W. Mark Felt at a news conference in April 1981.
W. Mark Felt with his daughter, Joan Felt, and grandson, Nick Jones, at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif.
Posted on 05/31/2005 2:24:51 PM PDT by kcvl
Per MSNBC
I always thought it was Maureen Dean..Man, talk about a tightly wrapped broad..
"Unless one is a serious news/political junkie or old enough to remember Watergate, the identity of DT is probably a curious factoid of history. "
No way !!
The chickens have come home to roost and paybask is gonna be a bitch.
There's lots of conservatives that lived the days when Nixon fought Kennedy and was cheated by vote fraud in Chicago and Texas. And then Nixon came back to win the war in Veit Nam when the MSM and academia marxists had turned sentiment against our soldiers. He finally did what was righht and mined Haiphong - crippling our enemey - forcing them to crawl to the peace table.
But they lied and went on to kill another 3 million.
And the MSM and the marxists finally got Nixon's scalp.
That's why this is so sweet. Nixon was stabbed by a democrat opportunist.
It matters on a number of levels including the revelation of the position this man held and the implications that he had some ugly motivations.
I agree with others who say he was no hero and his grinning family has repulsed me.
That's not to excuse any wrongdoing by the Nixon administration, but I also side with those who say it was blown all out of proportion.
They stubbled on this like I know what Bush is going to go next!
Now he's changed his mine?
In light of the Vanity Fair article and the Felt family speaking out, the dishonorable thing would be to maintain a silence meant to keep a secret that was now waived by the person being protected.
I am glad Woodward, Bernstein and the Post have now confirmed.
“Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, whose parents were also Communists
******
Deep Throat loved scotch, gossip
Jun 01 10:40
AFP
In their book All the President's Men, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein said their Watergate source, Deep Throat, worked in the Executive Branch and was "an incurable gossip".
He smoked. He liked Scotch. He distrusted the telephone.
The Washington Post reporters revealed little else, particularly not his name.
Three decades later, the most famous anonymous source in the history of journalism has been unmasked as Mark Felt, a top official in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Mr Felt, now 91, revealed his identity as Deep Throat in an article in Vanity Fair magazine, and it was confirmed by The Washington Post.
snip
Mr Woodward and Mr Bernstein wrote Deep Throat had an "extremely sensitive" position in government and "access to information from the White House, Justice, the FBI and CRP (Richard Nixon's Committee for the Re-election of the President)".
"He could be contacted only on very important occasions," they wrote. "Woodward had promised he would never identify him or his position to anyone.
"Further, he had agreed never to quote the man, even as an anonymous source."
"Deep Throat never tried to inflate his knowledge or show off his importance," they wrote.
"He always told rather less than he knew. He was dispassionate and seemed committed to the best version of the obtainable truth.
"The Nixon White House worried him. 'They are all underhanded and unknowable'," Deep Throat was quoted as saying.
"Aware of his own weaknesses, he readily conceded his flaws. He was, incongruously, an incurable gossip, careful to label rumour for what it was, but fascinated by it."
Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons dubbed Mr Woodward's source Deep Throat after the title of a popular pornographic film of the day.
Mr Woodward's meetings with Deep Throat took place mostly at 2 am in an underground parking garage after arrangements worthy of a spy novel.
Deep Throat was worried about surveillance, so Mr Woodward would move a flower pot containing a red flag to the rear of his apartment balcony if he wanted to meet.
Deep Throat would request a meeting by drawing a clock on the copy of The New York Times delivered to Mr Woodward's apartment.
Deep Throat and Mr Woodward met seven times to help he and Mr Bernstein break stories about the involvement of Nixon administration officials in the June 17, 1972, burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel complex.
******
Staley raised eyebrows when the HRC acquired Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate archive for $5 million.
