Watergate’s Deep Throat still a mystery

Press, 20 November 1982, Page 14

Watergate’s Deep Throat still a mystery

By

HAROLD JACKSON,

in Washington for the “Guardian”

It'boggles the mind to contemplate Alexander Haig haunting the car parks of Washington just to whisper sweet somethings, into the ear of a “Washington- Post” reporter. ’• ■; . . < The former Secretary of State — and earlier chief of staff in the Nixon White House — is the hero of the latest Watergate conspiracy theory. According to John Dean, he was Deep Throat. Ten years after the event, Deep Throat is still in there with the Loch Ness Monster and the Little Green Men from Mars as one of the world’s most productive sources of idle gossip and speculation. To the amazement of most of those involved, there still seems to be an insatiable market for Watergate memoirs and trivia. Deep Throat, it will be. recalled, was the cover name Bob Woodward of the “Washington Post” gave one of his principal informants. As he and Carl Bernstein fought to unravel the endless political complexities set off by the burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, . some of the most significant tips came from this anonymous White House insider. Bernstein says he never knew who it was and Woodward has resolutely refused to give any information. He has stuck to his silence diverting inquiries with the comment, “I don’t have anything to say, thanks for calling.” As the former White House counsel, John Dean showed near photographic recall during his evidence before the Ervin committee. His version of events was substantially vindicated by the famous tapes, but he has rather less credibility on this topic. Mr Haig, naturally, denied all: “This is the first I’ve heard about it and it is absurd. It is probably commercially motivated.” He can say that again. Mr Dean has yet another book

coming out and the revelation is part of the pre-publication build-up. Even “Time” magazine which broke the story poured cold water on the idea by pointing out the “inherent implausibility of the ultra-digni-fied and instantly recognisable Haig skulking around Washington garages undetected at 2 a.m.” Not least of John Dean’s problems is that this is his third stab at identification. In 1975 he said he was positive the culprit was Earl Silbert, a member of the original Water-, gate prosecution team who moved, on to become Attorney for the District of Columbia. A year later he had modified his view: then he was perfectly certain it was David Gergen, one of Mr Nixon’s speechwriters. Mr Gergen, who has since moved on to become director of communications in the Reagan White House, firmly denies the charge. The identification of Deep Throat, in fact, has turned into one of the industries sparked by the appearance of more and more Watergate memoirs. The original conspiracy seems to have paled into near-irre-levance next to the endless subsequent theories about one or other of its subsidiary aspects. As a starting point, one school holds that the whole affair was an elaborate plot by the Democrats (with the implicit corollary that Richard Nixon was cruelly framed). You need to be a pretty close reader of the texts to follow this one, but, in its baldest form, it relies on the “fact” that Officer Shoffler - the policeman who led the police team which arrested the burglars - had taken the unusual step of signing on for a second eight hour shift that night. One of his friends, Mr Edmund Chung, said later that he “had the impression that Shoffler had advance knowledge of the break-in.” As the theory unwinds it establishes to the satisfaction of its protagonists that the

Democrats engineered the burglary of their own offices in an extraordinarily byzantine plot to get Nixon. The fascination of Watergate, of course, was that what actually happened was so improbable that it served significantly to shift the boundaries of belief. When the President, the At-torney-general, the White House chief of staff, and a host of other senior public officials are shown to have conspired to pervert the law, what is left that no-one is prepared to believe? So there has never been any shortage of candidates for Deep Throat and Mr Haig is going to have to take his place at the end of the queue. : My own favourite, for example, is Leonard Garment, who always stuck out like a sore thumb in the Nixon White House. He is a Democrat for a start and, as counsel to the President, served as a sort of liberal conscience in a team not notable for that quality. He had been a partner in the same law firm as the President and was the only man with Nixon the night he decided he would have to sack his two top staff men, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He had knowledge and motive, in my view. The argument against the theory is that Garment is lavishly credited as a source for both the Woodstein books, though that could be no more than cover. The connoisseurs maintain that he would have been too obvious suspect and could never have got away with wandering around the town meeting reporters in the middle of the night. What about Ken Clawson, then? He was a former reporter at the “Washington Post” working at the White House. According to a book by another staff member at the “Washington Post ” Barry Sussman, Woodward got the name of the man who shot George Wallace in May, 1972, from a friend at the White House.

“As we began to get into the Watergate scandal, ‘my friend’ as Woodward called him. came to play a mysterious, a crucial role. . . and Howard Simons gave him a new name. ‘Deep Throat’.” In their second book. “The Final Days,” Woodward and Berstein name Clawson as the source of the Wallace information. The film of the book has Woodward saying to the figure in the car park, "You helped me with Wallace.” The trouble is that Clawson was almost the last of the Nixon loyalists and no-one seems to credit that he could have played such a dual role — or that he would have had the information to do so. That is always a stumbling block with so .many of the people offered as candidates. Either they were not in a position to have the information given the reporters or, if they were, it seems pretty unlikely they would have been bandying it around to an evidently hostile newspaper. Not least of the problems with John Dean’s latest theory is that Haig is highly unlikely to have known the details of the grand jury proceedings passed on at one stage by Deep Throat. That, and various other clues, suggest the source must have been a lawyer (and there is no clear evidence that it was a man). John Ehrlichman fingered Henry Petersen, then head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice and later defence counsel for the convicted Attorney-General, John Mitchell. Bob Haldeman pointed to Fred Fielding, once deputy to John Dean in the White House counsel’s office. President Nixon seems to have settled on Alexander Butterfield, the man who told the Senate Watergate Committee about the existence of the White House tapes. So there was never any shortage of candidates. There

is also the theory among some Washington insiders that there never was a Deep Throat. They say he owes his existence to

the need for a junior reporter to convince a highly sceptical editor that the story he had written was true.