Watergate is shorthand for the moment American politics broke in public. Between 1972 and 1974 a White House break-in operation, an organised cover-up, and a secret FBI source pulled the country into a constitutional crisis that ended with Richard Nixon becoming the only US president to ever resign the office. The man feeding the journalists was Mark Felt, the number two at the FBI, and his name stayed buried for more than thirty years after the fact.
The Plumbers and the burglary that started it
Popular shorthand calls the five Watergate burglars "the Plumbers", but the Plumbers were a different group. They were an earlier off-the-books White House unit, set up in 1971 to plug leaks after the Pentagon Papers embarrassed the administration. Nixon's circle wanted hands-on retaliation against the leaker, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. Two of the Plumbers, former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy, broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in Beverly Hills in September 1971, hoping to find material that would discredit him. They came back with nothing.
The Watergate complex on the Potomac, where the June 1972 burglary took place / Indutiomarus / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
When Hunt and Liddy resurfaced inside the campaign as planners for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (mockingly nicknamed CREEP), they recycled the same playbook. On 17 June 1972, five men were arrested inside Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex on the Potomac. One of them was James McCord, the committee's own security coordinator. They were trying to fix a malfunctioning wiretap they had planted weeks earlier and to photograph documents. Bugs, bugged-out radios, and sequential hundred-dollar bills traced back to the Nixon campaign were lying around. Despite the arrests, Nixon won re-election four months later in a 49-state landslide.
A leaker at the top of the FBI
The Watergate burglary was, on paper, an FBI case. The bureau's Deputy Associate Director was William Mark Felt Sr., a thirty-year veteran who had expected to succeed J. Edgar Hoover after Hoover's death in May 1972. Nixon passed him over and installed his own loyalist, L. Patrick Gray, as acting director. Felt watched from the inside as Gray funnelled FBI evidence directly to the White House and as the bureau's own investigation was steered, slowed and second-guessed by Nixon aides.
Mark Felt as FBI Deputy Associate Director, around 1972 / FBI / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Felt began meeting Bob Woodward, a young Washington Post reporter, in an underground parking garage in Rosslyn, Virginia. The two had a primitive signalling system: a flowerpot moved on Woodward's balcony to request a meeting, a clock face drawn in his copy of the New York Times to set a time. Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein never named their source in print. The Post's editors called him "Deep Throat", a play on the title of a contemporaneous pornographic film and a nod to the fact that he would speak only on deep background. He confirmed leads, killed wrong ones, and pointed Woodward and Bernstein toward the money trail that connected the burglars to Nixon's campaign treasury.
The cover-up unravels on tape
In February 1973 the Senate set up a select committee chaired by North Carolina Democrat Sam Ervin to investigate the campaign. Hearings opened in May and ran for months on live television. The decisive witness was former White House counsel John Dean, who in June 1973 spent a week describing, in detail, a presidency-wide cover-up. Then, almost as a side note, Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield revealed under questioning that the president had been secretly recording every conversation in the Oval Office since 1971.
Nixon at his desk recording his televised address to the nation on Watergate, 22 April 1974, with stacks of tape transcripts at his side / Jack Kightlinger / Nixon Presidential Materials, NARA / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
The tapes turned a he-said-he-said scandal into a documentary one. After more than a year of fights over executive privilege, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on 24 July 1974 that Nixon had to hand them over. On 5 August the White House released a recording from 23 June 1972 (six days after the burglary) in which Nixon personally instructed his chief of staff to have the CIA shut down the FBI's investigation. The press dubbed it the "smoking gun". The ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment in committee announced they would now vote for it on the floor. Nixon's political support evaporated within forty-eight hours.
Resignation and pardon
On the evening of 8 August 1974, Nixon told the country he would resign at noon the following day. The next morning he gave a rambling farewell to White House staff in the East Room, walked out to the South Lawn with his successor Gerald Ford, and boarded the presidential helicopter. The two-fingered V-sign he flashed from the helicopter steps became one of the most photographed gestures of the twentieth century.
Nixon's V-sign as he boards Marine One on the South Lawn, 9 August 1974 / Robert L. Knudsen / White House Photo Office, NARA / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
A month later, on 8 September 1974, Ford issued Nixon a "full, free, and absolute" pardon for any federal crimes committed during his presidency. The pardon spared Nixon a criminal trial but cost Ford the 1976 election. Forty of his subordinates were not so lucky. Cabinet officers, campaign aides, lawyers, and the burglars themselves served real time. Attorney General John Mitchell, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman, and White House counsel Charles Colson all went to prison.
