Watergate "Deep Throat" Mark Felt Dead At 95

Hugh Pickens writes "W. Mark Felt Sr., 95, associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal, better known as 'Deep Throat,' the most famous anonymous source in American history, died at his home in Santa Rosa, California. Felt secretly guided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to pursue the story of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office buildings, and later of the Nixon administration's campaign of spying and sabotage against its perceived political enemies. 'It's impossible to exaggerate how high the stakes were in Watergate,' wrote Felt in his 2006 book A G-Man's Life. 'We faced no simple burglary, but an assault on government institutions, an attack on the FBI's integrity, and unrelenting pressure to unravel one of the greatest political scandals in our nation's history.' No one knows exactly what prompted Felt to leak the information from the Watergate probe to the press. He was passed over for the post of FBI director after Hoover's death in 1972, a crushing career disappointment. 'People will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing by helping Woodward. The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, and isn't that what the FBI is supposed to do?'"

Comments

Answer's obvious.

[mind21_98]

The FBI is supposed to get the whole truth out. Unfortunately, there are people who want to bring politics into enforcing the law, so we need checks and balances on the entire government. That's where the media comes in. Mark Felt did do the right thing, even though it was incredibly difficult for him at the time. RIP, Mark. (now, whether we'd have the balls to do that today, or the attention span to see it through, is another question entirely. I don't think we do, quite honestly, judging by the multiple scandals that have gone seemingly unpunished during the Bush administration.)

Re:Answer's obvious.

[WindowlessView]

The right thing isn't to go outside the business/government process.

Nonsense, both in general and this specific case.

The "process" in this case was blocked and corrupted from multiple angles. The Attorney General (John Mitchell) was involved in the original crimes. His replacement, Eliot Richardson, was fired in the Saturday Night Massacre along with the special prosecutor and others. It was later shown that the CIA, FBI, etc., all had elements participating in the crimes or cover up.

Working within the system Felt would not have been any more effective than anyone else. Yes, like Richardson et.al. he could have taken a stand and been shoved aside or fired. And effectively silenced because he didn't have any specific evidence himself but merely the knowledge of where to point the investigation. He would have been a small part of a 3 day news cycle and the Nixon gang might well have gotten away with it.

Going outside the system was precisely the right thing to do, arguably the only thing available to him. Even so, if it weren't for a rather unique group of people at the Washington Post it might not have had anymore success than working inside the system. One only wished the NY Times had such guts with the illegal wiretapping information instead of sitting on it for a year.

The business/governmental "process" only works when there are people of integrity involved. When those people, like Nixon, Bush, Enron, Countrywide, etc., are up to eyeballs in the crime the "process" is nothing more than convenient choke points to stop the truth from getting out.

Re:Media AI source code

[Neon Aardvark]

It's worth bearing in mind that Nixon's predecessor was objectively far worse than him, namely LBJ.

Starting and then fighting the Vietnam war badly, deliberately falsifying the Gulf of Tonkin incident (whatever about Bush, I think he genuinely believed his pretext, that Iraqi WMDs existed), ordering the USS Liberty to not be defended when it was under attack and then falsifying details of the attack later (probably the most spineless act in US military history).

Aside from that, there's the personal - forcing aides to talk to him while he was talking a dump, laughing at the dead body of JFK, etc..

A truly odious and terrible president.

Felt's Revenge for Not Getting Promoted

[Doc Ruby]

Mark Felt disclosed to Woodward and Bernstein what he thought would hurt Nixon, because Nixon had passed over Felt (#2 at FBI when Hoover finally died) in favor of a Nixon crony, an "outsider", to run the FBI instead of promoting Felt.

I'm glad he did. But I don't admire or respect Felt for it. Because Felt could have disclosed any of that stuff (or more that he surely knew) to Woodward and Bernstein, or many other journalists, well before he had reasons of personal revenge. Which might have prevented Nixon from being reelected in 1972, instead of a landslide followed by an aborted impeachment that has left this country in Constitutional crisis through today, worse every time around the cycle.

I'm not glad he's dead, either. I wish he had spilled more, about other Nixon cronies (like Rumsfeld and Cheney), and he might have done so once the Bush era was finally safely over, and those other criminals were as "retired" as he was. But evidently there wasn't enough personal gain in that kind of disclosure, so Felt never gave it. And now he never will.