The famed and enigmatic anonymous source credited with grinding Richard Nixon's perfidious presidency to a halt, died yesterday in northern California. A career FBI director, W. Mark Felt Sr. confessed to being “Deep Throat” in 2005, after 30 years of denial. He was the man, he admitted, who walked Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein through Nixon's debauched attempts to cover up his dirty footprints in the early 1970's, which culminated in the Watergate scandal, Nixon's resignation in 1974, the launch of Woodward and Bernstein's careers, a major motion pic and the spawning of secret deep-throat copycat sources around the world.
Nixon, who had his sneaking suspicions that Felt was the leak that did him in, did Felt in by twice passing him up as the next choice for FBI director, despite Felt's rank as second in command. However slippery Dick might have tried to remake himself in his later “elder statesman” years, and however absent Deep Throat may be from all the kitch and adoring reels at the Nixon Library, the specter of Deep Throat must have surely followed Nixon to his grave.
Although Felt is best remembered for urging Woodward and Bernstein to drive the Watergate investigation all the way to the top dog, he is also described as a “hard-line Hoover loyalist” who supported bugging Martin Luther King Jr. during Kennedy's presidency and was convicted of authorizing illegal break-ins against friends and families of the radical group, Weather Underground, in the Washington Post article about him today.
Deep Throat was 95 years old and died peacefully after eating a big breakfast at his Santa Rosa home.