Why Felt stayed silent for 33 years
Through all of it, Felt said nothing publicly. He was named as a suspected source in books and articles for decades and denied it under oath every time. Woodward and Bernstein had promised they would protect their source's identity until his death, and they kept the promise even after Felt began showing signs of dementia in his late eighties.
The reveal came not from Woodward but from the source's own family. On 31 May 2005, Vanity Fair published a piece by attorney John D. O'Connor in which Felt, then 91 and living in Santa Rosa, California, identified himself in plain words.
"I'm the Guy They Called Deep Throat."
Mark Felt to John D. O'Connor, Vanity Fair, July 2005
The Washington Post and Bob Woodward confirmed the story within hours. Felt's daughter Joan said publicly that the family had encouraged him to come forward, partly to set the record straight and partly to capitalise on book and film deals while he was still alive to enjoy them.
Felt's complicated legacy
The hero narrative is uncomfortable in places. While Felt was passing tips to Woodward, he was also personally authorising warrantless break-ins at the homes of relatives and friends of Weather Underground fugitives. They were "black-bag jobs" of exactly the kind he had spent thirty years refusing to admit the bureau ever did. A federal grand jury indicted him on 10 April 1978. He and another senior FBI official, Edward S. Miller, were convicted on 6 November 1980 of conspiring to violate citizens' constitutional rights. The judge fined Felt $5,000 and gave him no jail time.
Less than four months later, on 26 March 1981, President Ronald Reagan pardoned both men, writing that their actions had been taken "in good faith". So the man who took down a president for ordering illegal surveillance was, himself, convicted and then pardoned for ordering illegal surveillance, and he was a criminal under federal law for less than a year and a half before the pardon arrived. Felt died at home in Santa Rosa on 18 December 2008, aged 95.
Watergate's afterlife in books, screen, and law
Watergate has had a long cultural afterlife. Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men (1974) became the textbook for a generation of investigative journalists and a fixture on any list of essential whistleblower books; the Alan Pakula film adaptation followed in 1976 and remains a staple of whistleblower cinema. Bernstein returned to that period in his 2022 memoir Chasing History. Garrett Graff's Watergate: A New History, also published in 2022, was the first comprehensive single-volume account written with Felt's identity already known, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. Peter Landesman's 2017 film Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, with Liam Neeson, gave the leaker himself a screen biography for the first time. HBO's 2023 miniseries White House Plumbers, starring Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux as Hunt and Liddy, played the burglary as the dark farce it actually was.
The archives keep moving too. On 31 October 2018, after a lawsuit, the National Archives unsealed the Watergate "Road Map", a grand jury's 53-point report that had laid out the evidence against Nixon for the House Judiciary Committee in 1974. It had been under seal for forty-four years. The 50th anniversary of the resignation in 2024 brought another wave of declassified prosecutorial files and documentaries, plus another round of arguments over what the case should mean for executive power today.
Page 2 of the Watergate "Road Map" summary of evidence prepared for special prosecutor Archibald Cox in August 1973, declassified by the National Archives in 2018 / National Archives (Public Domain)
Watergate also rewired how Western democracies think about whistleblowers. The reporting Felt enabled showed that confidential sources can be the only check on a captured executive branch, a lesson absorbed by every later source from Edward Snowden leaking NSA programmes to Frances Haugen handing internal Facebook documents to a Senate subcommittee. The legal and journalistic norms that grew up around protecting them (source-protection privilege, formal whistleblower statutes, secure intake channels) all owe something to the precedent of "Deep Throat". The US Whistleblower Protection Act (1989), the SEC bounty programme created by Dodd-Frank (2010), and the EU Whistleblower Directive (2019) are the codified, less cinematic descendants of a man meeting a reporter in a parking garage.
Mark Felt was an imperfect, conflicted, partly self-interested civil servant who handed a free press the information it needed to break a presidency. The Watergate story endures because it is a useful reminder that institutional checks fail more often than they hold, and that when they do, the difference between cover-up and accountability is sometimes one person inside the building who decides to talk.
