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22 = THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19,2002
DREW'S NEW CREW
LAURIESISK/KANSAN
Drew Gooden answers a campers question while visiting with participants of the Roy Williams Basketball Camp yesterday at Horesji Athletic Center. Gooden awaits the NBA draft, which takes place next week.
'Throat's' identity safe still, 30 years later
"I am down to four people, and while this is a game to me, it is not a game to Deep Throat, so it has to be played by certain rules, and one is that I won't speculate," Dean told the assemblage at Grand Central Terminal.
The fact that he didn't really know was announced in advance, but it didn't stop 200 people, mostly journalists and political junkies, from converging on a free lunch Tuesday to hear him say it.
Deep Throat—a name borrowed from a 1973 porn flick—was used by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to refer to an official who, they say, supplied key information that helped expose Richard Nixon's attempts to cover up his administration's role in Watergate.
NEW YORK — Thirty years and a day after the break-in at the Watergate complex that would bring down a president, former White House counsel John Dean called a press conference to reveal who Deep Throat was — then stonewalled.
While Woodward has promised not to identify Deep Throat until the source dies, the political who-was-it parlor game has lasted 30 years, with perhaps a dozen people offered as suspects and then discarded because they couldn't have known what Deep Throat knew or they weren't around at the right times.
Dean, the aide who warned Nixon there was "a cancer growing on the presidency,"
gave Senate hearing testimony that helped blow the lid off the Nixon White House. He has been trying ever since to determine the identity of Deep Throat.
Years ago he named Watergate prosecutor Earl J. Silbert and Nixon chief of staff Alexander Haig, both of whom denied it — as have FBI official Mark Felt, ABC newswoman Diane Sawyer, who then worked in the White House press office, and even Dean himself.
Dean's latest Deep Throat theory was to be published this 30th anniversary week in a 40,000-word e-book by the online magazine Salon.com. But at the last minute, he said, denials from his choice suspects were so strong as to force a postponement.
He identified the four possibles as Ron Zeigler, Nixon's press secretary, White House aide Steven Bull and speechwriters Ray Price and Pat Buchanan. All have denied being the mystery tipster.
While the lunch gathering had a rather sporting air, exasperation over Dean's coyness prompted publisher Harold Evans to demand that he "come clean!"
"Throat wants to remain anonymous." Dean said, adding that one of his suspects even threatened to sue him. "This person is so offended by having his name connected with Deep Throat. He doesn't want his obituary to be led with, 'Deep Throat died today.'"