Posted on 06/05/2005 6:34:50 PM PDT by wagglebee
Joan Felt, who played a pivotal role in unraveling the 30-year secret that her father was the mysterious "Deep Throat" source, says he is lucid and feels reassured that he made the right decision.
He is "relieved to get the secret off his chest," Felt said in the first comments by a family member since the revelation last week that W. Mark Felt, then the No. 2 person in the FBI, was the key source in the Washington Post's Watergate investigation that helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon.
As both praise and criticism of Joan Felt and her family swirled last week in the national media, she disclosed the family's motivations for coming forward now, why money was a family consideration and how her father remains a "sensible and wise" participant.
Felt, who has lived with her father in a two-story home in northwest Santa Rosa for the past 13 years, said her 91-year-old father deserved to be released from the secret he had held so long.
"I think it's so important for a person getting into elder years, when death is somewhere around the corner, to be unburdened," Felt said. "At that time of your life, you (shouldn't) be holding up appearances or have something troubling your heart and have to keep it a secret."
Her comments came two days after a media frenzy that included reporters and camera crews camped on her front lawn. Joan Felt, 61, took a quiet moment in her car on the way home from Rohnert Park for an exclusive cell phone interview with The Press Democrat.
While she wouldn't talk about her father's decision to go public, and while the family has refused to make him available for interviews, she was frank about her own motives.
"There were many reasons why we decided to do it. I won't deny that to make money is one of them," Felt said. "My son, Nick, is in law school and he'll owe $100,000 by the time he graduates. I'm still a single mom, still supporting them to one degree or another, and I am not ashamed of this," Felt said.
In the past week, Washington Post Editor Bob Woodward, who closely guarded Felt's identity as the source in many of the key Watergate stories, as well as his partner Carl Bernstein and former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, has each publicly questioned Mark Felt's competency and his ability to withstand family pressure to reveal the secret.
Joan Felt said she understands the concern, but the news articles portraying her father as mentally incapacitated are simply wrong. She confirmed that her father has struggled. He suffered a stroke in 2001 and has had a series of surgeries to battle heart problems and repair a broken hip.
Mental capacity defended
"His health is frail, yes, but he's very present and cogent and capable of making decisions," she said.
If the family is successful in reaching a book deal, which some agents have said could be worth more than $1 million, they would be in good company. Woodward and Bernstein wrote a best-selling book on the Watergate scandal, "All the President's Men," which was made into a movie. And Woodward's publisher is rushing into print a book on Mark Felt, "The Secret Man," due out in July.
The story of the unmasking of Deep Throat is inseparable from the story of the Felt family, from a father and daughter estranged following the social revolution of the 1960s to the eventual reconciliation that last week brought the world to a Santa Rosa doorstep.
Mark Felt's formative years were spent in modest circumstances in post-World War I Idaho. He worked his way through the University of Idaho and George Washington University law school. He waited tables, stoked furnaces and worked for an Idaho senator as a clerk.
Fellow University of Idaho student Audrey Robinson caught his eye and the two were married in 1938 by the House chaplain, ready to begin their life in Washington, D.C., together.
Drawn to the FBI in 1942, Felt developed a deep and unwavering commitment to the Bureau that would shape the rest of his life.
"I am willing to stake my loyalty and dedication to my country against that of anyone," he wrote in his memoir, penned in 1979.
While he was wrestling with Watergate, his daughter Joan was raising a family. She gave birth to three children after embracing a counterculture lifestyle that did not include marriage. As Nixon was winning a landslide election in 1972, she was stepping away from an elite education that included two language degrees from Stanford University and traveling to Chile on a Fulbright scholarship to study Spanish.
Her father strongly disapproved, straining their relationship. With the birth of her first child in 1974, Joan Felt became the breadwinner of her young family, working a variety of low-paying jobs and living in small rentals in Guerneville and Santa Rosa.
Around the time of the birth of her youngest son, Nick, she and her father began rebuilding their relationship. Mark and Audrey Felt made trips from Alexandria, Va., to visit the family in Sonoma County.
