, by forcing him to take action, rather than scheming to destroy him. That was the lesson that Woodward and Bernstein took from Deep Throat’s repeated insistence, ‘ I have to do this my way.’”
Garment also wrote. Later, “I asked (Bob Woodward) why Deep Throat, after all these years, would not be willing or even eager to have his identity known. After all, large portions of the politically sentient populace considered him a hero for the risks he had taken…Woodward answered that, in l972 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. “
This description, of course, fits Lichenstein.
More significantly, when I approached Garment in November 2002, unknown to me, I was not the first person to strongly propose Lichenstein as a Deep Throat candidate to him. In 2000, shortly after publication of his book, Garment received a letter from a man who said his wife had been Lichenstein’s colleague at PBS and they thought he was Deep Throat.
Garment called Lichenstein, whom he had known at the Nixon White House. On Jan. 29, 2001, they went to lunch. Garment asked him if he was Deep Throat. “He declined to confirm it,’ Garment said. “He was laughing and cheerful, and said, no. It was different from the others when they were asked. They were quite upset. Some threatened lawsuits.”
“I wish I had pursued it, Garment says, “now that I know about Lichenstein’s sense of privacy and the complexity of his decision. He seems like a better candidate.” Garment turned his folder on Lichenstein over to me and wished me luck. The notes helped me flesh out Lichenstein’s resume, the surprisingly little media notice about him over the years except in The Washington Post and put me in contact with two friends who believed he was Deep Throat. There was also a provocative letter from Lichenstein to Garment.
Low Profile Deep Throat The day after their January, 2001 lunch, Lichenstein wrote Garment. He referred to their discussion of a theory raised by former Post reporter James Mann in an Atlantic Monthly article in l992 on the 20th anniversary of Watergate. Mann, who said he remembered Woodward talking about a “friend at the FBI,” raised the possibility that Deep Throat was an FBI source or sources trying to protect the FBI from criticism and White House interference in the Watergate burglary investigation. Lichenstein, on Heritage Foundation letterhead, wrote that Mann’s “take on the matter is both businesslike and thought-provoking. The more I think about it…the stronger becomes his case for a relatively low-profile DT. Speculation always has centered on this or that Biggies, or kind of Biggie, or Biggie wannabe—natural but likely misleading,” Lichenstein wrote. Of course, Lichenstein, himself, would be a low profile Deep Throat. He went on, “Especially with respect to the trade craft (subterranean parking garages, circled page numbers in The NYT) and motivation (to defend the FBI against all enemies), Mann’s case is compelling… although I strongly believe that (former FBI Director) Pat Gray, after just a couple of false starts and a very few days, did not at all impede but rather pursued the investigation hard, the in-house suspicion was palpable during my frequent visits to his chambers at DOJ. His confidences to me, and his most searching questions, invariably took place one-on-one—not even Kinley and the other personal aides present. And, although the agents were unfailingly respectful to me, they were not forthcoming. They were ‘us’ and I was one of ‘them.’’’
The end of Lichenstein’s January, 2001 letter to Garment has a teasing quality. He writes:
“The ‘FBI sources(s)’ moreover would help account for the possibility that DT was indeed multiple sources—not always the exact same agent or assistant or een(sic) deputy director.
“I’m not yet prepared to vote. But, so far, this new (for me) candidate is appealing.
“Let’s by all means continue the dialogue.’ Lichenstein concluded.
Garment did not meet with Lichenstein again nor did the dialogue continue.
“His Pontificating Eminence” In the early 80s when Lichenstein told me he was Deep Throat he said he had been a White House liaison to the FBI during Watergate and that Patrick Gray was a close friend. Amb. Kirkpatrick and other colleagues said he had been a longtime friend of Gray’s.
In addition to this description in the letter to Garment of his inside track to FBI sources, there are more compelling letters and memos in Lichenstein’s personal files putting him in the middle of the Watergate investigation. These papers—with Gray’s handwritten notes— indicate he was advising Gray within weeks of the June 17 burglary on a controversial deposition from a key assistant to treasurer Jeb Magruder at the Committee to Re-elect the President. It was background information about this specific issue that Deep Throat gave to Woodward to help The Post reveal that the Committee’s money had been used to finance the burglary and other attempts to discredit Democrats. And, most importantly, the information that the money was controlled by high administration officials. This was the major help that Deep Throat gave The Post and is the central story of the movie All the President’s Men.
