In from the Garage.(media watch)

WHY is the identity of Deep Throat more than a trivia question, like what happened to Judge Crater, or an item of Seventies nostalgia, like sideburns?

Richard Nixon found himself embroiled in Watergate because he was Richard Nixon. Some presidents (Lincoln, Reagan) seem miraculously to lack the genes for suspicion or rancor; others (Washington, Eisenhower) have them, but keep them rigorously in check. Nixon had real enemies, but he was paranoid about them, and it brought him down.

But there was also a geopolitical context, missing from the Deep Throat hoopla. Nixon and his assistant, Henry Kissinger, were playing a high-risk game of international Twister, simultaneously trying to save South Vietnam, get America out, and cozy up to China and the Soviet Union while playing both off against the other. Success depended on keeping the early moves from allies in Saigon and Taipei, from our own foreign-policy establishment, from political opponents (Nixon had to get reelected), and from the press. After the Pentagon Papers appeared on the front page of the New York Times, Nixon feared premature exposure. Hence the plumbers, and hence their visit to the Watergate complex.

Nixon's grand strategy was defensive and arcane; it lacked Reagan's confidence-his confidence, one might almost say, in human nature. On the other hand, Reagan did not come into office with 500,000 troops in ...