Saturday, February 12, 2005

The Throat-stakes

Many of my readers aren't interested in the identity of Deep Throat, but the guessing game remains one of my favorites. One fanciful notion I've always found appealing holds that Watergate ringleader E. Howard Hunt was himself Deep Throat.

The chronology dictates against that idea, of course -- Hunt was found guilty in December of 1972 and served 33 months in jail; Woodward met Deep Throat on various occasions in 1973. Other than that, Hunt is a weirdly attractive candidate -- a smoker with a literary bent, privy to all sorts of inside CIA knowledge, and (some have alleged) secretly out to undermine Nixon.

Robert Bennett remains my favorite candidate. Senator Sam Ervin's Select Committee on Watergate also fingered Bennett as DT. Here's a bit from that committee's report:

Bennett took relish in implicating Colson in Hunt's activities in the press while protecting the agency at the same time. It is further noted that Bennett was feeding stories to Bob Woodward who was 'suitably grateful'; that he was making no attribution to Bennett; and that he was protecting Bennett and Mullen and company.
Pretty damning, if ya asks me.

Throat-spotters usually get mired in the game of who-knew-what-when. But Bennett was CIA, and the CIA knew everything as it happened. They had bugged the White House.

If I'm right -- and if Woodward reveals Bennett as DT -- will the CIA's role in bringing down Nixon receive much mention in the press? Possibly. Today's political situation is very strange, and the neo-cons have taken an adversarial attitude toward the Agency.

2 comments:

Joy Tomme said...

So...who's sick? They (John Dean) say Bradlee has written the obit because DT is sick.

Probably not Johnny Carson or Arthur Miller. We've got Rehnquist. and the Pope.

Is Bennet sick?

Joy Tomme (http://ratfuckdiary.blogspot.com)

Anonymous said...

Re: Joy Tomme's question, "So...who's sick?"

I believe Dick Cheney is much sicker than is publicly known. In his public appearances during the campaign he was always seated, his wife almost always by his side; he was shockingly inappropriately dressed at Auschwitz recently; and a friend tells me that when he made an appearance on the campaign trail late last fall, an aide had to buy him a pair of shoes a whole size larger than his standard size because his feet had swollen (apparently a sign of congestive heart failure, but could be other reasons).

Anyway, I have no real knowledge about the Deep Throat story, so I don't know what Cheney was up to at the time, or whether he is completely out of the running as DT, but he IS sick. From what I can see, Rehnquist is a better bet.