Watergate Affair

What was recorded during the 18 1/2-minute gap of one of President Nixon's tapes will remain a mystery -- at least for now. The National Archives says audio experts were unable to recapture intelligible sounds from test tapes that simulated the recording made famous in the Watergate scandal. "I am fully satisfied that we have explored all of the avenues to attempt to recover the sound on this tape," U.S. archivist John Carlin said Thursday.

Thirty years after the Watergate break-in, the identity of Deep Throat--the White House insider who helped bring down President Richard Nixon--remains a mystery. Although former White House counsel John Dean has spent 25 of those years trying to unmask the man who was a source for Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, he failed Monday to identify Deep Throat in a 158-page e-book published by Salon, an online daily magazine.

The 30th anniversary of Watergate today brings another round of theories and guesses about the identity of "Deep Throat," but the two journalists who dealt with the confidential source renewed their three-decade vow of silence. "You're going to get a kind of deep silence from us," said Washington Post writer Bob Woodward. Former White House Counsel John Dean has a new book, "Unmasking Deep Throat," in which he narrows the list to a "thimbleful."

As the latest round in Washington's greatest guessing game builds to a crescendo on Monday's 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the award-winning online magazine Salon plans to enter the Deep Throat fray with a definitive 40,000-word accusation by scandal veteran John W. Dean III. Or maybe not.

Richard Nixon is dead, Katharine Graham is dead, even Linda Lovelace is dead. But Deep Throat? Still alive, and still a secret more than a quarter-century after his guidance helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story and unseat a president. John Dean says he knows Deep Throat's identity. And the former White House counsel, whose testimony against Nixon was a key moment in the saga, says he will reveal all in "The Deep Throat Brief."

On June 20, 1972, President Nixon sat down with his top aide, H. R. Haldeman, to discuss the Watergate crisis that soon would engulf his administration. What they said has become one of the most enduring mysteries in American political history: the contents of the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap on a tape rolling in the office of White House secretary Rose Mary Woods.

For more than 20 years, Katharine Graham, head of the Washington Post and grande dame of American journalism, proudly displayed in her office the mechanical wringer from an old washing machine. It was a reminder that life entails risks--and that taking those risks can lead to greatness. During the early days of Watergate, when the Post labored almost alone to expose the improper and illegal actions that eventually forced President Richard M.

When the time came, G. Gordon Liddy approached the witness stand Monday with the confident posture of an actor and spoke with the controlled diction of a radio talk show host--the twin careers that have kept him in the public eye long since he first won infamy as a Watergate felon.

These last few days, I've had this feeling--kind of giddy, kind of obsessed, unable to think about anything else but the object of all my attention. It's the last thing that fills my mind at night. It's the first thing that pops into my head in the morning. I'm not in love--I'm in . . . flashback. As I listen to the Florida presidential election post-mortem, I'm taken back to the summer of 1973--the summer of the Watergate hearings.

George W. Bush was worried about Richard Nixon, but he needn't have been. Informed that the National Archives was releasing a new batch of Watergate-era tapes Thursday, a top aide to the Texas governor suspected that the fine hand of the White House might be involved. Was there an embarrassing conversation between President Nixon and Bush's father from long ago that was about to be exposed less than two weeks before the Nov. 7 election?