Thirty years after a nightwatchman stumbled across a break-in at the Watergate apartment complex, sparking off the greatest political scandal in modern United States history, the enduring mystery at the heart of the affair produced fresh media speculation this week.
In newspaper articles, television interviews and even an online “e-book” to mark the anniversary, Watergate obsessives made their guesses as to the identity of Deep Throat.
Neither Bob Woodward nor Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who exposed Richard Nixon’s presidential dirty tricks, has ever given much away about the administration official who leaked inside information to Woodward in the darkened recesses of a Washington parking garage. They describe him only as chain-smoking, with a weakness for Scotch, but still alive. Woodward has said he will only name him after Deep Throat releases him from his vow of silence or dies.
That has not stopped a host of amateur sleuths from having a go. The latest is John Dean, the former White House counsel who spent 127 days in jail for his part in the Watergate cover-up, even after his testimony to a Senate committee helped force Nixon to resign. Now an investment banker, Dean has written three books on the affair.
His e-book, published by online magazine Salon.com, was supposed to unmask Deep Throat, but his suspect, Jonathan Rose, a Nixon aide and a former intelligence officer, threatened to sue.
Dean now rules Rose off and instead offers a shortlist, including Pat Buchanan, a former Nixon speechwriter who went on to become a right-wing presidential candidate and a regular shouting head on television talk shows.
Also on the list are another speechwriter, Ray Brice, another aide, Steve Bull, and even Ron Ziegler, the White House press secretary who famously shrugged off Watergate as a “third-rate burglary”. It later turned out that the men who broke into the Democratic party offices in the complex were paid from a slush fund run by the Campaign to Re-elect the President.
This new shortlist presumably overrides Dean’s last list, which included Earl Silbert, a Watergate prosecutor, and Al Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff. Woodward has denied that it was Haig.
Another tip-off came from an unexpected leak from inside the Woodward-Bernstein team, when the latter’s son supposedly told a friend that the number three official at the FBI at the time, Mark Felt, was Deep Throat. Felt has denied the claim, but it is repeated in a forthcoming book by Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter.
At the University of Illinois, journalism students have been analysing thousands of pages of documents and Woodward’s stories. They have deduced that Deep Throat must have been tall, as Woodward had to stretch to reach documents he left behind after their meetings, and that he lived near Woodward in Washington’s Dupont Circle district, as he was able to walk to their meetings.
Their teacher said Buchanan fitted the description and, alone among the suspects, had refused to reply to letters asking about his role.
The naming of a scandal
The 1972 Watergate break-in gave birth to a new journalistic clichÃ