REMEMBER OL' FRED D. THOMPSON? No? You don't remember good ol' Frayud, Howard Baker's boy? The minority counsel on the Ervin Committee, you don't remember him?

Well, now that you mention it, wasn't he the one with the glasses?

No, no, no, that was Sam Dash, the majority counsel. You're getting them confused because they both wrote books about Watergate.

I am? They did?

Sure, sure. Sam's was your basic recap, but now Frayud, he went off chasin' the CIA because Sam's side was doing such a fine job of linking the White House and CREEP and the Cubans and all, Frayud wanted to pull a wounded hen act.

Izzat right?

Oh, yeah. But Frayud was entranced by the CIA, too, just like John Ehrlichman, who smelled fried clams every time he huddled with Richard Helms, you know, the CIA director.

Fried clams?

Yeah, illegal seafood. Like Ehrlichman was forever fishing for information the CIA wouldn't give him, so he wrote his book about how the CIA was blackmailing the president. He called it a novel, of course, so he wouldn't get sued, but you never know about those things.

Guess not.

The guy who really did the CIA trip, though, was that guy E. Howard Hunt. He made a living writing airport-bookstand-spy-thrillers when he wasn't burgling to make the world safe for democracy. He wrote a book about Watergate, too, but take away the cloak-and-dagger and all you get is self-service (it's cheaper that way). Just like Magruder and Dean, the two bright young boys who did all they could to stanch the tide just as soon as there wasn't a wave to ride anymore.

Uh huh.

Colson was the shrewd one, though, everybody thought he was crazy but he had the best marketing sense of all of them.

What'd he do?

Colson saw the potential in the religious bookstore market, so he hardly wrote about Watergate at all. Just about how nice it was for Jesus to have sublimated those overpowering urges to stomp his grandmother in the name of the Republican Party.