The close relationship to Gray, who did not answer requests to be interviewed about Lichenstein, was revealed in humorous handwritten notes from Gray on FBI stationary in Lichenstein’s files. One dated Sept. l, l972, from “His Pontificating Eminence” (Gray) to “The Honorable CML thanks Lichenstein for help in editing a speech:
“As usual your grasp of the levers of power is ever sure and certain too! Before you had the opportunity to remove some of the hard-line in the text. I did a wee bit of excising. Combine yours and mine and we now have the patient running fast around left end to avoid the scalpel! Oh well, t’is done..and it reads rather well..what it says is another matter. Regardless, I appreciate and value highly your very kind assistance. HPE alias G…”
This is another proof of Lichenstein’s access to the FBI through Gray, And that with his White House employment and his longtime friendship—since l960—with Rosemary Woods gave him access to everything Deep Throat told Woodward in “All the President’s Men.” No other Deep Throat candidate has been suggested who had complete access to the information given Woodward.
A Convinced Professor Dr. Carl E. Nash, retired Director of Strategic Planning and Evaluation at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and an adjunct professor at George Washington University, was a neighbor of Lichenstein since the l970s. His former wife worked with Lichenstein and they became friends.
Nash and a colleague, the late Larry Jenney, who had been in the CIA with Lichenstein, were convinced that Lichenstein was Deep Throat, Nash says. They believed that he not only had the access, but he had the academic and undercover skills. They asked him if he was Deep Throat and told him their reasons. They discussed it a number of times over the years, Nash says, and “Chuck would laugh and unconvincingly say it wasn’t him. We would ask when he was going to write a book about being Deep Throat.”
It was Nash who wrote Garment after the publication of his book to say that Lichenstein was Deep Throat.
“It had to be him. He was a faceless man,” Nash explains. “Everyone knew him, but no one paid attention to him. He was a small, sandy man, you wouldn’t notice. But although he was a Republican loyalist, he was deeply moral. He was an innocuous man. No one would ever suspect him of anything. He was a night owl. I can easily imagine him meeting in garages in the dead of night.
“He was unremarkable looking. He walked everywhere and got around without notice. The people who lived across the street from him for years—people I know—didn’t even know he was there. He was phantom-like.”
Nash was and is so convinced that a week after Lichenstein’s funeral in September, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post about Lichenstein’s “critical and heroic role in American history.
Unacknowledged Letter “Chuck lived alone in a modest Capitol Hill home,” he wrote the Post. He did not own a car, and commuted to work on foot. He would venture out late at night without raising anyone’s suspicion. He was from Yale and knew Bob Woodward from that connection. He worked as a Central Intelligence Agency trainer. As a result, he knew how to communicate and act surreptitiously.
“He was a deeply principled conservative who was well known and trusted within the Nixon White House. He was thoughtful, had a wonderful sense of humor, and as little ego as any individual I have known. He was also deeply offended by the Watergate scandal and the activities of Nixon and his operatives to cover up that scandal.
“Although Chuck never actually exposed the Watergate operatives, he provided critical guidance to Bob Woodward in his attempts to report on Watergate. Woodward, in turn, protected his identity until the end.
“RIP, Deep Throat, and thank you.” Nash concluded his letter.
The letter was not printed, nor was it acknowledged. A few months later, Nash said, he met Woodward at a party and discussed Liechtenstein and Deep Throat. “He did not deny Liechtenstein was Deep Throat,” Nash said, “ but he said it was a much more complex situation.”
Another Believer Deanna Collingwood, Vice President of Government and Foundation Relations for PBS Station KERA in Dallas worked with Lichenstein at PBS during the late 70s and shared an office with him when they both left. “I had no proof, but I always thought he was Deep Throat. He was someone, who was always watching what was going on and he was very wise. He had a way of chatting up people.
