History

The Nixon story dominated my junior & senior years of high school. I couldn't BELIEVE that a president and an administration could or would do such things as they did. I watched as President Nixon went from a dominating, controlled political figure and leader to a broken man - all live on TV. It was a severe lesson in politics, humanity, patriotism and the machinations of this county. It affected the way I thought about America. It made me look at history differently. It made us question what our leaders were doing in our names or behind our backs.

Mark Felt played a big part in that. And he himself had his issues, as you can read near the end of this article. the most fascinating thing, though, is the fact that after EVERYTHING went down, and Felt was on trial himself 8 years later, Mr. Nixon himself TESTIFIED on his behalf!!!

Incredible.





W. Mark Felt, 'Deep Throat' of Watergate, dead at 95
(CNN) -- W. Mark Felt, who leaked information to reporters under the moniker, "Deep Throat," about the Watergate break-in, died Thursday at the age of 95, sources told CNN.
Rob Jones, Felt's grandson, said his grandfather died at his home in Santa Rosa, California. According to published reports, Felt died of congestive heart failure.
Felt admitted in a 2005 Vanity Fair article he was the Washington Post's source for many of its 400 stories on the Watergate affair during the early 1970s. The Watergate break-in eventually led to the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon.
"I'm proud of everything that Deep Throat did," Felt, 92, told CNN's "Larry King Live" in 2006, his first public interview on the subject.
Felt's entanglement with history occurred in 1972 after the bungled break-in at the Democratic National Party offices in the Watergate hotel. Felt, an associate director at the FBI, said he was unhappy with the way the administration meddled with the investigation into the break-in, which led him to divulge information to the newspaper. Watch how Felt played a pivotal role in presidential history »
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, then-rookie reporters with the Washington Post, did stories about the break-in and subsequent cover-up. Both men credited Felt for helping them, but Bernstein said Felt was a tough interview.
"He didn't leak. He had to really be squeezed," Bernstein said in a 2006 interview. "He confirmed mostly what we had gotten elsewhere. He didn't want to volunteer a lot of information, yet his role was essential in giving us a solidity and a knowledge that what we were reporting was right."
When King asked Felt whether he felt he had done anything wrong in going outside approved channels to get information out, Felt was unequivocal.
"I thought I was doing the right thing," he said.
Felt, who retired from the FBI in 1973, had his own legal problems. He was convicted in 1980 on conspiracy charges for authorizing government agents to break into homes without search warrants in a hunt for bombing suspects in 1972 and 1973.
When the case went to trial, former President Nixon testified on Felt's behalf. Felt was eventually pardoned in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan.
When asked how he would like to be remembered, Felt said, "I'd like to be remembered as a government employee who did his best to help everybody."