Wow, Deep Throat has been revealed finally, at age 91.

I read All the President’s Men when I was about 16 or 17, and the book played a large role in shaping my interest in politics and social issues.

I never thought I’d learn the identity of “Deep Throat”, the anonymous source whose disclosures drove the Washington Post’s Watergate coverage.

But at age 91, W. Mark Felt has come clean. He was an Assistant Director of the FBI at the time of the Watergate scandal.

The excerpt below is the introduction to a fascinating Q and A session with the Washington Post editor. The Q and A session talks a lot of journalism and investigative reporting and journalistic ethics, and is a great and fast read.

Deep Throat: The Post and Watergate
Deep Throat: The Post and Watergate

Leonard Downie Jr.
Executive Editor, The Washington Post
Wednesday, June 1, 2005; 1:00 PM

The Washington Post Tuesday confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was “Deep Throat,” the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon.

The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee. The three spoke after Felt’s family and Vanity Fair magazine identified the 91-year-old Felt, now a retiree in California, as the long-anonymous source who provided crucial guidance for some of the newspaper’s groundbreaking Watergate stories.

[LONG and interesting Question and Answer session with the Washington Post’s editor]