Who Cares Who Deep Throat Was?

So Pat Buchanan, who certainly has more serious transgressions to answer for than alleged disloyalty to his past employer, is the latest suspect, according to the execrable Joshua Micah Marshall. Marshall is atwitter because, mirabile dictu, Buchanan won’t confirm or deny! Um, Josh, Stanley Kutler in Slate supplies a slightly more persuasive explanation. And as Jane Galt points out,

if Buchanan were really concerned about alienating his peeps in the GOP, he’d be more worried about, oh, say, his running for national office on a third party ticket and thus siphoning off some of the party’s base during a tight election year than he would about admitting he blew the whistle in a 30 year old political scandal.

Something about Deep Throat — secret meetings! scribbled times on newspapers! wrestling matches in underground parking garages! — inflames the imagination of every journalist. My friend Mark Riebling, who’s really more a historian, joined the fray by nominating, in his generally excellent book Wedge, ex-spooks William Colby and Cord Meyer, but he admits he’s no longer convinced, and really he wasn’t very convincing even when he wrote it eight years ago.

Edward Jay Epstein, on the other hand, argues that there was no Deep Throat. Throat’s revelations were attributed in the original Washington Post stories to multiple sources, which Woodstein bundled up and dramatized for All the President’s Men. Epstein’s theory is no fun at all. Its only merit is that it’s obviously true.