“He liked helping people and he liked deep conversations. After the Esquire article appeared, I asked him if he was Deep Throat and he stuttered. It was the only time I ever heard him stutter. I felt that I was on the right trail, but I never asked again. He was a private person.
Dave Gergen In l976—the only time Lichenstein’s name was mentioned publicly as a possible Deep Throat— former Nixon speechwriter, and now journalist and Harvard professor David Gergen and several of his friends told Taylor Branch, who was writing a story for Esquire that Deep Throat was Lichenstein. They were trying to take the heat off Gergen, who had been fingered as Deep Throat by John Dean, Nixon’s former White House counsel.
Gergen told me that Lichenstein “was always mysterious to me. I was never clear as to what he did or whom he worked for. Whose payroll was he on? Was he in a position in the information flow?
“Always a shadowy guy, fascinating and smart. I can’t remember why I said he was Deep Throat 25 years ago. I can’t place why I thought that. But he kept strange hours, had all these peculiarities. And no one who was Deep Throat could have led a normal life.”’
In Esquire, Taylor Branch, who called Lichenstein “the bureaucrat”, wrote that he called Lichenstein on vacation in Scotland and told him “he could save Gergen from a big mistake by stepping forward.” Branch wrote:
“I would love to do that,” chuckled the Bureaucrat, “but I am not and never have been Deep Throat. It might have been nice, though I’ve never met Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. I was interviewed by one of their investigators for The Final Days. I was a source for that. And I tell you this: if I had known in l972 what I found out from Pat Gray later, I might have been some kind of Deep Throat. But I don’t think I’d have met Woodward in the dark. I would have just called my friends in the press and told them what I knew. I’m not Deep Throat, but I’d like to meet him.”
Lichenstein’s files reveal he was advising Gray on Watergate matters about the very information that Deep Throat give Woodward. He knew what Gray knew immediately in the summer of l972 within two weeks of the burglary..
There is additional evidence he did help Woodward and Bernstein with The Final Days. Among Lichenstein’s papers is a large manila envelope from Woodward and Bernstein hand delivered to him at the White House during the Ford administration with an outline of stories which had appeared in The Post and The New York Times from April 30, 1974 to August 10, when the President resigned.
It is not clear how Woodward and Bernstein would have located the anonymous Lichenstein, who had the lowest of profiles within the White House, much less outside, if one of them had not known him in another context. Searching for such links between Woodward and possible Deep Throat contenders led to the Deep Throat-Yale connection rumored in the press corps and the Watergate books over the years. Gergen and others Throat candidates also attended Yale.
It seems unlikely that Woodward and Bernstein worked through the White House telephone directory asking people they did not already know about the final days of the Nixon presidency or that Lichenstein would have agreed to help with The Final Days if he had not already known one of them. Lichenstein’s papers also a include a notebook of four speeches he wrote for Nixon and analytical outlines dated April 30, l974 putting a positive spin on the President’s actions in connection with the Watergate scandal and suggesting ways to explain the President’s actions as he turns over tapes to the House Judiciary committee. The premise of the outlines and speeches is that the President had no knowledge prior to March 21, l973 of any cover-up. The background memos decry “the shifting charges against the President.”
The speech notes say of Nixon: “A good and decent man who ended war, stopped city riots, opened the doors of peace, engendered domestic stability, and gained the respect of the world is now the victim of a massive partisan assault.
The Final Days Lichenstein is mentioned three times in The Final Days. The first time on page 347 on July 31, 1974, he is described as a member of a new team supervising the mobilization of an organized defense rebutting the articles of impeachment. He is identified as White House counsel Dean Burch’s deputy and other members of the defense team are Al Haig, Ron Ziegler, Patrick Buchanan, Ray Price, William Timmons, Fred Buzhardt, James St. Clair, and Burch, a number of whom over the years have denied being Deep Throat.
Lichenstein is mentioned in the book again on page 359 on August 1 when Buzhardt tells the defense group they could not read the transcripts of the President’s tapes, which were to be turned over to Judge Sirica.
The book reports, “Lichenstein thought that Buzhardt’s demeanor typified the lunacy of trying to conduct a defense from the darkness, and he was enraged. If the staff had only Buzhardt’s interpretation to rely on, they might all end up facing criminal charges. He was still quaking from Buzhardt’s misreading of all the other tapes, and of the edited transcripts. Buzhardt, he thought, read the same words but understood meanings that ordinary mortals did not. Burch shared his deputy’s apprehensions to some extent, but he did not share Lichenstein’s feelings of animosity. The mere mention of Buzhardt’s name could put the even-keeled Lichenstein in a state. “Literally crazy…insane…he apprehends a reality that is not the same as ours,” he said of the lawyer.”
In Woodward and Bernstein’s earlier book, All the President’s Men, they describe Deep Throat as both “emotional” and “frightened.”
By this time, Lichenstein/Deep Throat has known his plan to save Nixon by forcing the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman the previous April and exposing other White House staffers closer to the dirty tricks and cover-up is not working. He could have learned that the President was involved in the cover-up of the burglary from the beginning from Rosemary Woods in the fall of l973 when she was transcribing the damning tapes. It is all but certain that Lichenstein had not known of the President’s direct involvement in the cover-up when he began to help Woodward.
Although Ambassador Kirkpatrick and other Republican friends think Lichenstein was a hero if he was Deep Throat, Gergen said, “I am not sure everyone would agree.”
A case in point is Delores Jones Forward, Bob Finch’s secretary —Former Health Education and Labor Secretary and Presidential assistant Finch died in l995, She said that Chuck was “ such a loyal Republican from the beginning years with Nixon (1960) he couldn’t have done it.” She also said that Rosemary Woods has Alzheimer’s and is in a nursing home. Finch had denied that he was Deep Throat.
Two Post Stories A story in The Washington Post in March, l984 by James Conaway reports:
“Charles Lichenstein, the man who told the U.N. Where to Go. “Charles Lichenstein, 125 pounds of neo-conservatism in blue corduroy bedroom slippers, has left his post as alternate U.S. representative to the U. N. to be a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
“’The U.N. is an intricate charade,’ he says, padding around unpacked cartons in his Capitol Hill townhouse, hotbed of right-wing reverberations for lo these 35 years—since Lichenstein, now 57, first came to Washington. His political credits include editing a newspaper for the CIA, and assisting Richard Nixon in writing “Six Crises” but his televised invitation to anti-U.S. delegates made him famous. (The UN story).
The Post story goes on to report: “A bachelor, Lichenstein taught political science at Notre Dame until William Casey, now director of the CIA, recruited him for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign…. ”I am a Republican,” says Lichenstein, as close to fervor as an academic can reasonably get. “A conservative who feels a great affinity for what is now called neo-conservatism. It’s not so neo.” It stands, he says, for principled pragmatism. We’re not naïve or romantic about wholesale changes in the evolution of American institutions. We rely on the markets for a wide range of decisions.”
He helped Vice President Nixon run for president in l960. “If somebody wanted to know what Nixon thought about X,” he says, “I’d give them a briefing.” The Nixon Lichenstein knew was just another withdrawn scholar, he says. “He was very shy, very private. He preferred the solitude of the study and the companionship of his closest friends. The public persona is something he forced himself to develop.’ Nixon’s presidency was “most successful…but he made some key errors. He’s re-emerging from the isolation now. He will make a stronger contribution to American life. He is his own foundation.”
Post Story #2 Lichenstein did not surface again in The Post or elsewhere until thirteen years later in June, l997 when reporter George Lardner Jr. tracked him down for a brief quote at the end of a long Washington Post story about the release of Nixon tapes.
“’Nixon always believed that crisis somehow improves the man, that only through adversity does one learn his own quality,’ says former ambassador Charles M. Lichenstein, a former Nixon aide and chief ghostwriter for Nixon’s first book, “Six Crises.”
“’Personally, I think (Nixon) used that (theme) too hard,’ Lichenstein said in an interview. “’I think he was better off in his last years when he wasn’t fighting anybody anymore. The books he did on foreign policy, for instance, were written from a more relaxed posture and they flowed better.’”
