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Felt inspired thousands of students
Deep Throat's death comes as no shock to the nursing home atmosphere that sometimes looms over American newspapering these days, where we tend to log on each morning and ask, while chewing soft food, who's dead now? (Or, who's been laid off? Who's stopped subscribing? Who's stopped delivering? Who's decided to close their Washington bureau?)
- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
- Published: 22:40 December 20, 2008
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Mark 'Deep Throat' Felt dies at 95
The man who tipped off reporters to scandal that toppled a US president dies
Washington: Deep Throat's death comes as no shock to the nursing home atmosphere that sometimes looms over American newspapering these days, where we tend to log on each morning and ask, while chewing soft food, who's dead now? (Or, who's been laid off? Who's stopped subscribing? Who's stopped delivering? Who's decided to close their Washington bureau?)
He'd been identified three years before, anyway, ending this town's best parlour game. W. Mark Felt Sr was the secret source who played an important and clandestine role in The Washington Post's investigation into the Watergate break-in and ensuing, primordial White House imbroglio of the 1970s. But he was more than that, to a certain sceptical spectrum of Americans. He was Deep Throat, ya know? Without a single byline he inspired thousands and thousands of campus misfits to get journalism degrees, each one of them in pursuit of bad haircuts, smoking habits and the next Deep Throat, the next huge story. Any "gate" that followed or may yet follow feels incomplete without its own Deep Throat.
Felt had breakfast Thursday at his home in Santa Rosa, California, he took a nap, and disappeared into the evermore. As we in the newspaper "biz" say, he took the buyout. Good for him, and thank you.
He was 95. Although he enjoyed relatively good health to the end, you could also say that the idea of him had died already, a few years ago, when he allowed the world to know who he was in a 2005 Vanity Fair magazine scoop that unveiled him as the anonymous source who used to meet Post reporter Bob Woodward in an Arlington, Virginia, parking garage. Knowing for certain who Deep Throat is (and Felt had always shown up on the short lists of likely guesses) took away the allure of not knowing. Washington culture had a lot invested in not knowing.
Much was being said Friday about Felt's patriotic duty to the Constitution, to ideals. Nothing in Felt's story indicates a profound love for the Fourth Estate. He was FBI. He didn't make a career of being a loose set of lips. This is a story about doing the right thing when the moment called for it. Thirty-six years after the Watergate break-in, Woodward and his former colleague Carl Bernstein visited Felt at the house where he lived with his daughter and grandson. They talked for a couple hours. They had lived so long with the strangest sort of fame. Although he was in on the secret all those years, Bernstein had never met Deep Throat.
"Bob and I went out to San Francisco a few weeks ago; we had a speech out there," Bernstein told CNN's American Morning Friday. "He knew we were coming; he was looking forward to it. But he had been very ill, and it was a kind of closing of the circle. ..I was amazed at his relative vigour given the fact that he had been quite ill."
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