"The trick was finding the funds outside the university," said Staley. Containing more than 250 reporter's notepads, memos, photographs, drafts of stories, and All the President's Men, both the book and the screenplay, the collection realizes Ransom's vision in all ways but one: It is not complete. Documents relating to confidential sources, including Deep Throat, have been kept in Washington. Only after the sources die will their names be revealed and the documents sent to the HRC.
UT's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
I wonder if criminal convictions can now be overturned if Felt was indeed Deep Throat. Misues of evidence.
A couple of liberal journalists attempting to harmonize all of the various accounts of Watergate came to the conclusion that John Dean was the originator of the Watergate burglarly. They wrote it up in their book Silent Coup. Liddy found their reasoning persuasive enough to convince him, and he routinely accuses Dean of having thought up the breakin, and of having managed to pin the blame on Nixon in order to protect his own hide.
One nugget you learn from this book is that Bob Woodward, before becoming a writer for the Washington Post, had been a Naval officer, and one with an interesting job. He was a military attache to the White House, and one of the men he worked with was an Army officer of the name Al Haig. I suspect there is more to "Deep Throat" than just Mark Felt.
who is this long nosed B rhymes with Witch on MSNBC? Go Pat Go?
Maybe I understated it a bit. I can remember when the identity of Deep Throat was THE issue. But, I lived thru it. I do remember. But it is not important to me anymore.
I am witholding final judgement on Felt until I can figure out why this whole story has a foul smell.
September/October 1993 | Contents
Impeaching Woodstein
DEEP TRUTH: THE LIVES OF BOB WOODWARD AND CARL BERNSTEIN, by Adrian Havill. Birch Lane Press. 264 pp. $ 21.95
Review by Steve Weinberg
Weinberg, a CJR contributing editor, is a long-time investigative reporter and biographer.
Bob Woodward, the most influential investigative journalist alive, is under attack -- again -- concerning the accuracy of his reporting. It would be simple to attribute the attacks to the jealousy of lesser journalists. After all, if the critics are so smart, why aren't they rich and famous?
I don't know if Adrian Havill is rich. I know he's not famous -- his only previous book, a biography of Jack Kent Cooke, received little notice. But, as the latest in a line of Woodward attackers, Havill is plenty smart.
He has embedded his attacks on Woodward's credibility in a well-researched, capably written biography of the Watergate twins, both turning fifty. In alternating chapters, the dual biography devotes lots of pages to the boyhoods and young adulthoods of Woodward and Bernstein. When biographers research the early years of their subjects, the result is sometimes mundane. But Havill makes these early years significant: talented investigative journalists don't arrive at The Washington Post without predispositions.
By spending time in Woodward's hometown of Wheaton, Illinois, and by studying high school year books, Havill is able to provide fascinating detail about the scandalous divorce of the future journalist's parents, to speculate with some authority about the impact of Bob being reared by his perfectionist lawyer father, and to serve up telling quotations from Bob's high school friends ("He was always well-intended, but remote," says Craig Simpson, who ran Bob's losing campaign for student council president. "In many ways, he was like Nixon"). Havill's research into Bernstein's youth in Washington, D.C., is equally revealing. "If Bob's youth was a dark episode of the sitcom Happy Days," Havill concludes, "Carl's was the ultimate Philip Roth novel."
By Havill's account, he discovered youthful behavior suggesting tendencies by both Woodward and Bernstein to fictionalize the real world. One especially convincing example involves Bernstein, who, Havill says, concocted a false account of a trip as a teenager to Greensboro, North Carolina, to participate in a civil right demonstration.
As Havill starts trying his pieces of evidence together, he sometimes sounds like a prosecutor during a courtroom opening statement. Here is one of many examples, based on Havill's belief -- supported by suggestive evidence but not proved conclusively -- that Woodward, while in the Navy, served as a White House briefer to Alexander Haig:
[Woodward] has vociferously fought all attempts to link him with White House briefings while working at the Pentagon. Bob portrays his background in such a way that his initial success as a . . . reporter . . . seems to have come from simple hard work, from knocking on doors in the dark of night, and from talking with low-level government secretaries. Nothing could be further from the truth. . . . Bob denied knowing Alexander Haig because General Haig would be one of his more important government sources when Bob became a newspaper reporter, and because Alexander Haig is one of two or three men who fit the description of Deep Throat.
