Halfway through this book there is a strange photo of Richard Nixon and John Tower snapped at the White House. Nixon is gripping Tower by the throat with both hands. The two men are supposedly clowning for the camera, but you can see in Senator Tower's eyes that he does not like Nixon's bullying. At all.

Senator Tower was killed in a tragic plane crash in 1991. This ghost written autobiography, published in that year, seems a little jumpy, or chunked out, but it is as close as we may ever get to the important historical enigma of Texas Senator John Goodwin Tower, and especially of his little known power struggle with Richard Nixon in 1972, the year of the Watergate burglary.

In the elections of 1972, President Nixon tried to oust Senator Tower, who was then one of the most powerful Republicans in congress. The White House deliberately and repeatedly undercut Tower's re-election campaign in his native Texas. But despite Nixon's best efforts to ditch him, Tower routed his Democratic opponent and kept his seat in the Senate.

Some Watergate mavens think that while Nixon was working to unseat Tower in 1972, Senator Tower was working with Bob Woodward to unseat President Nixon. Tower is one of 22 people on the typical list of Deep Throat candidates. Why?

Senator Tower chaired the Senate Arms Services Committee. He knew a national security secret that was put at risk by the Watergate investigations. Most of the money used by the Nixon campaign to pay the Watergate burglars was contributed by Gulf Resources, a Houston defense contractor which no longer exists. The rather dangerous secret was that Gulf Resources was a producer of hydrogen bomb fuel.

Senator Tower himself exposed this eyebrow raising fact nine years after Watergate in a letter about Gulf Resources printed in the New York Times in 1983. What was going on?

The first step is easy to guess. Had the FBI investigation of Watergate continued, the money Gulf Resources contributed to the Nixon campaign could have been traced back to a nuclear arms transaction, since that was the business Gulf Resources was in. But Richard Nixon intervened at precisely this point to halt the FBI investigation of the money.

The intervention cost his Presidency. On tape, Nixon carefully called the Gulf Resources contribution "the Texas money" but the FBI had already determined that the money, about $100,000 altogether, came from outside the United States, nominally from Mexico. Opening up the source of this money to a serious investigation would have opened up a political and nuclear Pandora's Box.

Who were Gulf Resources' customers? Where was the product shipped? Who was making money? One prominent theory is that the CIA was exporting hydrogen bomb fuel to help China arm itself against Russia. There are five or six other theories. But the central fact is plain. Thirty years ago, the revelation of any sort of secret transaction involving the transfer of hydrogen bomb fuel, foreign or domestic, could have started a nuclear war.

Perhaps someone at CIA decided it was more logical to keep the nuclear secrets of Gulf Resources than it was to keep Richard Nixon.

Many authors think Deep Throat never existed, that the source in the shadows was just a rhetorical construct, a useful funnel for information gathered by multiple agents and packaged by the CIA for a favored reporter, Bob Woodward. But to capture the interest of Woodward's editors at the Washington Post, a Deep Throat "source" would have needed a real identity and a top tier Republican name. Hence, Senator John Tower.

This book offers quite a bit of support to the view that Texas Senator Tower was willing to be Deep Throat. He knew Bob Woodward. He had scores to settle with Richard Nixon. Arms deals, Defense, Banking and Intelligence were his professional specialities. He knew that Houston's Gulf Resources was a producer of hydrogen bomb fuel. The difficult, puzzling problem of selling arms to potential enemies is a recurring theme in Consequences.

Was he Deep Throat? Some of the evidence is inverted: Bob Woodward hinted in print that Deep Throat was a very tall man, and Senator Tower was the exact opposite of tall. Bob Woodward insists that Deep Throat is alive today and, sadly, Senator Tower is the exact opposite of alive.

See also: China Builds the Bomb by Lewis (Stanford Univ. Press); Dark Sun by Rhodes; Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA, by James Hougan; The Search for Deep Throat by Leonard Garment.