The Watergate era, that 1970s decade of Nixon, Woodward and Bernstein, gave us also that strange character with the obscene moniker, DEEP THROAT—an unidentified character for more than thirty years. This book is, in short, the story of DEEP THROAT; not only who he was—he was quite real—but the politically obscene things he did from his Number Two position within the FBI itself. DEEP THROAT was, in fact, Mark Felt, the FBI’s feared “hatchet man,” a powerful role that he played with glee and panache.
What emerges in these pages is a highly original story, one filled with new Watergate research and observations. Here, too, are serious challenges to the truthfulness of the famous Woodward/Bernstein (and Robert Redford) book and movie, All the President’s Men. These pages also include a remarkable assortment of declassified FBI documents about the Watergate break-in and its aftermath, documents replete with examples of Mark Felt’s grotesque FBI “signature”—a large, saber-shaped capital “F,” which, in Felt’s case, could stand for many things.
As a journalist and journalism professor for more than 50 years, the author of this book began his Watergate research even as the events of that era were unfolding in the ‘70s. Webb, Woodward and Bernstein are the same age and were prominent newspaper reporters at the same time—they in Washington DC and he in Chicago and the Illinois state capitol. Webb, who has two doctorate degrees and a dozen earlier books, has collected, analyzed and documented volumes about the Watergate story over all the years since it began.
For anyone not yet acquainted with the Watergate past, this book is a rich feast indeed. Anyone interested in American politics will become caught up in Watergate’s chicanery, its conniving, its cowardice, its cruelty, its very public lies and deceits, its villains along with a few heroes. As you read these pages, you, too, will get caught up in this provocative Great American DEEP THROAT Story.
