Bush 41 was `Deep Throat'?

An author writes to the Poynter Institute's Romenesko that he believes George Herbert Walker Bush was Bob Woodward's veiled source in the Watergate investigation. Does this fit a man tied so closely to the comedic impressionist's line, "Wouldn't be prudent."? I find this one hard to believe, but Adrian Havill points out that Bush 41 had plenty of motives to help the Washington Post sink Nixon.

Did Bush have motivation? You bet. It was Richard Nixon who urged Bush to leave a safe seat in Congress, hinting there would be a position as assistant Secretary of the Treasury waiting for him if he failed to win a Senate seat held by Ralph Yarborough. When Bush lost, Nixon reneged and asked him to take the U.N. slot instead but teased him by hinting he would be the replacement for Spiro Agnew in 1972. Instead, he was given the thankless task of heading the Republican National Committee in 1973. The elder Bush got his revenge in the end, by standing up at a cabinet meeting in August of 1974 and becoming the first person in Nixon's inner circle to ask the President to resign.

[Romenesko (8th letter from top)]

Meanwhile, Watergate Papers Unveiled at UT

Of course, the identity of Deep Throat isn't included in the notes made public, but there's still some interesting stuff about the downfall of President Richard Nixon, reports the Washington Post.

But what is in the collection reveals publicly for the first time that even Nixon's closest aides and senior Republicans on Capitol Hill shared "doubts, worries and suspicions" about Nixon. They were concerned, Woodward said, both about the president's involvement in the criminal Watergate coverup and his fragile psychological state toward the end of his presidency.

[snip]

The documents range from Woodward's hand-scribbled notes from the preliminary court hearing for the five men arrested June 17, 1972, after a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex to 42 pages of typed notes gleaned from eight extensive interviews with one of Nixon's principal Watergate lawyers, J. Fred Buzhardt.

According to a synopsis of the Buzhardt interviews that is included, the lawyer said that 10 months before the president resigned, "I concluded . . . that Nixon would not make it." He described in detail to the reporters how Nixon resisted disclosing to him and other lawyers the contents of the secret Oval Office tape recordings that eventually led to his downfall. Instead, Nixon ordered them to leak stories about how Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly resisted disclosing their own tape recordings.

[WP]