Former FBI agent Mark Felt, better known as “Deep Throat,” the man who helped reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein expose the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, passed away Thursday, aged 95.
Mark Felt suffered from congestive heart failure; he died at home in Santa Rosa, California, Thursday, December 18, family friend John D. O’Connor told the Associated Press. It was O’Connor who wrote the 2005 Vanity Fair article revealing Mark Felt was the one and only “Deep Throat,” three decades after the Watergate scandal had brought down President Richard Nixon.
Felt kept his role in the dramatic political play secret for thirty years. While revealing information to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, information that would ultimately lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon on August 9, 1974, and the imprisonment of some of his aides, Felt insisted that his identity remain a secret – he was only known as “Deep Throat.”
Nixon and his aides suggested it was Felt who leaked the damaging details connecting the White House to the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, but Felt denied this thoroughly.
It was only in May 2005 that he told O’Connor for his Vanity Fair article that he was indeed “the guy they used to call Deep Throat,” reviving and resolving one of America’s greatest political mysteries. Woodward, Bernstein Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Washington Post’s executive editor during Watergate, confirmed Felt’s claim to be Deep Throat.
The notorious figure of course generated mixed feelings: some considered him to be a traitor for betraying the commander in chief, while others praised him as a hero who had the tremendous courage to divulge a corrupt administration.
Felt was very aware of his controversial place in American history and wrote in his 2006 memoir “A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, ‘Deep Throat’ and the Struggle for Honor in Washington” that people would for a long time from now debate whether his association with Woodward was “the right thing.”
“The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, and isn’t that what the FBI is supposed to do?” he concluded.
Felt, born August 17, 1913, in Twin Falls, Idaho, had been very uncertain about revealing his identity in the magazine article and had disputes with his children. His daughter Joan managed to persuade him, arguing that Woodward would benefit from the revelation anyway after Felt died.
According to the Vanity Fair piece, Joan told her father they could make enough money to pay some bills, such as the debt she had “for the kids’ education.” She convinced him with a “Let’s do it for the family.” The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate coverage in the 1970s. Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book “All the President’s Men” was a best-seller. The subsequent film, starring Robert Redford as Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat, received eight Academy Award nominations and won four, including Best Picture.
Mark Felt graduated from law school at George Washington University and worked for a year at the Federal Trade Commission before joining the FBI in 1942. In an ironic twist, he was assigned to uncover the Washington Post’s source, all the while being this exact person.
Felt is survived by two children, Joan Felt and Mark Felt Jr., and four grandchildren. His wife, Audrey Felt, died in 1984.
