Mr. Throat, for the younger readers, was an anonymous source who gave valuable leads and tips to Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Under their editor, Ben Bradlee, they eventually linked the "third-rate burglary" of the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel all the way to Nixon's inner-circle of senior advisors - leading to prosecutions and the resignation of President Nixon.

The Washington Post won a Pulitzer and gained an amazing reputation as top newspaper. Woodward and Bernstein were played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in a great movie called All The President's Men. See it if you haven't.

Now about this business of naming Deep Throat - both Woodward and Bernstein have said that they will never name who Deep Throat was until he has passed away, respecting their source's desire to stay anonymous. John Dean is merely claiming to have figured out who it is. There is no way he can claim with 100 percent certainty who it is. Any assertion above reproach would require "smoking gun" evidence: a tape of conversations between the journalists and Deep Throat, for instance.

Dean doesn't have this.

Now it is fun to speculate who the inside source was. Whomever it was, they would have had to have inside access to the Oval office, yet would need to have been sufficiently removed to avoid going down with the vile, fascist crooks like G. Gordon Liddy or those lesser-evils on the Nixon staff.

Some have speculated that it was Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan. I disagree. Buchanan has tried so hard to claim the Nixon aura in his previous campaigns that it seems unlikely he would have ratted out his own administration. Many have said that Deep Throat was a composite character, a combination of several sources. Maybe. But Woodward has denied this many, many times.

I've always suspected it was Bob Dole. Like Buchanan, he's stayed active in politics for another 25 years and his wife still entertains the idea of running for office so there is reason why he wouldn't want to be identified. He was a senior, influential Senator and the Senate Republican Whip being groomed for big things. He had the inner access. He was more of a Reagan Republican than a Nixon Republican in a time before Reagan was even around so he had no great love for Nixon - he was a true believer in conservatism.

Whatever Dean says, ignore it. My guess is we won't find out until some prominent former political figure passes away.