My husband has been waiting 30 years for this very day.The man loves a conspiracy theory mystery. At the time Watergate happened, he was a staunch conservative Republican and Nixon supporter. He was also in college in D.C., and had even stayed with his family once at the Howard Johnson's Motel across the street from the Watergate, the one where someone was staying and saw a light on late one night across the street and called the cops. (We actually stayed there with the kids about 15 years ago, too; now it's a GWU dorm.) One of the goals of his life has been to find out who Deep Throat was.
Which is leading us to wonder what he can focus on now. One of his earlier obsessions interests a long time ago -- a couple of years after we were married -- was that Skylab was falling out of orbit and he thought it would be interesting to get hit by it. I never quite got this, but he would get excited at the prospect that he could get hit by it and then we would be set for life. I reminded him that getting hit by Skylab would probably be all the life he would be getting, but no, he insisted, he didn't want to get killed by Skylab, maybe just hit on the arm or something. I pointed out that this would probably be fatal too, but noooo, come on! Just a little piece of it!
How much of this was leg-pulling I was never quite sure, because he can be extremely funny and he is also really, really smart. It's likely that if he really thought he could get hit by a piece of Skylab and survive, then he probably could have.
He is now about as far from that conservative Republican college student as a man can get. Like me (and I'm sorry if I'm offending anyone here), 9/11 for him evoked shadows of the burning of the Reichstag, the event that allowed Hitler to consolidate his power in Germany (and oh wait, he also started the fire.) He's not the kind of conspiracy theorist who thinks that aliens are randomly abducting goofballs off the roads of America and having their way with them. He's more the kind that believes that Hillary really was behind Whitewater. (He's a non-partisan consipiracy theorist. He doesn't trust any of them.)
So the only question that remains is whether or not he will believe that this guy really was Deep Throat. He's in his 90s, after all, and Woodward and Bernstein have already gone on record that they will reveal the secret when Mr. Throat passes on. Until then, the Hubs will either believe, in which case he'll have to find a new reason for living, or refuse to believe, in which case he may be right. Time will tell.
