JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

As an offshoot of the intrigue surrounding The New York Times’ column by a “senior White House official” who bashes President Trump as unfit for office, two groundbreaking newspaper stories from decades ago have been getting a lot of attention today.

And it’s a privilege to say that the reporters who wrote those decades-old stories — one retired from the Wall Street Journal, the other now a columnist for The Washington Post — both live right here in the Kansas City area.

One is Dennis Farney, a Brookside resident, who wrote a Wall Street story in 1974 suggesting that W. Mark Felt, a retired FBI official, was the “Deep Throat” of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.

The other is David Von Drehle, a Mission Hills resident, who wrote a 2005 Washington Post story confirming that Felt was, indeed, “Deep Throat.”

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Farney

Farney and his wife Peggy have lived in Kansas City for many years. I believe he came here in 1985, when he was named Heartland correspondent for WSJ. I’ve met him and spoken with him several times over the years, and when I was a Catholic, I had his son Ryan in a religious education class I taught at Visitation Church. They also have a grown daughter.

Farney retired about 10 years ago and is in his mid-70s. He frequents Aixois, a restaurant in Brookside that is a nexus for professionals and retirees of many persuasions, including politics, journalism and the law.

Von Drehle, who is in his mid-50s, is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing primarily about national politics. His wife Karen Ball is a Kansas City native and a 1983 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She worked for the Associated Press from 1983 to 1993. She and Von Drehle met when they were both covering the 1992 presidential campaign between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.

Ball was White House correspondent for the New York Daily News when she and Von Drehle married in 1995. They moved to the Kansas City area in 2007 and have four children, two of whom graduated from Shawnee Mission East and two of whom are still at East.

Von Drehle

Von Drehle was with Time magazine for 11 years before returning to The Post last year. He is a regular speaker at organizations and institutions around town, including the Kansas City Public Library. I heard him speak at an educational event at Country Club Christian Church in 2016.

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Now, to the decades’ old stories that have been getting a lot of re-reading today.

Farney’s story pointing a finger at Mark Felt ran on June 25, 1974…

The headline came from Bob Woodward’s book “All the President’s Men,” in which Woodward says Deep Throat liked Scotch, read literature and smoked a cigarette at one of many clandestine meetings with Woodward.

Farney’s lead sentence, as you can see was, “W. Mark Felt says he isn’t now, nor has he ever been, Deep Throat.”

The second sentence was playful and suggestive…

“Of course, says the former acting associate director of the FBI, if he really were Deep Throat, you’d hardly expect him to admit it, now would you?”

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Felt denied for decades that he was Deep Throat. But in 2005, three years before he died, his family revealed he was Deep Throat in a Vanity Fair article.

On June 1, 2005, Von Drehle wrote a front-page story in which Felt confirmed he was “Deep Throat.”

Von Drehle wrote…

Felt’s repeated denials, and the stalwart silence of the reporters he aided…kept the cloak of mystery drawn up around Deep Throat. In place of a name and a face, the source acquired a magic and a mystique.

He was the romantic truth teller half hidden in the shadows of a Washington area parking garage. This image was rendered indelibly by the dramatic best-selling memoir Woodward and Bernstein published in 1974, “All the President’s Men.” Two years later, in a blockbuster movie of the same name, actor Hal Holbrook breathed whispery urgency into the suspenseful late-night encounters between Woodward and his source.

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We should be proud to have these two great journalists right here among us…Keep an eye out for them; you might see them anywhere!