LAST CALL: Extra Credit
Neumayr, George
LAST CALL GEORGE NEUMAYR Extra Credit N 1999, A TEENAGER BROKE THE STORY of Deep Throat's identity as Mark Felt in a high school history term paper. He got a B on it. Or "something ridiculous...
...I would have been more effective...
...He appeared to be alternately playing dumb, lying, and putting his son up to squashing the story...
...an idiot in my opinion," said Chase Culeman-Beckman to the Journal News of New York in 1999...
...Slate's "Chatterbox," aka Timothy Noah, was doing spadework on this issue in 1999 and correctly suspected Felt of being Deep Throat...
...How a high school student got Carl Bernstein lying and sweating like Richard Nixon deserves its own historical footnote...
...90 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005...
...No, it's not me," he said, adding lamely that "I would have done better...
...Carl Bernstein owes his son's summer camp pal an apology too...
...Chatterbox tracked Culeman-Beckman down and carefully questioned him, which unintentionally helped Bernstein's cover-up a bit in that Culeman-Beckman acknowledged that he assumed Jacob Bernstein knew of Felt's identity through his father but didn't hear him say that exactly...
...Bob and I have been wise enough never to tell our wives, and we've certainly never told our children...
...We entered into a very precocious discussion of politics...
...Bernstein, Culeman-Beckman surmises, let slip Felt's name to Nora Ephron and son Jacob during his alcohol-addled phase...
...So Bernstein could credibly dismiss his son's summer-school yarn to Culeman-Beckman as just a regurgitation of some "guesswork" his mother (on her own, of course) had shared with him...
...Speaking to TAS, Culeman-Beckman, now a graduate student at Cornell, figured Carl Bernstein was lying...
...My mother had a psychologist look at the tape [of Bernstein responding to questions about his term paper in 1999] and he looked nervous," he says...
...Bernstein, who before the Watergate story broke had been lobbying his bosses to be the Washington Post's Rock 'n' Roll reporter, was famous for his wild partying, hitting bottom after a drunk-driving arrest...
...The teacher is...
...Bernstein had conducted a little cover-up after the story reached the press...
...Somehow the conversation degenerated to talk about Watergate and in a burst of braggadocio, he said that Deep Throat was Mark Felt," said CulemanBeckman to the press in 1999...
...Does Culeman-Beckman look back in anger...
...I don't know how discreet he was at that time," Culeman-Beckman says...
...The Hartford Courant reported that Bernstein "didn't have time to call Jacob to ask him about it" and asked its reporter innocently, "Is Mark Felt still alive...
...Let the cards fall where they may"—Culeman-Beckman heavily footnoted his 20-page term paper, copyrighted it, attached a two-page bibliography, and went to the trouble of subjecting All the President's Men to rigorous textual analysis, noting that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had identified their source as My Friend, the initials of Felt's name...
...Showing laudable impatience with Watergate mythology—"They've been cute about it long enough," he declared to the press...
...Judging from his bobbing and weaving in press accounts, Bernstein was sweating...
...Jacob Bernstein was later trotted out to support this line, offering the press a rather lawyerly statement: "At no point did my father Carl Bernstein or Bob Woodward reveal the identity of Deep Throat...
...CulemanBeckman added that he "got the idea that at a young age" Bernstein's sons Jacob and Max (also a camper) "really did not like their father...
...Or "something ridiculous like that...
...Director Nora Ephron, former wife of Bernstein and mother of Jacob, was also helpful in confusing the matter, for she had theorized in a 1993 interview that Mark Felt was Deep Throat...
...Confirmed, Culeman-Beckman's high school term paper now belongs in the sequel to All the President's Men...
...He said I'm 100 percent sure that Deep Throat is Mark Felt...
...Then Bernstein tried to fake the paper out through lying bluster: "I hate to ruin your story, but Jacob Bernstein has not a clue as to the identity of Deep Throat...
...How did this enterprising young man figure it out...
...This 1999 flap wasn't covered very widely, but covered enough that Felt himself was contacted and he lied too...
...Deep Throat didn't exactly bring the White House crashing down, did he...
...He had attended a posh Long Island summer camp with Carl Bernstein's son Jacob roughly a decade earlier and had heard Jacob (then all of eight) popping off about "Mark Felt" as Deep Throat...
...Now that Felt has identified himself as Deep Throat, Culeman-Beckman's "idiot" history teacher at the Rye Country Day School owes him a retroactive A...
Vol. 38 • July 2005 • No. 6
