washpost

I cannot tell you how excited I am to discover who Deep Throat was. No matter than I couldn't name any of the involved parties, except for Nixon, Woodward, and Bernstein. And Spiro Agnew, maybe? We always ran out of school year before we got to that point in the textbook. I knew that G. Gordon Liddy was involved, unless he was one of those Iran-Contra people. And Oliver North probably wasn't. Not the guy on the grassy knoll, either: he was a shadowy figure from the 60's, and I knew that Watergate was a 70's thing. Maybe. Nixon ran for president so many times, it's hard to keep track.

So why do I care about Deep Throat? I love secrets. This is a doozy: it's like finding out where Hoffa was buried or whether Harding's wife really poisoned him. I had much the same response to the Primary Colors brouhaha. I didn't want to read the book and I didn't know who Joe Klein was. But who can resist a good public denouement?