Watergate Affair

Howard St. John Hunt remembers the night of the Watergate break-in as a bonding experience with his father. A sweating and disheveled E. Howard Hunt roused his 19-year-old son from a dead sleep to help him wipe fingerprints from the burglars' radios and pack the surveillance equipment into a suitcase. Then, father and son raced to a remote Maryland bridge, where they heaved the evidence into the Potomac River just before dawn on June 17, 1972.

The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda has long been the most kicked-around of presidential libraries, and nothing invited more ridicule than the dim, narrow room purporting to describe the scandal that drove its namesake from office. Venturing into that room, visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a "coup" engineered by Nixon enemies.

In the official narrative of the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, Carl Bernstein has long been one of the arch-villains, a reporter whose name -- along with that of former Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward -- elicited special loathing.

W. Mark Felt, who for nearly 33 years denied that he was "Deep Throat," also held a tragic secret from his family: It was suicide, not a heart attack, that felled his wife after years of strain from Felt's FBI career and ensuing legal troubles. In his new book, "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, 'Deep Throat' and the Struggle for Honor in Washington," Felt reveals that Audrey Robinson Felt shot herself in 1984 with his .38 service revolver after a long emotional and physical decline.

W. Mark Felt, a former No. 2 man at the FBI, has revealed that he was the legendary source known as "Deep Throat" who helped two Washington Post reporters expose details in the Watergate scandal that forced President Nixon to give up the White House. Bob Woodward, who along with Carl Bernstein led the Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, confirmed Felt's identity as the source, ending one of Washington's most tantalizing mysteries.

When investigative reporter Bob Woodward wanted to meet "Deep Throat," he'd move a flowerpot with a red flag to the rear of his apartment balcony. Even more mysteriously, when his top-secret source wanted to meet him, Woodward would open his New York Times, check Page 20 and look for a hand-drawn clock to tell him when to rendezvous at an underground parking garage. Even now, it seems like detail from a corny potboiler.

The long-awaited revelation of the identity of "Deep Throat" should remind journalists and a sometimes-skeptical public of the crucial role anonymous sources can play in revealing wrongdoing in high places, an array of reporters and writers said Tuesday. The Washington Post confirmed Tuesday that W. Mark Felt, a former No. 2 official at the FBI, provided much of the crucial information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon.

If W. Mark Felt, who outed himself this week as the almost mythic "Deep Throat" of Watergate, writes a book as has been speculated, few believe it would ultimately be of great historic value. Other than the mystery that has long surrounded the identity of the Washington Post's informant, there is little else that isn't already known about the scandal that toppled the Nixon presidency, some academics said.

Some past and present FBI agents said Wednesday that they felt uncomfortable with the revelation that one of their own was the legendary "Deep Throat," who had helped the Washington Post uncover details of the Watergate break-in. One called it appalling. But others said that W. Mark Felt, then the FBI's No. 2 man, did what he had to do to get the story out. That's a sentiment that has permeated the bureau throughout its history and continues to this day -- sometimes for ignoble purposes.

One day after the disclosure that former FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt was "Deep Throat," Washington was awash with claims from political celebrities that they'd known the identity of the secret source all along. Nora Ephron, a screenwriter and author who was once married to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein -- who with colleague Bob Woodward played leading roles in exposing Watergate -- put out word on a blog that "I knew that Deep Throat was Mark Felt because I figured it out."