I've Got You, Bob

Ann reminds us that the Deep Throat story was long ago demolished:

The fictional Deep Throat knew things [Mark] Felt could not possibly have known, such as the 18 1/2-minute gap on one of the White House tapes. Only six people knew about the gap when Woodward reported it. All of them worked at the White House. Felt not only didn't work at the White House, but when the story broke, he also didn't even work at the FBI anymore.

Deep Throat was a smoker and heavy drinker, neither of which describes Mark Felt.

Woodward claimed he signaled Deep Throat by moving a red flag in a flowerpot to the back of his balcony and that Deep Throat signaled him by drawing the hands of a clock in Woodward's New York Times.

But in his 1993 book, Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Adrian Havill did something it had occurred to no one else to do: He looked at Woodward's old apartment!

Havill found that Woodward had a sixth-floor interior apartment that could not be seen from the street. Even from the back of the apartment complex, the balcony was too high for any flowerpot to be seen. So unless there was a second flowerpot visible from a nearby grassy knoll, the red flag in the flowerpot story is ... well, full of red flags.

In addition, newspapers were not delivered door-to-door in Woodward's apartment building but were left in a stack in the lobby. Deep Throat could not have known which newspaper Woodward would pick up.

Thus Mark Felt's daughter is probably making stuff up for--what she hopes will be--financial gain:

Felt's free-love, flower-girl daughter was estranged from her father for decades on account of her rejection of conventional bourgeois institutions such as marriage. Now she is broke—because of her rejection of conventional bourgeois institutions such as marriage. (Too bad she didn't follow Pop's advice to "follow the money.")

She lives in a house bought for her by her father ...and said she decided to reveal her father as Deep Throat to try to make some more money. "I'm still a single mom," she explained, "I am not ashamed of this."

Now, the question ought to be, why is Woodward playing along.