Audrey Felt's death in 1984 would bring father and daughter even closer, and he made the annual trips to Santa Rosa alone, staying at the Flamingo Hotel.
"When my mother died, my father decided to move out here. My dad has always been the most supportive and beyond-the-call-of-duty father," Joan Felt said.
In 1990, at age 77, the former FBI man severed the last of his Washington ties and moved to Santa Rosa. He rented an apartment for a time, and in 1992 purchased a split-level, five-bedroom home on Redford Place for about $200,000. The lower part of the split-level was remodeled into an apartment for him, with a bedroom-living room, kitchenette and bathroom.
House bought for family
"Dad bought the house for us because I was a single mom. I've been the breadwinner, and I was living in this little, tiny two-bedroom duplex with these three kids," Joan Felt said.
The family settled in -- Mark Felt, Joan Felt and the boys -- Will Felt, then 18; Robbie Jones, then 13; and Nick Jones, then 11. Joan Felt began teaching Spanish at Sonoma State University and at Santa Rosa Junior College.
Mark Felt became a familiar sight going to the store and driving around in his 1989 Buick. Joan Felt took him to meetings of the retired FBI agents association in his wheelchair.
Joan Felt had heard the rumors about her father as published accounts named him, and others, as the man Woodward called Deep Throat. But when Woodward showed up on her doorstep in 1999, she didn't immediately recognize him. Over the course of the visit, however, she began to wonder what a conservative career FBI man had in common with a famous Washington reporter.
Not everything revealed
Joan Felt said her attorney has told her not to reveal when she first knew for sure that her father was Deep Throat. The attorney, John D. O'Connor of Marin County, wrote the Vanity Fair article identifying Felt as Deep Throat and is trying to strike a lucrative book deal for the family.
She did say it took time to persuade her father that he hadn't betrayed the Bureau and that enough time had passed for people to understand that what he did was right.
"We had to help him see that most of the world now considers what he did heroic. At the time it was happening, he wouldn't have gotten that percentage of support, but history has shown it was so important what he did," Joan Felt said.
Her belief helped unify a family in its efforts since at least 1999 to convince the family patriarch that he had not betrayed the FBI's culture of confidentiality.
"One of the things I feel is most precious and special about our family is this relationship with my dad and having him in the intimate circle of the family all these years," Felt said. "I want the world to know how wonderful he is and how wonderful it is to live with him."
"That's the main reason I wanted his story to come forth -- to say what a joy it is to have our elders with us," Felt said.
Friends of the family dispute media accounts that Joan Felt is exploiting her father in some way.
"It's ridiculous," said Elizabeth Martinez, Joan Felt's supervisor at Sonoma State University.
"I have known her for 10 years, and Joan and I have been quite close. She has always seen her father as a hero. I don't mean in terms of what he did in the '70s, but in the sense that he is her father and she loves him very much," Martinez said.
Following the cell phone interview, Joan Felt continued home, to be greeted by a security guard outside her door and media requests stacked high on her kitchen table. She would forgo grading Spanish papers to listen to a CNN interview with Woodward, who detailed the relationship he had with her father.
"We're so proud of him, not for being Deep Throat, but because he's got such a perspective on life. That's the heroic part about him," she said.
I believe she brought up the education loan to show "need" or justify her choice. Whether or not it is used for that is another story.
Unless you wish to advise us that it is Conservative to lock grandpa in an upstairs room for the rest of his life, I wouldn't call this situation particularly Liberal.
It's just better.
I've been to California many times. Trying to think of the last small house I saw there that had a basement! Maybe out in the Valley.
Sounds like there was a "Jones" fellow in there somewhere, but the "Felt" brother would be the gift of the counterculture.
No shock here. A family that involves a lawyer operates on greed.
""There were many reasons why we decided to do it. I won't deny that to make money is one of them," Felt said. "My son, Nick, is in law school and he'll owe $100,000 by the time he graduates. I'm still a single mom, still supporting them to one degree or another, and I am not ashamed of this," Felt said.""
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