The man who provided Bob Woodward with the critical leads on the story that eventually saw the resignation of Tricky Dick Nixon has died: W. Mark Felt, aka. Deep Throat, was 95.The NYT has a little feature on why he was such a big deal. Only in 2005 did Felt finally admit to being Deep Throat in a Vanity Fair article. [more inside]
posted by krautland on Dec 19, 2008 - 31 comments

Remembering a forgotten hero on the anniversary of his death. Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, security guard Frank Wills called police after someone repeatedly taped the latch on a door at the apartment complex where he worked. That act changed politics forever; one reporter said “It was one of the most important phone calls ever made in American History.” Mr. Wills did not benefit from the circus that followed, however. After two arrests for shoplifting he died penniless on September 27, 2000.
posted by TedW on Sep 27, 2006 - 62 comments

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald says emails relevant to the Valerie Plame leak investigation have gone missing from the White House. "In an adundance of caution," Fitzgerald wrote [PDF] to "Scooter" Libby's lawyers on January 23, "we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system." Might this help explain why Alberto Gonzales -- now the Attorney General, and lately so busy mustering arguments to assert that Bush's NSA domestic-spying program is "legal" -- waited 12 hours before instructing White House staff to preserve documents relevant to the leak investigation after telling Andrew Card about it? Shades of the late, great yoga instructor, Rose Mary Woods. [More on Plame here.]
posted by digaman on Feb 1, 2006 - 54 comments

"Bob Woodward's gonna get all the glory for this, but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills." Or not.
posted by delmoi on Jun 8, 2005 - 11 comments

Former Nixon speechwriter (and Ferris Bueller's economics teacher) Ben Stein loses his mind over Mark Felt: "There is a lot of debate about whether or not Mark Felt was a hero. Obviously, I don't think so. I think the hero was Richard Nixon, fighting for peace even as he was being horribly mistreated and crucified just for his fight for peace." And that's not nearly the worst of it.
posted by Ty Webb on Jun 4, 2005 - 107 comments

Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate Papers are now available online at the University of Texas web site (press release/about the collection) Deep Throat is still not uncovered (as discussed previously at MetaFilter, including the sale of this collection). [cross-posted from MonkeyFilter]
posted by kirkaracha on Feb 3, 2005 - 14 comments

"Rose . . . is as close to us as family". Rose Mary Woods, who died Saturday at 87, was Richard Nixon's private secretary. In 1973 Woods was transcribing secretly recorded audiotapes of Oval Office conversations , working on a June 20, 1972, tape of a conversation between President Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, that might have shed light on whether Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in three days earlier. While she was performing her duties (.rtf file), she said, the phone rang. As she reached for it, she said she inadvertently struck the erase key on the tape recorder and kept her foot on the machine's pedal, forwarding the tape. More inside.
posted by matteo on Jan 24, 2005 - 16 comments

Watergate: The Scandal That Brought Down Richard Nixon , at watergate.info. Extensive.
posted by plep on Jan 7, 2004 - 10 comments

Tehelka is the Indian journalism Web site that published video of bribe-taking on the Net, launching a Watergate-like corruption scandal at the highest levels of government. Since breaking the story, however, "Tehelka’s staff has gone from 120 people to three; its office has been vacated; its staffers arrested and harassed; and its debts have spiraled." But the site perserveres. And Malaysiakini seems to be following in its footsteps. As Doc Searles says, it's "the duct tape of journalism."
posted by hairyeyeball on Sep 24, 2003 - 0 comments

Nixon Ordered the Watergate Break-in. Jeb Stuart Magruder, the deputy director of Nixon's 1972 campaign, revealed in a PBS documentary to air on Wednesday that Nixon personally ordered the bungled break-in at the luxury Watergate Hotel complex. It took 30 years, but the truth finally comes out.
posted by zaelic on Jul 27, 2003 - 18 comments

Deep Throat uncovered. No, not that one, the one of Watergate notoriety. A journalism class at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana has determined that this man is the infamous Deep Throat.
posted by mr_crash_davis on Apr 23, 2003 - 18 comments

Nixon's Last Secret The race is on to try to recover the missing 18 1/2 minutes of the infamous Tape 342. While it will be interesting to see what's on the tape (if it can be recovered) the big question is this: Why erase part of one tape and leave all the others intact?
posted by Irontom on Jun 19, 2002 - 14 comments

"There he was, right in the middle of my Throat-searching radar" John Dean unmasks Deep Throat, sort of, in his Salon e-book. Who do you think it is?
posted by kirkaracha on Jun 17, 2002 - 19 comments

John Dean's Watergate Expose , due to be published Monday, will not be as illuminating as he earlier claimed. Meanwhile, two time Pulitzer Prize winner William Gaines's journalism class at the University of Illinois names Pat Buchanan as Deep Throat on NBC's Dateline.
posted by ljromanoff on Jun 14, 2002 - 11 comments

XP demonstrates "Intelligent design." You mean they didn't evolve it with genetic algorithms? Boy, I could swear the past versions were composed of randomly generated code fragments. (Do read the original article.)
posted by badstone on Nov 14, 2001 - 7 comments

The Reagan Papers? "The confidential memos, letters and briefing papers passed among Ronald Reagan and his top advisers were to have come out in January -- 12 years after Reagan left office, as established by post-Watergate laws.

But the White House counsel's office asked the National Archives to delay the release until at least June 21 so government lawyers can look at the files that researchers and others are waiting to dig through. "
posted by owillis on Jun 7, 2001 - 12 comments

G. Gordon Liddy says that Watergate was really about call girls. Now he's being sued for defamation. I think that everyone's missing the real crime here--the G-Man's acting career.
posted by rorschach on Jan 17, 2001 - 6 comments

Nixon caught with his pants down Selected Watergate tapes & other audio items of historical interest, including the smoking gun.
posted by lbergstr on Feb 10, 2000 - 1 comment