Key figures: W. Mark Felt (former Associate Director of the FBI), John D. O’Connor (attorney and author of the Vanity Fair article), Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Washington Post reporters), Ben Bradlee (Washington Post executive editor during Watergate), Joan Felt (Felt’s daughter)
Summary
On May 31, 2005, the magazine Vanity Fair published an article by the California attorney John D. O’Connor titled “I’m the Guy They Called Deep Throat,” revealing that W. Mark Felt — who had served as the Associate Director, or second-ranking official, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Watergate era — was the confidential source known as “Deep Throat.” For more than thirty years the source’s identity had been one of the most closely guarded secrets in American journalism and the subject of persistent guessing among historians, journalists, and former officials.
Felt, who was 91 years old and in declining health at the time of the disclosure, had helped guide Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward through the early reporting on the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex and the ensuing cover-up. The scandal ultimately forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974. Within hours of the Vanity Fair story, Woodward, his reporting partner Carl Bernstein, and former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee confirmed that Felt had indeed been their source.
The Secret Source
During the Watergate investigation, Woodward relied on a high-level government source whom he had promised to protect and to quote only on “deep background” — a category of sourcing in which information can be used but not attributed. The Post’s managing editor, Howard Simons, gave the source the nickname “Deep Throat,” a play on the deep-background arrangement and the title of a widely publicized 1972 pornographic film. In the reporters’ 1974 book All the President’s Men and the 1976 film adaptation, Deep Throat was portrayed meeting Woodward in a darkened Arlington, Virginia, parking garage, signaling meetings by moving a flowerpot and marking a newspaper. The film’s famous injunction to “follow the money” became emblematic of the story, though it does not appear in the book and is not documented as Felt’s actual words.
Woodward and Bernstein had pledged to keep the source’s identity confidential until his death or until he consented to be named. That commitment held for more than three decades, sustaining a long-running parlor game in Washington in which figures ranging from White House aides to intelligence officials were proposed as candidates. Felt himself repeatedly denied being Deep Throat over the years.
Motives and Controversy
Felt’s role prompted immediate debate over his motives. A career FBI official, he had been passed over for the directorship after J. Edgar Hoover’s death in May 1972, when Nixon installed the acting director L. Patrick Gray. Some observers cast Felt as an institutional defender of the FBI’s independence against White House interference in the Watergate inquiry; others viewed his cooperation with a reporter as driven partly by personal ambition and resentment. The disclosure reopened questions about the ethics of leaking, the use of anonymous sources, and the proper relationship between law-enforcement officials and the press.
Felt’s own record complicated the portrait of a straightforward whistleblower. In 1980 he was convicted of having authorized illegal FBI break-ins during the 1970s against associates of the radical Weather Underground; President Ronald Reagan pardoned him in 1981. The decision to go public in 2005 came from Felt’s family — including his daughter, Joan Felt — who, according to the Vanity Fair account, encouraged the aging Felt to claim his place in history and hoped the revelation might yield income from a book or film. The article preempted Woodward, who had prepared his own account and published the book The Secret Man weeks later.
Significance
The unmasking of Deep Throat resolved the most famous unanswered question of the Watergate saga and closed a chapter in the history of American investigative journalism. It renewed public attention to the role that a single, well-placed confidential source can play in holding power to account, and to the enduring tension between government secrecy and press freedom. Felt’s story was later dramatized in the 2017 film Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House. Felt died on December 18, 2008, at the age of 95, three and a half years after the secret he had kept for a generation was finally revealed.
Related Topics
- George W. Bush’s 2005 second-term agenda — the contemporary presidency against which questions of executive power and accountability played out
- Camp Casey anti-war protest (2005) — a 2005 episode of citizens and the press pressing a sitting president
- The Colbert Report premieres (2005) — 2005’s other reckoning with the relationship between the press and political power