Deep Throat
Political Mystery
Of Our Time
Leonard Garment
(Basic)
Starting in 1972, and with inexorable and agonizing pacing, a sitting president of the United States was revealed to be a scamp. It took endless newspaper revelations, television stories, books, and a series of Senate and House hearings to connect Richard Nixon with illegal activities that occurred under his watch. Associates, with his knowledge and compliance, participated in a series of burglaries, bribes, cover-ups and other scandalous acts that would have done credit to a banana republic.
He was thus in the middle of what is now commonly referred to as "Watergate" and for some lunatic reason, years after the fact, has become obsessed with the identity of one Deep Throat, the man who essentially served as the spy within the Nixon government to help it fall apart. He met many times (in a seedy bar, in a parking garage) with Bob Woodward, one of the two reporters at the Washington Post in charge of investigating the Watergate.
In Search is Garment's attempt to pin down exactly who is (or was) Deep Throat. The very name, Deep Throat, is a fine and ironic one. Linda Lovelace was the star in a blue movie of the same title, famous for her ability to accomplish penetrating acts of laryngectomy to satisfy her needy clients. To name a mysterious Republican mole Deep Throat says much about the character of politics in those days. (Indeed, some enterprising graduate student might well do a study of how Washington politics merge so easily with pornography. During Senate hearings over the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, another well-endowed star with the sobriquet of "Long Dong Silver" became the subject of heated discussion. Anita Hill claimed that Judge Thomas was intent on showing her films in which Dong --- or, better, Silver --- was the star. His name and extraordinary abilities gave a certain piquant air to the hearings, especially as several possibly more innocent Senators insisted on mis-naming him "Long John Silver," thus confusing piracy with pornographia.)
Given the structure of this book, if Garment is still practicing law, god help his hapless clients. This document stretches on (and on) for some 270 pages and is chockablock full of repetitions, backtracking, noisy personal asides, wheezy theories on the nature of politics --- all excess verbiage of the highest order.
Early on, we are told who the main suspect is: a lawyer and Nixon supporter by the name of John Sears. Thus the potential novelistic adventure of being with the author as he solves the mystery is short-circuited. Since Woodward and Bernstein have said that they will reveal the name of DT when he expires, it's becomes rather anticlimactic even before it begins. Like the lawyer he is, Garment is fond of backtracking over the same evidence again and again, which makes the reading less of an adventure in truth and more of a trial for the long-suffering reviewer.
To say it is an exercise in trivia is an understatement, especially when we learn at one point that the author was in serious correspondence with a Chase Culeman-Beckman, age eighteen, who presumably had hot inside information gleaned from the fact that he was at summer camp with Carl Bernstein's son --- and had learned the identity of DT through him.
This book reaches its nadir when Garment chooses to compare this obsession of his to Jewish scholars who study the Talmud intensively, those who "read and re-read the exceedingly small print until they solved the textual riddle --- because they had to." Comparing one of the characters of a now not-to-important political scandal from a quarter-century ago to the Talmud might well be wretched excess.
There are a few --- a very few --- bright spots in this ramble, some having to do with the collection of film noir-like characters who were involved in the caper. There's Ulasewicz and his bus-driver change belt. There's Martha Mitchell who suffered from the screaming-meemies, and husband John who opined in a telephone call with Woodward that Kay Graham, owner of the Washington Post, was going to "get her tit caught in a wringer" if the paper didn't lay off.
We learn that Ron Zeigler, Nixon's Press Secretary, came to his high office after working at Disneyland, and
not only could he repeat verbatim the jungle tour spiel he had given when he was a guide at Disneyland but could deliver it backwards.
Perhaps most interesting of all is the character of Garment himself. (He tells us that "has spent too much time on a psychiatrist's couch" to try to analyze the motives of other characters.) He spends much time studying the main source of Watergate Talmudic wisdom here --- Woodward & Bernstein's All The President's Men --- to such a point that one of his two copies, carefully marked in ink, falls in the bathtub, so his ink notes become "before" and "after."
He is a lover of jazz, still, at age seventy or so, likes to play it, and quotes to good purpose that famous "political analyst Fats Waller" who would surmise that many of the candidates for Deep Throat didn't fit because "their feets too big."
That's why the Deep Throat secret has remained intact for more than a quarter century.
He also points out, correctly, that the sheer pleasure of what he calls his "hobby horse," the whole weird tangle, and why it still has a hold on us:
For those who had lived through the crisis of Watergate, the opportunity to revisit the scene of so much political excitement and human mystery was irresistible. The Nixon years, after all, were not merely disruptive; they were also among the most absorbing in living memory. Of the people I asked to talk with me, the losers as well as the winners, it is a safe bet that not many had had so much political fun in their lives before Watergate or since.