He was many things — inspiration to a generation of investigative journalists, Judas Iscariot of the Nixon cabal, a shadowy figure whose very vagueness encapsulated an unsettling, confusing era.
In the end, though, “Deep Throat” remained a walking cipher, an icon with uncertain motivations who represented the most complicated parts of a time when nothing — not even the state of the American union — was exactly what it seemed.
One-time FBI official Mark Felt outed himself as Deep Throat 3 1/2 years ago after three decades and an agonizing internal debate.
To hear his friends tell it, Felt spent the end of his life relieved of the burden that he placed upon himself when he chose to covertly spill various beans about President Richard Nixon’s misdeeds.
Yet in a way, Felt didn’t matter as much to history as did his alter ego because the character he created, named after one of the first porn movies that reached into mainstream culture, was one that America desperately needed at that moment: someone who would, with no visible rewards, blow the whistle on the yarn to end all political yarns.
He was also, for many Americans, an entry point into the murk that brought down Nixon’s presidency.
“It’s with the figure of Deep Throat that you feel like you come into contact with that kind of hidden secret infrastructure that is so much a part of the Watergate story,” said Andreas Killen, author of “1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America.”
Also, Deep Throat was almost never unmasked, at least in his lifetime. Carl Bernstein didn’t meet him until last month, and Bob Woodward kept the secret through nearly 30 years of speculation.
If the book by Woodward and Bernstein, “All the President’s Men,” didn’t secure his place in the culture, then the 1976 movie version starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman certainly did.
In it, we see Hal Holbrook in the fabled parking garage whispering back-channel information to our intrepid reporters. It was unforgettable — and a pastiche that inspired thousands of young people to choose investigative journalism as a career out of the belief that, with the dogged pursuit of sources and the truth, some good could be done.
Some called Deep Throat a traitor. Some called him a hero.
Woodward called him a secret, and that’s exactly what made Felt’s identity such an object of fascination over so many years.
America likes nothing better than an unsolved mystery.
“He became one of the great American mysteries. There’s who killed JFK, is there a Bigfoot roaming around somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and is there a Deep Throat?” said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of television who studies how American popular culture works.
Thompson sees another crucial narrative element in the Deep Throat saga: He was a really serious player. In a story that unfolded with bumbles and boners, with botched burglaries and ham-handed lies and suspiciously absent segments of audiotape, this was someone with the goods.
In other words, Watergate: created by idiots, revealed by experts.
“The whole thing looked like something out of a Mack Sennett comedy,” Thompson says. “And suddenly you get this Deep Throat guy who looks like he’s operating out of a serious spy thriller.”
The allure of the mysterious insider whose motivations are unclear — but appear unexpectedly pure — endures.
“People will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing by helping Woodward,” Felt wrote in his 2006 memoir, “A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, ‘Deep Throat’ and the Struggle for Honor in Washington.” “The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, and isn’t that what the FBI is supposed to do?”
