February 04, 2005

The Watergate Papers Go Public In 2003, Woodward and Bernstein sold the notes they took during Watergate (the scandal that eventually forced President Nixon to resign, for non US monkeys)to the University of Texas. Now, the University is making some of the papers available to the public, starting Friday. You can view the papers at the University or online.

What you won't get to see (yet) is anything that identifies confidential sources who are still alive. Unfortunately, this includes the identity of Deep Throat. However, this should still be pretty cool.

posted by meredithea 19 years ago
  • thanks for posting this, meredithea. it's a pretty big deal in the journalism industry, as you can imagine. i hope we'll finally get to know deep throat's identity during my lifetime! i figure he/she must be getting pretty old now... once deep throat dies they'll announce his/her identity.
  • The most interesting thing I ever heard about Watergate was that the National Archive(?) was releasing the Nixon Tapes transcripts in multi-year installments just so that people wouldn't forget what a jerk Nixon had been. Not entirely sure it's true, but I read it in a reliable source at the time.
  • SideDish: Do you have a theory about who Deep Throat is? My mom and I have played the guessing game from time to time, and our favorite pet theory is that Deep Throat is a composite, and not any one person. It seems like the Watergate Papers as a whole are one of the journalistic Holy Grails (along with the complete fidings of the Warren commission report on Kennedy's death, or is that just amongst conspiracy theorists?)
  • I think it's Linda Lovelace.
  • The composite identity sounds interesting and I wonder if that's helped with keeping it secret (one person claiming to be DT -has anyone ever done this?- might be plausibly refuted if the others wanted to do so, for example). I think it's Kissinger. This WaPo article lists the four people who know his identity with certainty (and it does sound like Mr. Throat is a man) and the various persons suspected of being DT.
  • Dang, this stuff is just funny. Funny, as in awful. I wonder what we could have done differently then to change where we're at now...?
  • not that the Pentagon Papers had anything to do with the Watergate break-in...