Readers of the Washington Post Magazine don’t know how close they came to discovering that Deep Throat was actually Fred Fielding. On May 31, the day W. Mark Felt fessed up, the magazine was within three days of printing a feature on the University of Illinois investigative-journalism class that had fingered the former Nixon legal aide as the famous Watergate source. “They based a lot of their case on what they claimed was an early manuscript of All the President’s Men with margin notes,” says editor Tom Shroder, whose crew yanked the story from the June 19 issue. “It was pretty persuasive, actually.” Timing is always a concern for the editor of a magazine with a three-week lag time between deadline and publication, but Shroder says he never saw the Vanity Fair article coming. “I’m sure I said, ‘[Deep Throat’s kept quiet] for 30 years. All we need is a few more weeks.’”

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