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.)

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.