John Dean John Dean, the former White House counsel who refused to take the blame for Watergate, doesn’t think Lichenstein is Deep Throat. He doesn’t believe he had access, despite his close friendships with Rosemary Woods to the information Woodward says he got from Deep Throat about the erased tape. Dean was the person who originally told Taylor Branch that Deep Throat was David Gergen and more recently accused a Washington lawyer of being Deep Throat in his recent book which ended with the lawyer’s denial and a threat to sue.
Dean also says that Deep Throat gave Woodward a lot of misleading information. He says he is going to get back on Deep Throat’s identity soon .
However, Lichenstein fulfills all but one of Dean’s criteria for Deep Throat at outlined in his book “Unmasking Deep Throat History’s Most Elusive Source.” It is dedicated to University of Illinois Journalism Professor William C. Gaines, whose students have been pursuing the story.
Dean’s Deep Throat criteria, distilled from All The President’s Men Include:
• Bachelor, or lived like one •Thinks and talks like a lawyer •Understood journalism •Worked at the Nixon White House •Not an investigator or co-conspirator •Didn’t like Woodward to call him at the office •Nervous, even jaw-quivery frightened about Watergate •Could not conceal his emotions •Capable of being rowdy, drinking too much (this is may have been true when Lichenstein was younger) •Smoked cigarettes, drank Scotch, knew much literature well. (An accolade from the head of the Heritage Foundation refers to CL smoking on the sidewalk in front of the building while he lectures interns.) •Heavy beard in dead of night (not sure) •Someone in the inner circle
None of his friends remember whether Lichenstein, had a heavy beard in dead of night.
Nay Sayers Former Nixon White House Communications Director Herb Klein believes Deep Throat is not one person, and not Lichenstein. ‘I don’t think it’s him. I don’t think he had the availability of information. I don’t think he would believe he could save the President by doing this.
“ He was a great loyalist. Too smart to think it would help. I don’t think he liked Haldeman and Ehrlichman and he would have liked to get rid of them, but this was a damaging way to get rid of them. Not that getting rid of them would not have been beneficial.
“I first met Chuck in l960. He was looked on as a brilliant speechwriter. In the ’60 and ’62 campaigns, he was part of a small group around Nixon. Sort of strange, great intellectual capacity, but never knew the inside. I cannot imagine that he knew enough to be Deep Throat.
Woodward & Bradlee Woodward describes Deep Throat this way in a recent interview on the Post Watergate website: “The source known as Deep Throat (a very unfortunate name given to the source by the managing editor of The Washington Post) provided a kind of road map through the scandal. His one consistent message was that the Watergate burglary was just the tip of the iceberg, part of a scheme and a series of illegal activities that amounted to a subversion of government. The interlocking nature of the crimes gave it weight and provided the context, and in fact one of the incentives for us to continue our investigations.”
Ben Bradlee, former Post editor, on the Post website says: “I think he (Deep Throat) had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.” He told the Yale Daily News that the newspaper would only reveal Deep Throat’s identity after his death and that the quality of American journalism is improving because “there are no drunks left in our business.”
The Watergate story has deeply affected American journalism A gaggle of talking heads on Fox in 2003 were gnashing about how it has ruined a generation of reporters looking for personal Deep Throats and wrong-doing in every institution as a ladder to success.
Pure Fiction Garment in his book said “Those who view Deep Throat as a pure fiction say that he was simply a gimmick, beginning to end, invented to make Woodward and Bernstein’s story more dramatic. Those who make the ‘composite’ version of the argument contend that Deep Throat was a combination of sources whom the authors blended into a one-man Greek chorus.” The chorus had to take the form of one man, in this view, because only a single voice would give the needed narrative structure and pace to the story of a news-gathering process that was otherwise fragmentary, desultory, and dull. like most good journalistic investigations.”
Alice Mayhew, editor of Dean’s first book, Blind Ambition, had also been Woodward and Bernstein’s’ editor in the preparation of All the President’s Men. Mayhew told Dean that she was the one who had invented the detective story structure for the reporters’ book according to Garment. Garment wrote that Mayhew also told Dean that she did not believe there was a single source for Deep Throat.
