BY PAMELA AND KELLY YENSER
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HERE WE HAVE
IDAHO
ark Felt may have become our most famous Vandal — or our most infamous, depending on your point of view. For more than three decades, he kept a spectacular secret. According to Ben Bradlee, top editor of The Washington Post, it was “the last secret” of the story that became the juiciest political scandal in modern history — Watergate. And then in small increments of willingness, 91-year-old William Mark Felt ’35 let his family tell the world he was Deep Throat, a suspicion he had denied adamantly to his family, to the press and to the world. With family friend and attorney John O’Connor willing to help write the story and his daughter, Joan, needing to pay for his grandkids’ education, Felt revealed his identity on May 31. Vanity Fair magazine ran the story in their June issue. W. Mark Felt had finally ‘fessed up. Famous or infamous? Hero or traitor? Either way, Felt now stands as a legendary figure.
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President Nixon sits in his White House office, Aug. 16, 1973, as he poses for pictures after delivering a nationwide television address dealing with Watergate. Nixon repeated that he had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in and was not aware of any cover-up.
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he identity of Deep Throat seemed consigned to history until this June when Vanity Fair broke the news. That Deep Throat’s identity has been revealed in our time is big news. That Deep Throat turned out to be Mark Felt is not much of a surprise to anyone, especially to those who remember or study Watergate. Felt always has been on the short list of plausible informants: The FBI’s “Let me be very clear. then Acting Director L. Patrick Gray The story is completely III, who lived in Felt’s Fairfax, Va., neighborhood; Nixon speech-writers and Patrick Buchanan, David Gergen and Raymond Price; and a dozen others, I would have done it including Alexander Butterfield, who better, I would have been exposed Nixon’s Oval Office taperecording system. more effective. Deep As early as October 1972, Nixon himself suspected Felt, who was then Throat didn’t exactly assistant director at the FBI and bring the White House gunning for director. But Felt issued an absolute denial. He denied his role crashing down, did he?” as informant explicitly to family and friends. To the press, he denied it over —Mark Felt and over. In 1974, he told the Washington Times-News, “I would not leak any information. I did not and would not. I don’t operate that way.” The Washingtonian printed a quixotic quote: “I can tell that it was not I and it is not I.” In 1999, he told the Twin Falls Times-News,“Let me be very clear. The story is completely fictitious and false.” He gave the Hartford Courant an unequivocal and persuasive statement of deniability: “I would have done it better,” he insisted. “I would have been more effective. Deep Throat didn’t exactly bring the White House crashing down, did he?” But didn’t he?
fictitious
false.
2005
A Vandal’s Role in the Watergate Scandal
FALL
Mark Felt’s Deep Secret
The President: Richard M. Nixon, true-blue law and order guy with a square-jaw and tough demeanor; abuse of power led to his resignation, his demise hastened by the Watergate tapes. The Scandal: Watergate–the two-bit burglary that became biggest political scandal of the 20th century and, up to this moment, the most serious constitutional crisis in American history. The Liberal Press: The Washington Post, that hardcore bastion of fact-based newspapering; home of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters who unraveled Watergate with the help of Deep Throat; their story and press now scooped by the upstart, Vanity Fair, a glossy magazine largely devoted to soft journalism and celebrity. The Whistle-blower: Mark Felt, a straitlaced G-Man with movie star good looks who skulked around in dark places, whispering shadowy secrets. When Woodward promised to keep his name silent until death if only he would spill the beans on Watergate, he gradually agreed, thus consigning himself to a double life. He was given the code name Deep Throat, an allusion to a ’70s pornographic movie. The Hero: Same guy as above. FBI true believer and loyal protégé of J. Edgar Hoover, his hero. Felt presents himself in his 1979 memoir, “The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside,” as a model organization man – like his FBI superior Hoover, whom Felt considered disciplined and principled, loyal to his men and to the Bureau. When Felt’s leading role in the breaking of the Watergate story was confirmed recently, daughter, Joan, and grandson, Nick Jones, called him “a great American hero.” The Books and the Movies: In “All the President’s Men” (Simon and Schuster, 1994) he is a chain-smoking, shadow-wreathed character. In the 1976 film, he’s the shadowy chain-smoking guy played by Hal Holbrook, who tells Woodward (Robert Redford) to “Follow the money,” while Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), back at the Post, is jumping to conclusions and spilling ashes down his shirt. In a lucrative deal recently negotiated by Felt’s family, a new book to be co-authored by John O’Connor is tentatively titled “A G-man’s Life: The FBI, Being Deep Throat And the Struggle for Honor in Washington.” A new movie is optioned to Playton, a Tom Hanks’ company, and Hanks could have designs on playing Felt.
AP PHOTO/STF
Let’s review the players and events in the strange and paradoxical Deep Throat story:
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