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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
As darryl pointed out, All the King's Men is not an accurate title here. Now, I make a lot of mistakes in my own posts. When you have Woodward's team behind you (read acknowledgements in Fear), you make a lot fewer.
So when Woodward and Bernstein said they had, say, four sources for a story, they really had five?
In any event, the sources aren't named in Fear.
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The critics say that the one source, Deep Throat, is a combination of multiple sources of whom Feld was one, who are combined for dramatic effect in the book.
I'm aware that Woodward doesn't name sources in Fear. It's an issue since you have no idea how seriously to take the charges. As I've said, many of the people who were at the events mentioned in the book have denied the accuracy of the accounts.
I've always enjoyed history, and even minored in it in college (majored in computer science). One thing one learns is that if you don't know the source, you have no idea how seriously to take the account. As an example, the accounts of what happened at Gettysburg are wildly different depending on who the source is and when the source was telling their story. Longstreet wrote three different versions. Many versions seem to have been made up whole cloth well after the war for political reasons. We see the same thing with what is going on in Washington these days. A lot of stuff being made up whole cloth just to feed a political narrative.