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REPORTER: The money's the key to whatever this is.

EDITOR: Says who?

REPORTER: Deep Throat.

EDITOR: Who?!

REPORTER: Well that's Woodward's garage freak -- his source in the executive.

EDITOR: Garage freak?! Jesus! What kind of a crazy story is this?

BOB GARFIELD: Since the 1974 publication of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book All the President's Men, insiders and outsiders alike have puzzled over the identity of the reporters' anonymous source known as Deep Throat. Now, just as Woodward and Bernstein's papers have been sold to the University of Texas for 5 million dollars, a journalism class at the University of Illinois has claimed definitively to have sniffed Deep Throat out. They say Fred Fielding, a lawyer in the Nixon White House, is the shadowy source who skulked in parking garages to scent the Washington Post hot on Nixon's trail. William Gaines is the journalism professor who spearheaded the project and he joins me now. Professor Gaines, welcome to OTM!

WILLIAM GAINES: Thank you. Happy to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. We've established the who, what, when and where -- how about the why - why spend four years trying to finger Deep Throat?

WILLIAM GAINES: I saw a list of the ten greatest mysteries of the 20th Century, and Deep Throat was number five! Amelia Earhart was number one. And it struck me at the time that nobody knows what happened to Amelia Earhart, but somebody knows who Deep Throat is and they're not telling us, so I guess that became a challenge, and also added to that challenge was a statement that Ben Bradlee, you know, the editor of Woodward and Bernstein at the time, made recently that somebody could probably take all the information known about Deep Throat and put it in some huge computer and they would be able to figure out who Deep Throat was.

BOB GARFIELD:So it was a game of "mega-clue" -- a process of elimination that finally led you to Fred Fielding in the garage with a leak. Do you think we'll ever know? I mean this is--

WILLIAM GAINES: Well I know!

BOB GARFIELD: -- do you know? I mean do you know to a certainty? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

WILLIAM GAINES: I, I, I know! I know who Deep Throat is! It's Fred Fielding! There's no question about it. Nobody else could be Deep Throat but Fred Fielding. He had access to all the information. He's the only person who fits Woodward and Bernstein's description, and not coincidentally, he has access to all the information that Deep Throat had, some of it almost exclusively. So it just cannot be somebody else.

BOB GARFIELD:All right. Let's just say that you and your class are right -- that Fred Fielding is Deep Throat. I, I, I still have to ask you why? Carl Bernstein for one was apoplectic about this exercise. To paraphrase him, shouldn't you be teaching your students about the sanctity of confidential sources instead of trying to unmask them? How say you?

WILLIAM GAINES: Well, absolutely. I teach my students you never, ever reveal a source. What we have here is a situation where a source has been revealed and by Woodward and Bernstein. They've told us that he smokes and he drinks Scotch and so forth. They've made a, a movie character out of him. That's not how you treat a-- a source! You treat-- you, you keep it absolutely in confidence. So-- what they've done is made a guessing game out of it. A lot of people who have not - are not Deep Throat have been wrongfully named over the years and it's caused quite a stir! And I think that our investigation was more or less driven by public opinion, because people don't like questions of that nature -- they don't like the idea of a journalist saying I know something you know and I'm not telling you. They want to know the answer.

BOB GARFIELD: Inquiring minds want to know.

WILLIAM GAINES: That's right. And journalists should respond to that, and that's what we did.

BOB GARFIELD:I don't want to be too obnoxious about this, but "inquiring minds what to know" is the slogan of the National Enquirer which does, just as you say, it meets the demands of the reading public. It-- Does the fact that the public craves the identity of Deep Throat give you reason enough to provide it?

WILLIAM GAINES: I think so, because these are serious-minded people who want to set the record straight. They don't want Woodward and Bernstein to be in control at the time that Deep Throat dies and is the only person who can testify as to why he did it and what he did. I have had a lot of very interesting e-mails because of our web site, and people want to, to praise Fred Fielding.

BOB GARFIELD:Fair enough. Although if Deep Throat wishes to remain anonymous [LAUGHS] I'm not sure that that's to the point. Let me ask you, let me ask you something else. You yourself are a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for your investigative work, and I imagine in doing the work that you did at the Chicago Tribune in the '70s, I, I presume that some of your work depended on help from confidential sources. How would you like it if someone went in your wake and tried to dig them up and, and identify then?

WILLIAM GAINES: But as long as you don't give out any information about your source, how possibly could they do that? You know in our investigation, the student investigation, we have anonymous sources who provided us with information. A lot of times persons would talk off the record, and both I and the students kept that confidence. We didn't do as Woodward and Bernstein did -- give anybody any kind of a clue as to whether he or she was our particular source with this information. It was, it was like a, a, a military exercise - you know not, not using real bullets, and I hope that what we have done over the years that, that I've done this is arm young reporters with knowledge so they can do investigations of their own that might be more important than revealing who Deep Throat is.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. William Gaines, thank you very much.

WILLIAM GAINES: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: William Gaines is a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois.