Money makes the world go around
My thanks to Mark Evanier for calling to my attention yesterday’s Frank Rich column:
…journalists everywhere – from The New York Times to The Economist to The Washington Post itself – would soon start attributing this classic line of dialogue [“Follow the money”] to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line was not in Woodward and Bernstein’s book or in The Post’s Watergate reportage or in Bob Woodward’s contemporaneous notes. It was the invention of [William Goldman], the author of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Marathon Man” and “The Princess Bride.”
I like to think of myself as a stickler for writers getting credit, and I’m a fan of Goldman’s, but I’d either completely forgotten this, or I didn’t know it in the first place.
Rich further goes on to say:
Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if perhaps unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of 2005. It occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first comprehensive report on Vanity Fair’s scoop, interrupted President Bush’s post-Memorial Day Rose Garden news conference to break the story. Suddenly the image of the current president blathering on about how hunky-dory everything is in Iraq was usurped by repeated showings of the scene in which the newly resigned Nixon walked across the adjacent White House lawn to the helicopter that would carry him into exile.
