Somewhere, Linda Lovelace is laughing.
Even reporters who don’t usually cover politics were distracted by the revelation of one of journalism’s biggest secrets: The unmasking of W. Mark Felt as Deep Throat, the Washington insider whose leaked information contributed to President Nixon’s resignation.
It was yet another gift from the Nixon White House, right up there with the expletive- and racial-characterization-deleted filled material from the declassified Oval Office tapes.
Direct marketers stand to reap their share of this bounty. Amazon.com’s sales should spike, as everyone who walked through the West Wing between when the U.S. started bombing in Cambodia and the day Nixon resigned has written at least one book.
And that’s before Felt gets his own take published, in addition to the ones reporters Bob Woodward alone, Carl Bernstein alone and Woodward and Bernstein together are going to pen – to say nothing of former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee’s expected tome, “I Knew Before You Did, Na Na Na Na Na.”
Look for space ads to start hawking Watergate commemorative items such as mugs, candy dishes and reel-to-reel tape recorders, with the reels featuring carefully rendered caricatures of White House staffers H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman.
There’s already precedence for this. In his autobiography “Will,” Watergate defendant G. Gordon Liddy described his son wearing a “Property of the Watergate Break-In Team” t-shirt during a swim meet. (Before Liddy’s son took off his warm-up jacket and revealed, the crowd was abuzz as to whether or not he was related to “that Liddy”.)
The opportunities go beyond selling merchandise. The number of people suspected at one time or another of being Deep Throat is so large that if it were pulled into a mailing list, it could be sold on a cost-per-thousand basis. Within the past week, an equally large list of people claiming to have known all along has surfaced. These folks are prime candidates for Sharper Image electronic back-patting machines.
Felt’s revelation means that all of those letters, packages and catalogs addressed to “Deep Throat” can finally be delivered – and that Al Haig now knows where to forward all those that have been sent to him during the last 33 years.
Is this the last hurrah for the Watergate break-in buffs? Some are reluctant to let it go, claiming that Felt alone could not have accessed the information passed to Woodward. There is also the question of Felt’s compos mentis-ness. Those who don’t want the guessing game to end are hoping that in three years he’ll confess to having kidnapped the Lindbergh baby.
If that happens, the game’s on again. I wonder where I can get 500 “I Still Think It Was Fred Fielding” t-shirts printed cheaply?
To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact e-mail: rlevey@primediabusiness.com
