EDITOR'S LETTER

Mr. Felt Goes to Washington

FOR DETAILS, SEE CREDITS PAGE

On the morning of the last day of my honeymoon in late May, a fax arrived from my assistant reminding me that I we were releasing the "Wig" story to the press that day. This was news that snapped me back into reality. "Wig" was the Vanity Fair code name for an article we had been working on for the better part of two years, a piece which would reveal the identity of "Deep Throat," the confidential source in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book All the President's Men.

Although it gave the answer to one of the great unsolved mysteries in contemporary American history, there were any number of reasons to fret over the release of this story. In a climate where journalists virtually club one another to death over a typo, this was a big one to get wrong. Screwing up on this scale would have meant it would be a long flight back to New York. And although we were confident of our story—in which we named Mark Felt, the number-two man at the F.B.I. during the Nixon administration, as Deep Throat—we couldn't be 100 percent sure. Complete certainty, as I said last month, would have required calls to Woodward and Bernstein, who then could have broken the story themselves. Or they could have been noncommittal, as they had been for the past three decades. My major fear was that there was no single Deep Throat—that he was a literary composite dreamed up by Alice Mayhew, the revered editor at Simon & Schuster who oversaw the writing of All the President's Men. I worried that if we got it wrong I would become a pariah in my profession, I'd lose my job and all my friends, my hair would fall out, my children would stop speaking to me, and I would die lonely and alone.

At 9:30 that morning, as David Friend, the editor of the story, and I had agreed, he placed calls to Woodward and Bernstein, telling them that we were e-mailing them advance copies of a story that might interest them. "Great," Woodward said. "Send it over." An hour later, Beth Kseniak, Vanity Fair's, director of public relations, began releasing the story to the rest of the world. The networks, it so happened, were covering a Bush press conference at the time. But ABC got back to Kseniak immediately, and soon Charlie Gibson was breaking the news over the air and conducting a phone interview with the article's author, John D. O'Connor. By mid-afternoon Kseniak would receive hundreds of phone calls, e-mails, and voice-mail messages from press organizations.

As the revelations rolled out, it became the story around the world. But as my wife and I headed to the airport for the trip back to New York, I still did not have the confirmation I was looking for from Woodward, Bernstein, or The Washington Post. We were in the departure lounge waiting to board our flight and were following the news by cell-phone contact when Friend got on the line to say that the Post was going to make an official announcement in seven minutes. At the end of them, Friend called back to say that the paper had just confirmed on its Web site that Mark Felt was indeed Deep Throat.

Woodward, Bernstein, and their former boss, Ben Bradlee, had kept their source's identity secret for 33 years. Which is supremely admirable. But, believe me, keeping a secret at the Post for that long is equal to keeping one here, in the Conde Nast Building, for about 33 minutes. Once the story broke, what most amazed staff members, colleagues, and friends was the fact that details of the article had not gotten out in the two years we worked on it. This was a matter of some pride around the office. In the beginning, only Friend, our legal affairs editor, Robert Walsh, and I knew Deep Throat's identity. (We had signed non-disclosure agreements in case the Felt family later decided not to come forward with their revelation.) As the story began going through its numerous edits, the circle expanded to Kseniak, copy editor Peter Devine, deputy research editor Mary Flynn, design director David Harris, managing editor Chris Garrett, and associate managing editor Ellen Kiell. Meanwhile, Gasper Tringale was given the assignment to photograph Felt. The stipulations: he couldn't take an assistant, and he couldn't tell anybody whom he was shooting, not even his wife—an unusual situation, given that he is married to Susan White, Vanity Fair's photography director.

In the end, a total of 23 people were in on the story—19 of whom are pictured above. We typeset the article and laid it out in a separate part of our production department's computer server. The cover line "Exposed! Watergate's 'Deep Throat'" was itself a secret until we were all but on press. The words "That Car Door Slams Shut!" served as a substitute on the myriad cover proofs because the phrase had roughly the same number of characters as the real headline would. Indeed, another fear of mine was that a mix-up at the press— and this can happen—would result in a banner headline over the Vanity Fair logo that read: "Exposed! That Car Door Slams Shut!"

I spoke to both Woodward and Bernstein that week, and both could not have been more gracious. And seeing them doing their victory lap of the news cycle was like seeing the journalistic equivalent of Watson and Crick, Martin and Lewis, or Brad and Jen back together, however " briefly. For that, Mr. Felt, along with your services to your country, serious "Thank you" and a tip of the hat. -GRAYDON CARTER