Well, we finally know who Deep Throat is…Mark Felt, former associate director of the FBI. Honestly, the whole thing feels kind of anti-climatic. I don’t know why…it’s just like “OMG, we know who Deep Throat is now!”
“Who is it?”
“Mark Felt!”
“Oh, OK. So, how about those Nats, eh?”
So, how did Bob Woodward and Mark Felt meet? It seems that in 1970, when young Woodward was a dashing lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, he was sent to the White House to drop off a package. Upon meeting Felt, he discovered that they had something in common:
During that year in Washington, I expended a great deal of energy trying to find things or people who were interesting. I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with that classmate. To quell my angst and sense of drift, I was taking graduate courses at George Washington University. One course was in Shakespeare, another in international relations.
When I mentioned the graduate work to Felt, he perked up immediately, saying he had gone to night law school at GW in the 1930s before joining — and this is the first time he mentioned it — the FBI. While in law school, he said, he had worked full time for a senator — his home-state senator from Idaho. I said that I had been doing some volunteer work at the office of my congressman, John Erlenborn, a Republican from the district in Wheaton, Ill., where I had been raised.
So we had two connections — graduate work at GW and work with elected representatives from our home states.
And through these connections, they developed a friendship…and the rest is history. I expect that in the next few days GW Public Relations will issue a press release claiming some credit for bringing down the Nixon Presidency.
Ah, that reminds me, another GW-Watergate link that GW loves to talk about: The Hall on Virginia Avenue dorm.
I was one of the lucky freshman that scored a room at 2601 Virginia Avenue, the former Howard Johnson hotel right across the street from the Watergate (yes, my dorm was a former hotel, and yes, it was awesome…not many college freshman can say they were “neighbours” with Bob Dole, Condoleezza Rice, and Paul O’Neill…uhh wait, is that a good thing?).
On the 7th floor of HOVA, in room 723, you could find the former surveillance post of the Watergate burglary team. From this room, they monitored conversations between DNC officials, and, on the night of June 16, 1972, a lookout watched from the balcony while the rest of the group broke into the Democratic Party’s headquarters to fix the wiretaps. And what a great job that lookout did, eh?
But there is a lesser known room that was rented by the Watergate burglar James McCord (also a GW alum, haha) as a meeting place for McCord, Howard Hunt, and G. Gordon Liddy before they moved up to the 7th floor. It was room 419:
Guess which room I lived in?
