At the time of the Watergate break-in and bungled burglary, Bob Woodward was a nine- month novice reporter on the staff of the Washington Post. Before his hiring, he had been a reporter on a small town Maryland paper. While at the Post, he had been assigned to small time stuff, minor police corruption and the likes of unclean restaurants. In All the President�s Men, Woodward says that he had known Deep Throat prior to the break-in at the Watergate complex. How would a junior, 29 year-old, unknown, rookie reporter cultivate the seasoned deputy director of the FBI? Mark Felt was a hard-core career federal agent. Soon after the story of Deep Throat�s identity broke, Woodward claims that he met Felt at a chance meeting at the White House while Woodward was still in the Navy, and after a conversation, the Deputy Director of the FBI gave an unknown naval Lt. His personal number to his office. Woodward doesn�t say why Felt would do such a thing.

Mark Felt�s immediate superior at the FBI was L. Patrick Gray, who is alleged to have blackmailed the Nixon White House into the director�s job by destroying certain classified documents, burning them with his Christmas trash and perhaps holding some of them back.

Felt may have been aware of this activity. Given the anything goes, paranoid and Byzantine quality of life in the Nixon White House; and that of the by-then dead Hoover FBI, anything would seem possible. The president�s men and the FBI would all be playing hardball for keeps.

Bob Woodward was a graduate of Yale and had been a Naval communications officer for five years prior to his becoming a journalist. As a communications officer, his last tour was in the Pentagon, where he routinely briefed none other than aforementioned Alexander Haig.

The questions and the connections just continue to mount.

Of course, the character attacks on Mark Felt began almost immediately. Presidential wannabe and conservative talk show guest Pat Buchanan said that: �I think that Mark Felt was ashamed at what he did, that�s why he lied about it for 30 years-and he ought to have been.� Buchanan then went on to call Felt �a snake�. Pat Buchanan was a speech- writer for Richard Nixon and very much a part of the Byzantine/Spanish Inquisition atmosphere in the White House. Loyalty was just as important to Nixon and his staff and administration as it is to the present occupier of the Oval office.

Any one found leaking anything out of the White House would have been politically drawn, quartered and his remains buried very quietly in the Rose Garden.

Former Special Counsel to President Nixon and born again felon Charles �Chuck� Colson also crawled out from under his evangelical rock to declare: �I think its unfortunate at his age in life, I believe he�s being exploited, I really feel sorry for him because I think he goes out on a very sour note-not as a hero.� This from the man described as the chief �hatchet man� in the Nixon White House and a man who claimed that he would run over his own grandmother to get Richard Nixon reelected to Presidency in 1972.

When President Bush was asked to comment on Felt�s supposed hero status, the Chief Executive appeared as clueless as ever saying, �Its hard for me to judge until learning more about the situation�all I can tell you is that it was a revelation that caught me by surprise.�

Why should the Chief Executive know anything about the constitutional crisis that resulted in the only presidential resignation in the history of the Republic while his own father was the head of the GOP at the time??? He must have been busy not serving his time in the Texas Air National Guard.

Of course, the present administration leaks just as much as any in history. Perhaps that political combination of Cardinal Richelieu and Martin Borman known as Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney may be doing his best to plug the leaks. Nixon�s plumbers tried and ultimately failed. So there may very well be a modern day deep throat lurking in a remote corner of a Pentagon underground garage

So, is Mark Felt a hero or a very well informed whistle blower? Or maybe he�s nothing more than a loyal bureaucrat who had seen enough of the constitution being shredded and had the juice to do something about it. Maybe he saw Woodward as the best avenue to drop his bombs. And what if he had done nothing?

Just wait for the movie. By Grady Hawkins

As we go to press the most important source in modern day journalism has finally been revealed. Mark Felt, former Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came forward in a Vanity Fair article and revealed to a startled world that he himself was (is?) the legendary Deep throat of Watergate fame. But here at Alt we maintained or characteristic cynicism and wouldn�t take the bait. After all, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, along with former Washington post Editor Ben Bradley had all adamantly insisted that they would not reveal the man�s name until after his death. This could be nothing but grandstanding, disinformation or just plain hoax for gain on the part of Felt. But just a few hours after the event, Woodward and company admitted that Mark Felt was indeed, Deep Throat .

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