Word: throat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is no shortage of suspects in the guessing game of who Deep Throat was-or of skeptics. "I would expect it was a composite," muses former Nixon Attorney James St. Clair. Onetime Nixon Aide John Ehrlichman grouses: "It would be a great day for America to finally know the identity of one of Woodward and Bernstein's sources." Reviewing The Final Days, Political Writer Richard Reeves argues in the New York Times: "I have never been convinced that Deep Throat existed. The whole thing was too much like an old newspaper tactic that I have used myself: inventing...
Assuming Deep Throat does exist, one way to play the guessing game is to narrow the field by identifying men with access to the kind of information that Deep Throat provided Woodward. Such information ranges from Deep Throat's June 1972 tip that E. Howard Hunt Jr. was involved in the Watergate breakin, to his November 1973 disclosure that there were erasures on the White House tapes. Woodward's source also knew who controlled a special fund at the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (C.R.P.); that White House intelligence-gathering activities involved at least...
That litany strongly suggests that Deep Throat operated in the White House, which knew about Hunt before the FBI did and about the tape erasures before the Justice Department, the courts and the special prosecutor did. Some at the White House also knew about the special $350,000 secret fund at C.R.P. eventually used as hush money for the Watergate burglars long before investigators...
Other sources who could have been Deep Throat by the White House test include Counsel Leonard Garment; Chief of Staff Alexander Haig Jr. or, more likely, someone close to him; Speech Writers Raymond Price, Patrick Buchanan, Benjamin Stein, Franklin Gannon and David Gergen; Haldeman Aide Lawrence Higby; Telecommunications Director Clay Whitehead; National Security Aide Brent Scowcroft; and Domestic Adviser Kenneth Cole Jr. An outside possibility is John Sears, who retained excellent White House sources after his departure as a Nixon counsel in 1969, and whose cigarette-smoking and Scotch-drinking habits, while common enough, correspond to those attributed to Deep...
...Woodward's story on the tape gaps indeed came from Deep Throat -as he has written it did-then that narrows the circle further. Awareness of the erasures was limited at first to Nixon, Rose Mary Woods, Stephen Bull, Haig-and three men then serving as Nixon's lawyers: Samuel Powers, Garment and Buzhardt. Though he was long gone from the White House, Charles Colson is also known to have learned of the tape gaps soon after their discovery by Buzhardt...