Searching For a Source Named “X”: Why is Bob Woodward Still Covering Up the Real “Deep Throat”? After his father, L. Patrick Gray III, died in 2005, Ed Gray set out to right a wrong. Thirty years earlier, in Woodward and Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” Pat Gray had been defamed by the character the authors called “Deep Throat.” The Gray family had always known of the libel, but there was no one to be held accountable. Their First Amendment privilege protected Woodward and Bernstein from having to reveal the liar’s name. And when they finally did, by naming W. Mark Felt in 2005, just a few weeks before Pat Gray died, it was immediately obvious to Ed Gray and his father that “Deep Throat” was still unidentified. The “Deep Throat” who had defamed Pat Gray in “All the President’s Men” was not Mark Felt. Both Grays knew this. So Ed Gray decided to employ the journalists’ own tools to track down the truth. In this fast-paced and gripping presentation, listeners will travel with him as he uncovers the proof that “Deep Throat” was a fabrication, a single fictional character made up from several of Woodward’s actual sources, some of whom, like Mark Felt, are now dead and some of whom, like the one called “X” in Woodward’s own notes, are almost certainly still be alive.

The Pressroom/Cloakroom Complex: How the Behind-the-Scenes Tactics of Watergate are Still in Use Today and Why We Should All be Wary: Reporters earn their pay by telling us what we don’t already know. Politicians and high-level bureaucrats stay in power by undermining their detractors and protecting their friends. That toxic mix boiled over in the Watergate scandal that toppled the Nixon administration, and the lessons learned by the winners and losers continue to inform much of Washington today. Few are as conversant as Ed Gray is with those lessons, and in this multimedia presentation he lays them out. Along the way, listeners are treated to highlights from the infamous Nixon White House tapes (some of them uproariously funny, others disturbingly less so), reporters’ notes and calls,  private family recordings of his late father discussing them, all in an entertaining, highly informative and viewpoint-changing event.

Who Should Wear the Shield? The Problem of Anonymous Sources in High-Stakes Political Investigations:  An intriguing multimedia look into the conflict between front page openness and grand jury secrecy. Both are bedrock Constitutional rights. But what happens when the application of one results in a limitation on the other? In the criminal investigation of high government officials it happens nearly every time. Using audio recordings, previously secret transcripts and press accounts from his father’s experience as acting director of the FBI during Watergate, Ed shows how the game was played in Washington then, and is still played by the same rules today, inviting audience members to draw their own conclusions to the speech’s title question.