BEYOND DEEP THROAT

Other Watergate mysteries remain, and the Woodstein archives are filled of clues

With the publication of The veiled Man: The Story of Watergate's reaching far down Throat, Bob Woodward's memoir of his relationship with his legendary source - now known to be the former FBI honcho Mark Felt - speculation about journalism's greatest mystery has extreme pointed But as exciting as many set the resolution of Washington's oldest floating parlor game, to pupils of the press and the presidency it neared a chance to answer other questions about Watergate and journalism, a certain number of of which matter far more than reaching far down Throat's identity: How important was The Washington Post's reporting to the exposing of the full Watergate scandal? in what manner faithful to events was All the President's Men the one and the other the movie and book? What was the character of anonymous sourcing in The Final Days, Woodward and Bernstein's behind-the-scenes account of the extremity of Richard Nixon's presidency, which encouraged following efforts to probe the innermost councils of American presidents?

But now, without plenteous fanfare, a huge repository of ball of threads and leads to such questions is available. In 2003 the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin - a literary archive that houses the bring togethered scribblings of James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and other greats - paid $5 million for Woodward's and Bernstein's Watergate files. The trove includes interview notes from their history-making newspaper stories and their works All the President's Men (1974) and The Final Days (1976); volume and screenplay manuscript drafts; correspondence; publicity materials; and other assorted documents relating to their coverage of the scandal that forced Nixon to quit the presidency in August 1974 This February, the Ransom Center render free of accessed the first batch.

Those holdings include 74 standard-size boxe 6 oversize boxe 3 oversize folder 3 galley folder and 21 limit volumes. They attest to the variety of the reporters' sources, including Vice President Spiro Agnew; Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the prefer committee on Watergate; CIA Director William Colby; the White House aide John Ehrlichman; Republican Senator Barry Goldwater; the "plumber" Egil Krogh; and Nixon's Watergate lawyers, J Fr Buzhardt and James St Clair. More flies will be lay opened when other sources die.

I have not done what a certain quantity of historian eventually needs to do: lay out weeks with the Woodstein papers, carefully using the sum of two units men's notes alongside other primary sources to answer the larger questions about Watergate and journalism. I did, however, not long ago take a first look at the papers, and place that they offer some tantalizing hints. A not many examples:

THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG?

One question that historians and Watergate buff-skins debate is how much the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein contributed to the in all senses of Watergate. Critics such as Edward Jay Epstein have argued that the journalists simply published information that would have doomed Nixon anyway one time the prosecutors brought it to light. Others calculator that for months after the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic headquarters, sum of two units views of Watergate competed for public acceptance - individual holding that the burglary was an isolated incident, unconnect to administration higher-ups; the other positing a wider campaign of White House sabotage operations - and that the Post's reporting, by the agency of publicly raising the latter possibility, helped young ox key players to unravel the broader conspiracy when the Justice Department would not.

Some ball of threads in the Ransom Center papers support the latter claim. Consider the notes of an interview Woodward guidanceed with Sam Ervin on January 22 1973 just after the North Carolina senator had been named to head the newly created Watergate committee. At the time, the view that Watergate did not stretch out into the White House upper reaches, and that the burglars acted upon their own, held sway. on the contrary Woodward and Bernstein reported the existence of a wider campaign of White House illegality. The interview notes present to view that Ervin was eager to learn the reporters' sources, indicating his interest in investigating beyond the boundaries the FBI had placed upon its inquiry. "Want list of witnesses to subpoena," Woodward recorded Ervin saying, suggesting that he wanted to tread on the heels of up on the Post's discovery of a broader White House conspiracy.

Ervin also wanted to contact other offices that had already investigated Watergate, including that of Earl Silbert, then the lead Justice Department prosecutor in the case. "This means they also plan to investigate the investigators,'' Woodward wrote to himself. Ervin had apparently conclud that the official inquiries thus far had been inadequate, on the other hand that by pursuing Woodstein's leads, he might further unravel the Watergate mystery. He did.

A NIXON ALLY TALKS

That Ervin had oral to Woodward and Bernstein was revealed in All the President's Men on the contrary the Ransom Center papers disclose many other sources, suggesting an array of informants far broader than all the pre-Felt sleuthing about reaching far down Throat has suggested. They included flat officials such as Senator Strom Thurmond of southerly Carolina, a conservative who would have been wait fored to shun the Watergate sleuth The notes record: