J Stanley Pottinger, US official who discovered identity of Watergate scandal's 'Deep Throat', passes away

J. Stanley Pottinger, who as a high-ranking figure in the Department of Justice during the 1970s was probably the only person in government to figure out the identity of Deep Throat, the pseudonymous man who provided critical information to reporters in the Watergate scandal, died Wednesday in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 84.

His son Matt said the death, at a hospital, was from cancer. Pottinger, who went on to become a bestselling novelist, lived in South Salem, New York, but was in Princeton to be near the home of his daughter, Katie Pottinger.

Stanley Pottinger served as the top civil-rights official in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and in the Department of Justice under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In early 1977, Jimmy Carter, the incoming president, asked him to stay on to lead a grand jury investigation into illegal break-ins by the FBI.

During the testimony of Mark Felt, who had been the bureau's deputy director under Nixon, a juror asked him, offhand, if he was the one who had guided journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their investigation into White House ties to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.

Pottinger was standing next to Felt, and saw his face go pale.

Felt asked him to repeat the question.

Pottinger asked if he was Deep Throat.

Felt said no, but haltingly.

"I knew right away from his demeanor that he was Deep Throat," Pottinger told The New York Observer in 2005.

Pottinger told Felt that he was under oath. But he also offered him an out, saying that the question was not relevant to the investigation and could be withdrawn if Felt wished. Felt said yes.

"He was immediate in his response, in a way that made it clear he was troubled by it," Pottinger said. "That confirmed it for me."

He believed he was the only person in the room to notice, and he did not tell anyone what he knew until Felt revealed his identity in an article in Vanity Fair in 2005. Woodward then revealed Pottinger's story in his book about Felt, The Secret Man, also in 2005.

By then Pottinger had remade himself multiple times. After leaving government in 1977, he worked as a lawyer in private practice, then in 1981 moved to New York City to open a boutique investment firm.

He made a fortune trading in New England real estate during the 1980s economic boom, and became a fixture on the Manhattan social scene with high-profile romantic partners, including Gloria Steinem, Kathie Lee Gifford and Connie Chung.

Pottinger lost much of his money when the market burst in 1987. Looking for something new to do, he took night courses in filmmaking at New York University, then settled on writing a novel.

His first book, the medical-slash-political thriller The Fourth Procedure (1995), was a New York Times bestseller, with more than 1 million copies sold.

Writing, he said, was the fulfilling career he had been looking for all along.

"A successful writing life has just got to be the best," he told The Washington Post in 1995. "It's more mobile than painting. Easier than photography, less equipment! I think it's a great life. I hope I'm able to sustain it; if not, I'll have to consider alternatives."

John Stanley Pottinger was born Feb. 13, 1940, in Dayton, Ohio, to John and Elnora (Zeller) Pottinger. His mother managed the home while his father founded one of the few insurance companies in Ohio willing to take on Black clients, a commitment that Stanley Pottinger said influenced his interest in civil rights law.

He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in government in 1962 and from its law school in 1965.

He then moved to San Francisco, where he worked for a private firm and got involved in politics, working on the successful 1966 campaign of Robert Finch, a Republican, for lieutenant governor.

When Nixon, after winning the presidency in 1968, selected Finch to be his secretary of health, education and welfare, Finch took along Pottinger to run the department's civil rights efforts.

Among his first assignments was to review education efforts among the children of migrant workers. Unsatisfied with reading reports, he packed his wife and children into the family station wagon and went to live in a migrant labor camp for weeks.

In Washington, Pottinger oversaw a wide portfolio of issues, including the implementation of affirmative-action requirements for federal contractors and school integration in the South.

He continued that work in 1972, when he took over the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice under one of his mentors, Attorney General Elliot Richardson.

He was with Richardson on the evening of Oct. 20, 1973, when Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, the special counsel investigating the Watergate break-in. When Richardson refused, Nixon fired him; when William Ruckelshaus, the deputy attorney general, refused in turn, Nixon fired him as well.

Pottinger, who was up next in the line of succession, began to pack up his office. Finally, Robert Bork, the solicitor general, agreed to fire Cox. Pottinger kept his job during what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

His marriage to Gloria Anderson in 1965 ended in divorce in 1975. Along with their son Matt, who was a deputy national security adviser under President Donald Trump, and their daughter, Katie, he is survived by another son, Paul; six grandchildren; his brother, Paul; and his longtime companion, Elyse Weiner.

Though he eventually settled into his identity as a novelist -- he wrote three more books, A Slow Burning (2000), The Last Nazi (2003) and The Boss (2005) -- Pottinger also took up the occasional legal case.

He represented more than 20 survivors of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, and in 2013 joined 130 Republican signatories on an amicus curiae brief in support of same-sex marriage in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry, before the US Supreme Court.

In 2019, The New York Times published an article documenting how a hacker had offered Pottinger and another lawyer in the Epstein cases, David Boies, access to purported evidence, including videotapes, incriminating high-profile men captured in compromising sexual situations.

The article said the lawyers had planned to blackmail a number of the men into signing lucrative confidential settlements and using some of the money to finance a charity to help victims of sexual abuse. The issue became moot when it emerged that the hacker was a fraud.

In the article and on his website, Pottinger responded forcefully to the article. "Every step I took was taken according to the letter and spirit of the law in pursuit of justice for the Epstein victims I represent," he wrote.

Before his death, he had finished the manuscript of his fifth novel, which Matt Pottinger described as a spy thriller. It remains untitled.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.