Watergate's 'Deep Throat' Revealed; Reagan Meets With Soviet Leader At Moscow Summit: Today In History

May 31, 2017, is the 149th day of the year, with 214 days remaining. The moon is in a waxing crescent phase, with illumination at 39 percent.

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Reagan and Gorbachev: The Moscow Summit

Two days into the commencement of the Moscow Summit in 1988, things were off to a rocky start between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, then-general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The summit had been touted as a celebratory follow-up to the breakthrough summit of October 1987, where Reagan and Gorbachev signed the groundbreaking Intermediate-Range Nucclear Forces Treaty (INF), which eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles from Europe.

The May 31 meeting consisted of "lectures" from Reagan to Gorbachev regarding improving the Soviet Union's human rights record to Gorbachev's marked frustration when he said it might be "a time to bang our fists on the table" in order to hammer out an arms agreement. At other times, Reagan was speakingn before a group of students and Russian intellectuals or talking a walking tour of old churches. The summit meeting was considered a victory of style over substance.

Identity of Watergate's "Deep Throat" figure revealed

After 30 years of speculation, the identity of "Deep Throat" — the previously unidentified source who leaked key details of Nixon's Watergate cover-up to Washington Post reporters — revealed himself has 91-year-old Mark Felt, described as "number two at the FBI in the early 70s."

For some context, the Watergate scandal came to be when the public learned that five men had been arrested for breaking into and illegally wiretapping the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. One of the suspects, James W. McCord Jr., was revealed as President Richard Nixon’s salaried security coordinator.

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Photo credit: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library