Felt is reported to have suffered from congestive heart
failure but the exact cause of his death at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif., was
not immediately known. His daughter, Susan Felt, told the Post in a phone interview
that he "slipped away," after falling asleep.
The mysterious key player in one of the nation's most famous
political dramas, Felt insisted that his identity be kept secret for decades
after he leaked damaging information about Nixon and his aides to Washington
Post reporter Bob Woodward in the early 1970s.
A whirlwind of speculation consumed Washington for decades
afterward as to the identity of the source Post editors' dubbed "Deep
Throat." While some suspected that Felt was the source who connected the
White House to the June 1972 break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic
National Committee, he denied the accusations until finally coming forward in a
May 2005 Vanity Fair article.
"I'm the guy
they used to call Deep Throat," Felt told Vanity Fair writer John D.
O'Connor. The revelation sparked a barrage of media attention.
"People will debate for a long time whether I did the
right thing by helping Woodward," Felt wrote in his 2006 memoir, "A
G-Man's Life: The FBI, `Deep Throat' and the Struggle for Honor in
Washington." "The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out,
and isn't that what the FBI is supposed to do?"
In 2005, Vanity Fair's O'Connor described on the NewsHour
the process by which Felt decided to come forward.
"Over time he has realized that Deep Throat was a true
American hero," O'Connor said. "His family has talked to him about
this and they have convinced him through their communication, their love, that
Deep Throat is nothing to be ashamed of."
The Post's Woodward and partner Carl Bernstein relied on
various unnamed sources in reporting on Watergate, but "Deep Throat"
helped to keep them on track and confirmed key information. The Post won a
Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate coverage.
Reporting by the Post and other news organizations on the
White House's ties to the Watergate break-in and other political schemes forced
Nixon's resignation in 1974.
More than 30 officials would ultimately plead guilty or be
convicted, including Attorney General John Mitchell, who served 19 months for
conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury.
Felt was also memorialized in "All the President's
Men," a popular 1976 movie about the Watergate drama.
In the movie, the enduring image of "Deep Throat"
is of a chain-smoking Hal Holbrook telling Woodward, played by Robert Redford,
to "follow the money."
Born on Aug. 17, 1913 in Twin Falls, Idaho, Felt came to
Washington as a Capitol Hill staff member and later worked at the Federal Trade
Commission before joining the FBI in 1942.
Some critics speculated that Felt, a J. Edgar Hoover
loyalist, was angry at being passed over when Nixon appointed an FBI outsider,
L. Patrick Gray, to lead the FBI after Hoover's death.
"We had no idea of his motivations, and even now some
of his motivations are unclear," Bernstein said of Felt's reasons for
leaking the information, according to the Associated Press.
