The two journalists who broke the Watergate scandal have sold their notebooks and papers related to the story for $5-million. But the identity of Deep Throat, their anonymous source, will remain secret until his death.
The University of Texas yesterday announced that they had purchased the notes and papers of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that led to the resignation of President Nixon. They will be catalogued at a research library, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, in Austin, Texas.
Woodward (60) now assistant managing editor at the Post and a well-known author with White House access, said that he and Bernstein (59) had asked an agent to find a safe resting place for their papers. He told the New York Times that the pair were ”getting on in years and these things were sitting in our own storage facilities and we were afraid we would be gone someday and no one would know what to do with them.”
Most of the material will be made available to the public within a year, according to the university. There are 75 boxes of material, including taped interviews and memos exchanged by the two men. They have made a donation of $500 000 to the university to finance a series of conferences on the Watergate story.
Under the terms of the agreement, the identities of all confidential sources will remain secret until the deaths of the sources. There has long been speculation about the identity of the main source, nicknamed Deep Throat, with various names suggested, none of which the journalists would confirm.
Reporters are always told to keep their notebooks but this is usually so that they are available in case of a libel or contempt court case. The notes of the Watergate exposé, however, have a clear historical significance. The Washington Post signed a document to confirm that the papers belonged to the two reporters and not the newspaper.
The reporters uncovered the 1972 plot by Nixon’s staff and his re-election campaign team to break into the Democratic national committee’s campaign headquarters in the Watergate building. Their investigation led to the departure of Nixon in 1974, the first American president to resign. Woodward and Bernstein wrote two books, All the President’s Men and The Final Days, about their investigation, the former of which became a film of the same name.
Bernstein lives in New York and is working on a book about Senator Hillary Clinton. –
Guardian Unlimited Â