Thread by @dabeard

So much of #Watergate didn’t become public for years, often decades, later. Thanks to @vermontgmg’s new history, we have a number of examples. Here are a few: 1/x

Reporter Carl Bernstein had a tip a special grand jury had taken a secret straw poll on whether the president was guilty. Prosecutors weren’t aware of it, denied it, one called publisher Katharine Graham to warn her off it. But it happened, we found out 7 years later. 2/x

New Vice President was chatting with a @Newsweek reporter when the reporter told him Nixon couldn’t survive the scandal—“and you’re going to be president.”
Ford responded: “You’re probably right.”
But the conversation remained off the record until 2007. 3/x

The day Nixon got him fired, special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox wrote federal judge John Sirica to offer his services to the court. Sirica passed; the letter was unreleased until 2018 4/x

As one Nixon aide testified in televised hearings on #Watergate, an LBJ aide was burying evidence of Nixon’s pre-White House sabotage of LBJ’s peace talks on Vietnam. in 1973, LBJ aide Walt Rostow asked that the evidence be sealed for 50 years. 5/x

It wasn’t until 2005 that fmr FBI No. 2 Mark Felt acknowledged he was Deep Throat, a key source of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting. But Nixon and his crew figured he was leaking by 1973. “That’s a hell of a way for him to get in the [FBI] top spot,” Nixon said. @vermontgmg 6/x

Ben Bradlee said he’d been troubled with details of the Deep Throat story. A flower pot? How many meetings in the garage? “There’s a residual fear in my soul that this isn’t quite straight.” The quote never made it into his memoir, and was uncovered in his files in 2010. 7/x