It appears that the Washington Post is confirming that Mark Felt was Deep Throat. The Watergate hearings and Nixon’s resignation dominated the news the summer between high school and college for me, so Watergate coverage always has a special coming of age tinge for me.

For some reason–probably because I’ve never liked him much–I’m also glad that none of John Dean’s five possible candidates for Deep Throat was Mark Felt.

Here’s an article by former Washington Post reporter James Mann, (via kottke) from the May 1992 Atlantic, that suggested someone high up in the FBI was Deep Throat–over 10 years ago. The interesting thiing about the article is not so much that Mann was right (he even named Felt as a candidate), but the institutional reasons that would lead someone like Felt to talk to Woodward. The FBI was striving to remain independent from the White House (in the wake of Hoover’s death in 1972), so it was institutionally savvy for Felt to keep pressure on the White House via the Post. Quote:

The Watergate investigation demonstrated that the Nixon White House had dishonorable motives for wanting to gain political control over the FBI. Yet the FBI’s motives for seeking to retain its independence were not entirely pure either. Under Hoover the Bureau had become an autocratic institution, mistrustful of change and modernization, secretly engaging in a number of activities for which it had no legal authorization.