SPECIAL HISTORICAL MYSTERIES POST….The LA Times reports on two historical mysteries today.
First, John Dean says the identity of Deep Throat will become public soon:
Bob Woodward, a reporter on the team that covered the Watergate story, has advised his executive editor at the Washington Post that Throat is ill….The source who informed me that Woodward leaked the news of Throat’s illness to the executive editor of the Post gave me that information either on “deep background” or “off the record” (I never could get the distinction of those rules straightened out). So I apologize to my source if this information was never meant to be public, but it is a tidbit too hot to keep sitting on.
Second, Herbert Lee Stivers, a retired sheet-metal worker from Hesperia, claims that he’s the guy who gave Hermann Goering the cyanide that Goering used to commit suicide. He says it all happened when he met a German girl who said she had a friend she wanted Stivers to meet:
There, Stivers said he was introduced to two men who called themselves Erich and Mathias. They told him that Goering was “a very sick man” who wasn’t being given the medicine he needed in prison.
Twice, Stivers said, he took notes hidden by Erich in a fountain pen to Goering. The third time, Erich put a capsule in the pen for him to take to the Nazi.
“He said it was medication, and that if it worked and Goering felt better, they’d send him some more,” Stivers said. “He said they’d give him a couple of weeks and that Mona would tell me if they wanted to send him more medicine.”
Next up: who really killed JFK?
UPDATE: As Steve Snyder points out in comments, it should be fairly easy to come up with a list of consensus suspects for Deep Throat’s identity and then check to see which ones are gravely ill. I’m much too lazy to do this myself, but it seems tailor made for the supposedly distributed intellect of the blogosphere. Let’s get cracking, folks!
