Graydon Carter:
Well, it was a great scoop for us, but it was also a sort of display of how we played a very long game. It had started two years earlier when I’d gotten a call from a lawyer who said he represented a man called Mark Felt, who I’d never heard of before, and said that he was Deep Throat.
And we talked for a while, and I thought, we will follow up on it, because I used to take any phone call that came in just in case there was a lead onto something. And I signed one of my editors to the story, David Friend, and he worked with the lawyer off and on for two years on this, finding out about Mark Felt, trying to verify that he was, in fact, Deep Throat.
And we had issues because he was suffering from creeping dementia at the time, so it wasn’t 100 percent solid. And then I got married and went on my honeymoon item, and was waiting at the Nassau Airport to come back to New York. And I got a call from David Friend on my wife’s cell phone because I didn’t have one at the time, and saying that we would release the story that morning, and they were waiting for confirmation from Woodward and Bernstein.
And, finally, just before we got on the plane, they confirmed that Mark Felt was Deep Throat. It was a huge hit for us, and it went around the world. It was on every newspaper everywhere, and it was one of journalism’s last great secrets.
