With Deep Throat's identity revealed in 2005, one might have thought there couldn't be much more to discover about the reporting of Watergate.

Both Woodward and Bernstein have mined the Nixon White House scandal over the years in books, while their reporting was already dramatized in the classic 1976 film, "All the President's Men."

But if The New York Times hadn't sat on an FBI tip, the Washington Post's dynamic duo might not have gone down in journalism history. The Times Richard Perez-Pena reports on the one that got away.

Robert M. Smith, a former Times reporter, says that two months after the burglary, over lunch at a Washington restaurant, the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, L. Patrick Gray, disclosed explosive aspects of the case, including the culpability of the former attorney general, John Mitchell, and hinted at White House involvement.



Mr. Smith rushed back to The Times’s bureau in Washington to repeat the story to Robert H. Phelps, an editor there, who took notes and tape-recorded the conversation, according to both men. But then Mr. Smith had to hand off the story — he had quit The Times and was leaving town the next day to attend Yale Law School.



Mr. Smith kept the events to himself for more than three decades, but decided to go public after learning that Mr. Phelps planned to include it in his memoir.



In the days after that 1972 lunch, the Times bureau was consumed by the Republican convention, and then Mr. Phelps left on a monthlong trip to Alaska.



So what happened to the tip, the notes, the tape? Were they pursued to no effect? Simply forgotten?



Phelps, in his forthcoming memoir on life at the Times, said that he has "no idea" what happened to the tapes, and it's a "mystery" why the paper never followed through on the tip.

UPDATE: Ed Gray, son of the late FBI director and co-author of the book, In Nixon's Web, writes in the comments section that in the two months after the burglary, his father "gave interviews to nearly every important Washington bureau reporter, many of whom are still reporting today." And he casts doubt on these new revelations.

"In not one of any of those other interviews did L. Patrick Gray pass along anything like what Phelps and Smith now claim he passed along to Smith. Readers of Phelps’s new book will have to judge for themselves why the neither the young reporter nor the then-editor can explain why no story was ever written based on the “explosive aspects” supposedly passed along by Gray on this one occasion. Had my father intended to leak anything at all about Watergate or any other subject of interest to the FBI, rest assured that he would have made sure that the story got published."

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