In 1999, Timothy Noah, writing for Slate as Chatterbox, marked the 25th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation by calling Mark Felt to ask if he was, in fact, Deep Throat, the secret source for Woodward and Bernstein. Of course, as of now, we know that Felt has admitted to being Deep Throat. However, in ’99, Felt was still denying it.

There’s been some speculation that Felt, who most agree is suffering from the effects of age and is no longer completely in his right mind, has been forced into this admission by his family, who hoped to profit from the publicity. In that context, I found it sort of interesting to read about Noah’s attempt to contact Felt in ’99:

Earlier today, when Chatterbox first attempted to phone Felt (now an octogenarian living in California with his daughter Joan), he got an answering machine. "If you'd like to leave a message for Joan, Rob, Nick, or Deep Throat," it said, "you may do so after the beep." Naturally, Chatterbox got a little excited when he heard this. But when Chatterbox phoned back a little later, Joan Felt said it was a gag message that she had put on her phone last night after having a bottle of wine with some friends, and that this morning she'd thought better of it and taken it off.

It’s hard not to speculate that there’s been friction in the family for years about Felt’s identity, when to make it public, and what the payoff might be. The idea of Felt’s daughter getting drunk and outing him on their answering machine certainly is uncomfortable. Not considering his actions during Watergate one way or the other, I can’t help but feel bad for him, given the appearance of his present living conditions.

Of course, over the past 30 years, there’s been a lot of speculation about the identity of Deep Throat, and I think it’s interesting to look back and consider some of the guesses and the certainty (or lack thereof) with which they were made:

John Dean, the infamous Whitehouse Rat, had a number of ideas about the identity of Deep Throat. He insisted in ’75 that it was prosecutor Earl J. Silbert, then in ’85 he was sure that Alexander Haig was Deep Throat. In 2002, Dean took another convoluted stab at the subject, and was wrong again. It’s unfortunate for Dean that Felt revealed his identity late last month. Had it remained secret, Dean might have eventually made the correct guess.

Adrian Havill, who wrote a book on Woodward and Bernstein, thought that Deep Throat was George H.W. Bush. Well,he said he thought so anyway. I'd wager, however, that he simply liked the idea of accusing the former President.

Stephen Ambrose, Eric Burns, and Edward Jay Epstein all thought that Deep Throat was a composite; no real single person at all. Their arguments seemed pretty persuasive, too.

Leave it to the academics to come up with confident, bold, and spurious assertions about… well, anything, really…. and Deep Throat in specific. "Deep Throat was Pat Buchanan!" "Deep Throat was Fred Fielding!" Deep Throat was Carl Rove! Well, OK, they never came up with that last one, but given time, they might have.

Polling public opinion wasn’t really the best way to find the suspect, either. In a poll released earlier this year, Editor and Publisher readers came sorta close to the mark on the identity of Deep Throat. Mark Felt was close to the top of the list of suspects… he came in second, in fact. The poll showed that most E&P readers thought that Deep Throat was Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Timothy Noah, who seemed to be convinced all along that Felt was Deep Throat, never bought the Rehnquist idea for a second.

In June of 2002, CNN.com published a piece about Deep Throat, and invited their readers to guess between a number of possible candidates in an informal poll. I looked at the results of the poll, and saw that while Mark Felt was included among those named, he wasn’t the number one suspect in the minds of most CNN readers: