Anonymous sources are a pain. You have to decide why they don’t want their names associated with the information they’re giving. What axe, if any, do they have to grind? Personal? Professional? Sexual?

In the case of Deep Throat, there was apparently another motivation. Sour grapes.

Woodward said Felt helped The Post at a time of tense relations between the White House and much of the FBI hierarchy. He said the Watergate break-in came shortly after the death of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Felt’s mentor, and that Felt and other bureau officials wanted to see an FBI veteran promoted to succeed Hoover.

Felt himself had hopes that he would be the next FBI director, but Nixon instead appointed an administration insider, assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray, to the post.

Felt wouldn’t be the first Washington bureaucrat to dish some dirt as the result of being passed over for promotion. Information is power. And Felt’s talking out of school eventually made L. Patrick Gray’s position untenable to the point where the Acting FBI Director declined to be in the running as a permanent replacement for Hoover.

Now I’m sure that Felt sees in his own mind a nobility of purpose and purity of motive that blinds him to the more unsavory aspect of his deed. There’s a reason FBI reports aren’t made public; they alert the target of the investigation to the interest of the Bureau. And in Felt’s case, he guided Wood/Stein in such a way as to throw suspicion on people who could have been squeezed by the Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox before their names were associated with the crime. Would this have made a difference in the final analysis? Probably not. But it certainly made the job of Cox and his successor, Leon Jaworski that much harder.

And what about the $64,000 question? The counterfactual of counterfactuals?

What if Felt had kept his mouth shut? Would things have played out the same way? Would Nixon have been forced to resign?

The answer is a resounding yes. And that’s because Felt was more important to the Post than he was to the overall investigation.

The honor for the single most important cog in the Watergate investigation goes to a minor White House functionary named Alexander Butterfield. Butterfield had a rather unique job in in the White House. He liaised with the Secret Service to maintain the massive bugging system that Nixon, in what could only be described as revealing the tragic flaw of overarching hubris, had installed to record his every sentence, every word, every breath for posterity.

The story of Butterfield’s outing is a classic case of serendipity and best told here. And once the information about those tapes were out there, Nixon’s fate was sealed regardless of anything Deep Throat could tell Wood/Stein about the scandal.

So, the mystery is solved in something of an anticlimactic manner. There will be no more funeral watches of Watergate related figures for Woodward sightings. Instead, a very old and very sick man who may or may not have been angry at being passed over as Director of the FBI, tells a second tier monthly magazine a story that’s pretty much of surpassing interest only to political junkies and historians.

But it’s still a great story. And I’m glad it’s finally been told.