Lost in the Deep Throat Media Blitz: Carl Bernstein's Kid Tabbed Felt in 1988

By now everyone who's interested has read the upcoming Vanity Fair article in which W. Mark Felt, the second-ranking FBI official of the Watergate era, admits to being the most famous anonymous source of all time. The disclosure spawned a weeklong orgy of reminiscing and self-congratulation in the Washington Post and elsewhere. But few of the stories made note of the curious fact that Felt was first outed as DT by reporter Carl Bernstein's son Jacob at a Long Island summer camp in 1988. Back then, as chronicled in a fascinating 1999 Slate piece by Timothy Noah, young Jacob blurted to a fellow camp inmate that "Deep Throat was Mark Felt, he's someone in the FBI. I'm 100 percent sure." The boy to whom he told the story, Chase Culeman-Beckman, later repeated the claim in a college term paper. Both Bernstein and Jacob's mom, Nora Ephron, insist that Jr. knew nothing--he was only repeating his mom's conjectures. In any case, you can go to slate.msn.com/id/1003301 to read the Slate piece.