In the current issue of the American Spectator (you’ll have to go to a bookstore or newsstand, or subscribe to the magazine, to read it, since the print version’s contents are not online) Fox News correspondent James Rosen (whose very well-researched and highly recommended biography of John Mitchell, The Strong Man, has been the subject of several previous posts at TNN) reviews L. Patrick Gray III’s posthumous memoir In Nixon’s Web. This article is quite worth reading. In it, Rosen devotes a perceptive paragraph to the argument of Ed Gray (LPG’s son, who completed the book after his father’s death) that the statements and information attributed to “Deep Throat” in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book All The President’s Men did not entirely originate with W. Mark Felt (as Woodward and Bernstein stated in 2005), and that “Deep Throat” was not a person, but a composite.
And in election news, at 9:14 Central time tonight in St. Paul – standing in the arena which is to be the site of the 2008 Republican convention – Sen. Barack Obama announced that he had attained the Democratic presidential nomination. Sen. Hillary Clinton, however, still refuses to concede. Indeed, she succeeded in winning tonight’s primary in South Dakota, a state Obama was widely expected to win. Several recent articles have noted President Clinton’s round-the-clock campaigning in dozens of small South Dakota towns that have never seen a current or former president, and I’m wondering just how many thousand voters in that state personally promised old Bill they’d vote for his wife, and felt obliged to keep their word. It’s a state with a keen sense of its frontier past, and of course in the days when Deadwood was something other than a popular cable TV series, a man’s word was his bond in a town like that.