Never Knowing Jonathan Schell in The Time of Illusion sums up the impossibility of ever really knowing exactly what happened during the Watergate years. He writes: “The Nixon Administration was characterized by, among other things, fragmentation. What the Nixon men thought was unconnected to what they said. What they said was unconnected to what they did. What they did or said they were doing at one moment was unconnected to what they did or said they were doing the next moment…. In a democracy, people must know what is going on and know it immediately after it happens, if they are to make their judgments about where the country should be going and who should lead it there In the Nixon years, information about public affairs came in bits and scraps, often out of sequence and after long delays; and the coherence and meaning of the public record was lost. Later as the record of the administrations covert activates was made available, some of the gaps were filled in, but by then the parts that had been learned earlier were fading from memory, and people were left with a pile of shreds. It was as though they had been invited to listen to a large orchestral composition, but then had heard each of the instruments separately; one after another, and with long waits in between. They had heard interminable notes, played hour after hour, but they had never heard the composition.”
Schell goes on to explain the biggest Watergate mystery, why it had been impossible for Deep Throat or anyone to save President Nixon from himself.
“The conspirator who is a public official not only must know the facts, in order get on with the cover-up, while seeming not to know the facts, in order to escape indictment for misprision, but also must, in his public role as investigator, seem actively to seek the facts while secretly making sure he does not find them. When the sleuth and the criminal are united in one person, as they were in the person of the President during the Watergate cover-up, one is presented with the spectacle of a man following his own footsteps in circles while taking care never to discover where they lead.”
Why Nixon Did It Herb Klein explained it this way, “Nixon felt all along, if he stonewalled, he could get away with it in light of what Kennedy and LBJ had gotten away with. But he didn’t figure on the bloodthirsty press or the Democrats in Congress, Most of the press ignored the story in the beginning—just CBS and the Post and then when things started coming out, they were angry with Ziegler and Warren., (the press secretaries.)”
Garment explains: “. If (Nixon) rejected the route of confession and apology, there was some rationally based reason. Because there was no such rational consideration connected with the Watergate burglary itself, the reason must have involved things that went beyond the burglary. That reason now seems plain. Identifying all the people who would have to be identified in order to make an apology credible, and identifying the organizational and funding sources of the caper, would have made it possible for investigators to uncover a host of additional sleazy activities. There were the FBI wiretaps, those under a thin-cove of national security, and those that were clearly and uncomfortably naked. There were the wiretaps that the FBI had been unwilling to carry out, and for which the White House had found it necessary to engage other operators. There were the campaign finance illegalities in which Liddy and considerably more prominent others had participated. There were the spying and dirty tricks carried out under the direction of the White House proper, not merely by some campaign organization with a degree of deniability.
“There were the illegalities connected with the Watergate operation itself. There was the cover-up that had already began, involving the movement of impossible –to- explain hush money, not to mention (Republican operative) Tony Ulasewicz, who had so many cover-up calls to make from pay phones that he took to wearing an old-fashioned bus conductor’s coin belt. There was the random and mindless illegality, like the backdating for tax purposes, of the deed by which Nixon gave his papers to the Library of Congress.
“Thus the arrests at the Watergate would end by revealing everything. Nixon took the arguably rational course when he decided that instead of confessing to a part of the operations and seeing the rest exposed, one by one, he would attempt to paper over the entire mess.”
In Closing Lichenstein, now in the great think tank in the sky, can never be grilled on 24-hour-television news, be forced to listen to recriminations from conservative Republican colleagues and friends, asked to explain the Watergate scandal in a 30 second sound bite or be feted by most as a national hero.
And perhaps to avoid all of that, he—an intensely private man — never stepped forward publicly as Deep Throat.
-30- Additional Information Lichenstein’s CV Lichenstein began his career in the CIA from ’52 to ’56 where he edited a newspaper and directed special projects in the office of training. He returned to Yale where he taught from ’57-58. He taught at Notre Dame for a year and then went to work with Nixon’s campaigns from l959 to l963 He was close friends of Rosemary Woods and all the original California Nixon mafia.
In l963 he was recruited by William Casey (later CIA head) to work on the Goldwater campaign and was director of research for the Goldwater Campaign and the Republican National Committee from l963 to 1965.
From l965 to 1968 he was founder of the Free Society Association in Washington, D. C.