The indictment goes on. By checking weather data with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for specific days described in All the President's Men, Havill shows that it almost certainly did not rain when the book says it was raining and that it almost certainly was warmer than described in "chilly" scenes, or colder than described in "sweaty" scenes. Havill's research also shows, seemingly beyond refutation, that the movie Deep Throat was not playing in Washington, D.C., on the day Bernstein supposedly watched the hard-core sex film while evading a subpoena.
To bolster his case that Woodward and Bernstein are published liars, Havill quotes form a 1976 book, The New Muckrakers, written by Leonard Downie, Jr. At the time he wrote the book, Downie was an investigative journalist colleague of Woodward and Bernstein, at The Washington Post. (Today, as the Post's top editor, Downie is Woodward's boss.) Relating a 1965 newspaper story Bernstein wrote about the New York City power outage, Downie asked, "How many people were in the Americana's lobby? How many of the hitchhiking executives were wearing Brooks Brothers suits? . . . With Bernstein, you could never be sure about the little details."
While Downie is harder on Bernstein than on Woodward in The New Muckrakers, Havill focuses on Woodward's alleged sins. His research is prodigious. Trying to show that during Woodward's years in the Navy he was more deeply involved in military intelligence than he admits, Havill studied the 1965-66 deck logs of the ship on which he served. Trying to establish Woodward's penchant for fiction, he notes that the journalist's first ambition was to be a novelist. And the idea for the book All the President's Men, he reports, originated with Robert Redford, who was looking ahead to a feature film.
Especially damaging is Havill's evidence that the alleged source Deep Throat could not have had the view of Woodward's apartment described in All the President's Men. After recounting Woodward's published version of how he supposedly communicated clandestinely with Deep Throat, Havill writes: "This author has been on every floor of 1718 P Street, N.W. -- Bob's former apartment building -- and has been inside Bob's sixth-floor apartment and has stood in the courtyard several times. He found the following discrepancies between Bob's account in All The President's Men and what was physically possible." Those discrepancies, which would take too much space to set out here, raise compelling questions about Woodward and Bernstein's veracity.
Havill effectively uses similar on-the-scene reporting in attacking Woodward's account of his hospital encounter with dying CIA director William Casey. Previous journalists have questioned the truthfulness of the hospital scene in Veil; Woodward used his stature to brush them off.
Perhaps Woodward will succeed in brushing Havill, too, but he has more explaining to do than ever after Havill's demonstration -- more detailed than any other known to me -- of how difficult it would have been for Woodward to gain access to Casey in his hospital room.
Because of Havill's persistence and the previous reporting of other Woodstein debunkers -- especially Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup and Jim Hougan in Secret Agenda (see CJR, November/December, 1991) -- I'm prepared to judge Woodward and Bernstein guilty on some counts until proven innocent. They have played the anonymous sourcing game too long, with consequences for history too serious to tolerate.
Speaking of his own, usually unsourced, revelations, Woodward has said that readers take his word because they can distinguish "between chicken salad and chicken shit." So now that Havill has served up chicken salad, and pretty well-sourced at that, what is Woodward's response?
sounds like won an Oscar! GEEZE
The problem is that Felt had a boss to answer to, and that boss was Nixon's former AG at the time (while Felt thought the post should have been his).
Had he made arrests, he's have lost his job.
I am just glad it wasn't John Sears.
Well myabe he should win an Oscar, this is all BS!
W. Mark Felt at a news conference in April 1981.
W. Mark Felt with his daughter, Joan Felt, and grandson, Nick Jones, at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif.
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