If you grew up during the era of “Watergate” and Richard Nixon’s presidency, you might remember Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and the others involved with bringing the Nixon “Watergate” scandal to light. (If you were already a functioning adult — whatever that means — at the time, you surely do remember much of it.) One of the shadowy figures of the time who became a perennial “guess who the source was” figure in American history was Mark Felt. He died yesterday at the age of 95.
Who, you might ask, was Mark Felt? Why doesn’t his name really ring a bell?
If you are a political science or U.S. history “major”/buff/whatever, Felt might be a name you know. He was second-in-command of the FBI first under J. Edgar Hoover, then under interim FBI Director L. Patrick Gray. So perhaps the name rings a bell for that reason.
More importantly, Felt was the infamous information source that Woodward and Bernstein used to break the “Watergate” story, and who remained infuriatingly anonymous as “Deep Throat” for about 30 years. It wasn’t until 2005 that Felt’s family (he was suffering from dementia by that point) revealed his hidden identity. Bob Woodword confirmed that Felt was indeed “Deep Throat,” and the secret was finally out.
Reads sort of like a spy novel, doesn’t it? The report on Felt’s passing in The Washington Post, the paper for which Woodward and Bernstein did their work, tells of some of the incredibly clever subterfuges everyone involved used to keep the secret at the time, and the amazing fact that so many high-powered, celebrity writers/editors were able to keep the secret for so long.
And so, another chapter of U.S. history comes to a silent close.