Naming Deep Throat

Mark Felt confirmed it himself in Vanity Fair on May 31, 2005.
The first man to name him in print was Jack Limpert, the longtime editor of the Washingtonian, who died in 2024 at 90. In the June 1974 issue, a month after All the President’s Men disclosed that a secret source existed, Limpert ran a (“Capital Comment”) item guessing that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt (1913-2008), the former number-two man at the FBI. He followed it with a July 1974 piece called (“Deeper Into Deep Throat”), where he described calling Felt and getting the cool brush-off: “I can tell you that it was not I and it is not I.” Limpert later said his tip came from Frank Waldrop, a former Washington editor wired into the Bureau. The Washingtonian claims, with good reason, to be the first publication in the country to finger Felt.
A Wall Street Journal story that same summer of 1974 also put Felt’s name into the guessing game, and Felt denied it to them too, saying he was not and never had been Deep Throat. Limpert’s June item beat the Journal by about a month.
After that the name went quiet for years. Two people kept it alive. Nora Ephron (1941-2012), once married to Carl Bernstein (b. 1944), worked out on her own that Felt fit and told people so for decades. She said in a 1993 interview that she had always thought it was Felt. And James Mann, who had worked alongside Bob Woodward (b. 1943) at the Post, published a 1992 Atlantic Monthly article, (“Deep Throat: An Institutional Analysis”), that argued the source had to come from inside the FBI and pointed hard at Felt without nailing him by name in the way Limpert had.
The episode that pushed Felt’s name back into wide circulation came in 1999. Chase Culeman-Beckman, then 19, went public with a claim that at a Long Island day camp in 1988, when he was eight, Carl Bernstein’s son Jacob had told him Deep Throat was Mark Felt. He wrote it up for a high school history paper, got a mediocre grade, and the story moved on the Associated Press and MSNBC. Bernstein laughed it off and said his son was only parroting Ephron’s guesswork. Felt, then 86, denied it again, with the odd line that he would have done a better job and brought the White House down faster. Slate’s Timothy Noah chased the thread that summer and came away convinced Felt was the man.