Inside Watergate's Last Chapter

BEN MARGOT / AP
Mark Felt, with his daughter, is unmasked as Deep Throat

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Moreover, John Dean, the White House counsel sent to jail for his deep involvement in the White House attempt to obstruct justice, tells TIME that Woodstein never really got to the bottom of the whole case. "They didn't even crack the case. They couldn't have been further from what concerned us most, the cover-up." Yet the majority of Americans who have come to equate Watergate with the triumph of the common good and the Constitution over a corrupt government probably share the assessment of Felt's grandson Nick Jones: "He is a great American hero who went well above and beyond the call of duty at much risk to himself to save his country from horrible injustice."

Felt's willingness to blow the whistle against the highest in the land provides a salient reminder, at a time when journalism's credibility is at a low, of why anonymous sources have a legitimate role to play in keeping the powerful honest.

But the myths of Watergate look a bit different now that we have a name and a biography to attach to Deep Throat. The real man had scores to settle as a thwarted bureaucrat as well as principles to defend. He is at once a narrative hook for a complicated story of political intrigue and a marketable commodity in this age of celebrity. Yet to look at his record is to realize a deeper truth about Watergate: it was less about one character than about the process working the way it should. And as everyone has long accepted, it wasn't the dirty tricks that destroyed the Nixon Administration; it was the White House's sustained attempt to cover them up. That unraveled mainly through official investigations begun at the trial of the Watergate break-in conspirators and pursued in a Senate hearing room.

One question left unanswered last week was whether the white-haired gentleman who waved happily from the Santa Rosa house where he has lived so quietly for the past 15 years can provide rich details to fill out this chapter of history. J. Todd Foster, a journalist who says he spent nearly three years in discussions with Felt's family about bringing his version of the story to the public, thinks not.

"It's about five years too late," Foster tells TIME. "Mark Felt doesn't even know who he is half the time." Foster says he turned down a joint project after deciding that Felt's mental capacity was far too diminished. But at least Felt knows Deep Throat will not go down in history as just a shadow in a trench coat. As the Washington Post itself put it, "It's nice to be able to honor him by his real name while he still lives."