Who's Who.

• Author: THREADGILL, SUSAN
• Position: Political anecdotes - Brief Article

Just after CNN's cameras had caught Nancy Reagan's obviously deeply touched response to a film tribute to her husband at the GOP convention, Larry King turned to one of the people in his booth and asked for a comment. There were two problems: first, the person he turned to was Donald Regan, Ronald Reagan's former chief of staff who had devoted a large part of his White House memoir to attacking Nancy. Second, King called him "Michael."

Lynne Cheney is the co-author of a Washington novel called The Body Politic. In it the vice president dies of a heart attack that occurs while he is making love. Guess who succeeds him as his party's candidate for the vice presidency? His wife.

Should Dick be worried?

This reminds an old-timer we know of the time Charles Percy, after his daughter's murder, won a surprise victory in his first senate race. Dick Nixon was beginning his campaign for the 1968 Republican nomination and the sick joke around town was "Tricia and Julie are locking their doors every night."

This contribution to our How Things Have Changed Department comes from an article quoting Richard Berke, the national political correspondent of The New York Times, in the May issue of Lambda Report:

"This is a newspaper where not so long ago--when I started there 15 years ago--they were keeping lists--the department heads were asking for lists of the gay reporters in different sections so they could be punished in different ways ... Now it's like, there are times when you look at the front-page meeting and ... literally three-quarters of the people deciding what's on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals."

Good for the Times!

Speaking of Nixon, his former White House aide Leonard Garment says in a new book that another Nixon aide, John Sears, was Deep Throat. And Sears does talk more like Deep Throat than any of the other suspects, but he didn't know nearly as much about Watergate as our candidate Fred Fielding, who was John Dean's deputy and one of the great leakers of the modern era, as was our second choice, David Gergen, who also happens to have gone to Yale with Bob Woodward. Our third choice is Garment himself, who was known to detest the Haldemans and the Colsons and was also a skilled leaker. Our fourth and fifth choices are Alexander Haig and Fred Buzhardt, who were clearly the main sources for The Final Days, Woodward and Bernstein's second book about Watergate. Even if none of our five candidates turns out to be Deep Throat, we...