Watergate Papers Sold For $5 Million

University of Texas Deal Keeps Sources Secret

AUSTIN, April 7 -- In one of the largest such purchases in American history, the University of Texas at Austin has bought the Watergate papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for $5 million, the university announced today.

The archive -- 75 file-drawer-size boxes of notebooks, memos, correspondence, photographs, clippings, manuscripts, transcriptions and loose notes from the authors' reporting for The Washington Post and for their two books on the Nixon administration's demise -- comprises a "meticulous record of the Watergate story from beginning to end," university President Larry R. Faulkner said in a news conference.

As part of the extraordinary deal to purchase the materials, the university agreed to honor Woodward and Bernstein's long-standing commitment to protect the identity of a number of confidential sources until their deaths, including "Deep Throat," the Nixon administration official whose deep-background information was crucial to The Post's pursuit of the Watergate story.

The collection, save for the papers that would reveal the identity of confidential sources, is to be catalogued, preserved and made available to scholars and the public within a year at the university's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, one of the nation's premier academic archives. The center's holdings include a Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare folios, the final proofs of James Joyce's "Ulysses" and letters of Thomas Jefferson.

"Here was an institution that understood that some things would have to wait but that the great bulk of this material would be available," said Woodward, 60, an assistant managing editor at The Post.

"People are now going to get a look at our work in a way that can be evaluated," said Bernstein, 59. "Everybody else in this has been scrutinized. We haven't. And we're going to take a few hits in this."

A moment later, Woodward stepped in to clarify Bernstein's remark. The "hits" to which he referred might include the names and numbers of Bernstein's former girlfriends scribbled among the papers, Woodward said.

The University of Texas at Austin is the nation's largest and among the richest universities. Nonetheless, the price of the acquisition, to be financed by private gifts to the university, surprised some academic library and archives directors, who could not cite a comparable price paid to a living author for written materials.

"It's unusual, there's no doubt about that -- political collections do not normally bring this kind of money," said Thomas Hickerson, associate university librarian at Cornell University and a recent president of the Society of American Archivists. "On the other hand, I won't say that it's outrageous. I think that for a political collection this is a biggie. This will really draw the attention of researchers. I think they have a unique body of material here."

Hickerson said the University of Texas purchase is likely to have an inflationary effect, leading other contemporary authors, journalists and political figures to seek higher prices from research libraries for their papers. "This'll be the new gold standard for these kinds of collections," he said.

Victoria Steele, head of the department of special collections for the Young Research Library at UCLA, said she believed that UCLA had set a record for living authors last year by paying Susan Sontag, the author and critic, a reported $1.1 million for her papers, letters, manuscripts and a 20,000-book library.

On hearing of the $5 million price tag for the Watergate materials, Steele said: "Wow! . . . It is a lot of money. But I have to say it's indisputably an important event."