The decades-long political and journalistic mystery of who the source “Deep Throat” was in the momentous Watergate scandal that destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency is now, 100 percent solved: the Washington Post has now confirmed that former FBI bigwig W. Mark Felt was the man:
The Washington Post today confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was “Deep Throat,” the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon.
The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee. The three spoke after Felt’s family and Vanity Fair magazine identified the 91-year-old Felt, now a retiree in California, as the long-anonymous source who provided crucial guidance for some of the newspaper’s groundbreaking Watergate stories.
See our earlier post here. THIS is solid confirmation. MORE:
The Vanity Fair story said Felt had admitted his “historic, anonymous role” following years of denial.
In a statement today, Woodward and Bernstein said, “W. Mark Felt was ‘Deep Throat’ and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage. However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in The Washington Post about Watergate.”
Felt’s guidance to Woodward — provided on “deep background” in secret meetings — helped keep public attention focused on the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate office and apartment complex, and on a subsequent cover-up effort. This ultimately led to a congressional investigation that revealed the role of Nixon and a number of his top aides. Under threat of impeachment, Nixon resigned in 1974.
Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee had kept the identity of “Deep Throat” secret at the source’s request, saying his name would be revealed upon his death. “We’ve kept that secret because we keep our word,” Woodward said.
But with the Vanity Fair article and the family’s statement, the three decided today to break their silence.
Indeed: the two reporters were put in a weird position, earlier today. You had Felt via his grandson insisting he was the source. Then you had Woodward and Bernstein insisting they couldn’t confirm or deny it to keep their pledge not to reveal the source until his death. That, in effect, created uncomfortable credibility problems for Felt to whom they owed a lot. At 91 he clearly wanted to get credit for his courage.
But the best quote comes from the Post’s former editor:
Bradlee, who was the Post’s executive editor during Watergate, said today, “The thing that stuns me is that the goddamn secret has lasted this long.”
And there is this dynamic, too:
Woodward said Felt helped The Post at a time of tense relations between the White House and much of the FBI hierarchy. He said the Watergate break-in came shortly after the death of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Felt’s mentor, and that Felt and other bureau officials wanted to see an FBI veteran promoted to succeed Hoover.
Felt himself had hopes that he would be the next FBI director, but Nixon instead appointed an administration insider, assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray, to the post.
But Bradlee again steals the show:
Bradlee, in an interview this afternoon, said that knowing that “Deep Throat” was a high-ranking FBI official helped him feel confident about the information that the paper was publishing about Watergate. He said that he knew the “positional identity” of “Deep Throat” as the Post was breaking its Watergate stories and that he learned his name within a couple of weeks after Nixon’s resignation.
“I knew the paper was on the right track,” Bradlee said. The “quality of the source” and the soundness of his guidance made him sure of that, he said.
And so….a historical and journalist mystery is brought to an end — and a chapter closes with a last spurt of drama.
Ironically, it’s closing at the time when the use of anonymous sources is coming into disfavor that ever amid calls for editors want to clamp down. But in the Watergate coverage the Post’s editors kept tight control and insisted on confirmation — a quality control on confirmation which meant the stories were rock solid.
Meanwhile, it’s nice that at the age of 91 Felt is seeing himself get credit for his role. He could have SOLD his story earlier but he didn’t. He kept the secret for years.
And now the pendulum has swung: shortly after Watergate there were some who viewed Deep Throat in a less kinder light. But history has taken care of them…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.