From l969-71 he was special asst. to Robert Finch both at HEW and when Finch become a counselor to President Nixon. Lichenstein then was special assistant. and administrative assistant to Chairman Dean Burch at the FCC from l971 to l974. In 1974 he became special assistant to President Nixon and stayed on as a special assistant to Ford. From ’75 to ’79 he was vice president of PBS in Washington and then became a consultant to AEI for Public Policy Research, the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and the National Strategy Information Center.
Then it was onto the UN and after that the Heritage Foundation.
Other interesting Sidelights
1. Spy Tradecraft Referring to what Lichenstein had called “tradecraft”, in his book Garment had questioned the method of communication between Deep Throat and Woodward. “When Deep Throat wanted to meet with Woodward, Woodward had only to pick up his morning New York Times (delivered to his apartment building by 7:00A.M.) and turn to page 20, where Deep Throat would have drawn a clock face with hands pointing to the time of the proposed meeting.
“Woodward said in (his) book that he did not know how Deep Throat managed the logistics of this tortured mode of communication via the New York Times. For reasons unknown, the investigative reporter seems never to have asked,’ writes Garment.
(A recent observer said the communication might easily be explained by Deep Throat marking his personal copy of the Times and then strolling into Woodward’s apartment house and trading Woodward’s copy for his.)
2..On page 40 in The Final Days on August 5, when the defense team is told of the cover-up tape, the smoking gun and that the game is over, Ken Clawson said to Lichenstein, “Unfortunately, there isn’t a market for right-wing journalists.”
3. The CIA Connection In the 1976 Esquire article, Taylor Branch had not wanted Lichenstein to be Deep Throat. “His employment record had the feel of a CIA man, which bothered me. I wanted to think of Deep Throat as a tortured good guy instead of some manipulator. A CIA man would scramble the case even more.”
It has not been possible to find out what if any ties Lichenstein, who worked for the CIA from l952 to 1956, maintained with the agency. William Casey, later head of the CIA, recruited Lichenstein to work on the l964 Goldwater campaign and the men remained good friends until Casey’s death in l987. Two CIA veterans—both top officials—Clair George and Herbert Meyer, a longtime friend of Lichenstein’s, assured me immediately that he had not been on the CIA payroll during the Nixon years.
4. Gerald Warren, former Nixon deputy press secretary, who had been one of several Deep Throat candidates spotlighted by the University of Illinois journalism students, denied it on September 30. 2003. “Nobody who dealt with the press could possibly be Deep Throat. …they could not be able to defend the president publicly knowing what Deep Throat knew,” he said.
He went on to say in his denial that Deep Throat was not just one person but a composite, a number of different sources giving Woodward and Bernstein bits and pieces of information.”
He said recently he did not believe that Lichenstein had been Deep Throat. “ I didn’t see him in the loop. But if he had the information from Pat Gray and he was Deep Throat, he would have revealed himself after Nixon’s death as Deep Throat. He wanted to be a big guy.”
5. The Weekly Standard Longtime Liechtenstein friend, Claudia Winkler described him in a post funeral tribute column in The Weekly Standard: “He was an animated, learned, and tireless talker about history, literature, music and wine as well as politics and world affairs. Always, though, he looked back with relish on his UN years—historic years when the Cold War was being won partly by the clarity and tenacity of people like him.”
6. In the mid l970s, in a promo for the movie All the President’s Men with Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, Woodward said, “The identity of Deep Throat will come out someday. I am surprised it hasn’t come out already. I think mostly it is clear from the book and I hope form the movie that he was somebody who was conscience-stricken, somebody who crossed lines that somebody in that sort of responsible position doesn’t cross but crossed them for the best of reasons.”
7.Garment in his book had this to say, ‘”Deep Throat’s most important act was to blow the whistle not on particular crimes, but on the rising tide of a repugnant style of politics. Somehow, this act brought about the opposite of what he intended. For this reason, too, Deep Throat’s identity and the circumstances surrounding his actions have remained a matter of perennial interest.”
8. On a 2003 talk show, on which Woodward appeared, there was a discussion of revealing Deep Throat in a new edition of John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” which Caroline Kennedy was putting together.
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