The Deepest Throat : SILENT COUP: The Removal of a President, <i> By Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin (St. Martin’s Press: $24.95; 507 pp.) </i>

Is it possible that Richard Nixon was hounded out of office not primarily because of his chicanery but rather for being an architect of peace who angered the national- security establishment? Was Al Haig acting as the military complex’s representative in the White House, directing a secret spying operation of the Joint Chiefs against the President? And did Haig, acting as “Deep Throat,” use Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to leak information that protected the spy ring while undermining the President? Was the Watergate burglary the work of John Dean to exploit his future wife’s association with a call-girl operation that serviced clients in the Democratic National Committee, and did he implicate an innocent Nixon to save himself?

Those are the startling claims of “Silent Coup,” a very readable and yet detailed book. Surprisingly, some very conservative national-security types like Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy have backed this account, along with a long list of Nixon associates who are quoted throughout, including the late John Mitchell, who the publisher claims granted 74 exclusive interviews for this work. True, Mitchell and the gang may have been out to protect their own and Nixon’s reputations, but why the tack of supporting a very dark view of the inner workings of their own Republican administration?

Most intriguing is the endorsement of this wild thesis in the foreword by Roger Morris, a respected chronicler of the Nixon years and a former National Security Council staffer who resigned over the secret bombing of Cambodia. He worked closely with the players, has written key Nixon, Kissinger and Haig biographies, and was in no way tainted by Watergate. Morris writes, and the book attempts to prove, that the Nixon “regime was targeted because of its policies as well as its squalid politics.” Nixon was dumped in what Morris calls a “coup d’etat” engineered by a “formidable national security party” opposed to his secretly negotiated opening to China and his vigorous pursuit of arms control with the Soviets.

Before you turn the page away from what must seem preposterous charges, consider that this book is more carefully researched and solidly documented than some more well-received books on Watergate. True, it takes aim at the orthodox version first expounded by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their celebrated writings on the subject, but those works rarely named sources. There is just too much troubling documentation for this book to be dismissed out of hand as some critics have done.

Yes, Mitchell is let off lightly, Nixon the master conniver is pictured as being just too hapless in the hands of a manipulative Dean, and the grand theory of a military conspiracy is vaguely circumstantial at best. However, the authors have been just too good at delineating the inconsistencies in testimony that make a hash of anyone else’s Watergate theory. If nothing else, “Silent Coup” now establishes the parameters of confusion and misinformation and provides a starting point for any further investigation and debate about one of the most traumatic incidents in American political life.

Understandably, this provocative book by two “nobodies”--Len Colodny, a private investigator, and Robert Gettlin, a former Washington-based reporter--has tweaked the journalistic establishment, particularly the Washington Post whose assistant managing editor, Bob Woodward, comes in for a sustained drubbing. The implication is that, at worst, Woodward was using his journalism as a cover for his true job with the Pentagon or CIA and, at best, he was merely used by Haig to point the finger at Nixon rather than Dean. Woodward has simply dismissed the charges--which is his right, given his own knowledge of his sources. But the rest of the media has assumed a similar stance while being as much in the dark as ever about the original leaks that gave us the Watergate coverup caper. This book raises questions about those sources, and that is fair game.

After a flurry of news stories, the book’s allegations have largely been ignored. Time magazine dropped a planned cover story and CBS’s “60 Minutes” also backed off, with both news organizations insisting that their decisions had nothing to do with the book’s veracity. Attempts to disparage the research, like the Watergate coverup itself, have fallen on the rock of taped interviews which the authors have been willing to produce. And the list of those interviewed, including Woodward himself, is truly impressive.

In his interview, Woodward made light of issues involving journalistic ethics, particularly concerning his role in the Senate investigation where he was successful in recommending the hiring of his lifelong friend and future collaborator, Scott Armstrong, and even assisted in focusing the direction of the Senate inquiry. He denies having briefed Haig when he was a Naval officer but does not comment on the considerable evidence that Haig was the main and self-serving leaker, in what one presumes was a “deep throat” composite. The problem with secret sources and leaked information is that it may be true but only partially so and out of context. It is time for both Woodward and Bernstein to stop stonewalling about their sources; if they can’t name names they should at least provide a more complete context for their work. This argument should have been made earlier in the media out of a spirit of fairness and a desire not to tarnish reputations without the opportunity to confront one’s accuser. Yes, fair even to the likes of Nixon, but that’s easy to say only in hindsight.

The biggest problem the authors have is that Nixon, even by their account, was so venal in his conduct of the presidency that it becomes difficult to exonerate him of any crimes conducted during his tenure in the White House. He may not have ordered the Watergate break-in, but he did approve a campaign of harassment of his political enemies, real or imagined. If he didn’t order Watergate, and the evidence here is in his favor, one might argue that it’s only that he hadn’t had time to think it up.

Nixon had authorized the “plumbers” unit operating out of the Executive Office Building, which numbered Watergate burglars Liddy and Howard Hunt among their operatives. A climate condoning the Hunt-Liddy-directed break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office certainly was consistent with the Watergate caper, run by the same two men, even if Nixon did not personally order it. Indeed, one of Dean’s first assignments was to look into plans to neutralize domestic opponents of Nixon’s policies in Southeast Asia, and the President himself endorsed this infamous “Huston Plan,” which even J. Edgar Hoover and John Mitchell felt went too far.

It is unmistakably clear that, set up or not, Nixon did participate in a serious obstruction of justice which was the basis of his eviction from office. The authors here put the best spin on Nixon’s instruction to the CIA to thwart the FBI investigation of Watergate, claiming that Nixon was just going with his natural instincts to lie and otherwise deceive the Congress, the media and the American people. Deceit was Nixon’s political way of life, acknowledged by friend and foe. And he was skilled--this may have been his principal skill--at lying. When Dean came up with the harebrained scheme of getting the CIA to block the FBI investigation as a political favor, Nixon had a better ploy. Haldeman recounted that incident in his own book: “Dean had suggested a blatant political move by calling in the CIA--now Nixon showed how much more astute he was by throwing a national-security blanket over the same suggestion.”

My own theory is that Nixon got in trouble precisely because the “national security” gambit was no longer working. By drinking Mai Tais with the Chinese Communist leadership, Nixon had undermined the chilling effect of the cold war on Congress and the media. The national-security cover was lifted just enough to permit public inspection of the sordid mess underneath. Questions could be asked and documents and tapes examined without being accused of giving aid and comfort to the nation’s enemy.

What is difficult to buy, because this book only states but does not prove the connection, is the implication that Haig was acting on behalf of a larger national-security party. This is where the book falls apart--overreaching to find a grand theory to explain Haig and Dean’s actions, when in fact ordinary and individual avarice, ambition and mendacity would do quite nicely. To believe that larger forces were at work requires a Nixonian imagination.