Joan Felt explains why family members urged her father, Watergate's 'Deep Throat,' to reveal his identity
Joan Felt, who played a pivotal role in unraveling the 30-year secret that her father was the mysterious "Deep Throat" source, says he is lucid and feels reassured that he made the right decision.
He is "relieved to get the secret off his chest," Felt said in the first comments by a family member since the revelation last week that W. Mark Felt, then the No. 2 person in the FBI, was the key source in the Washington Post's Watergate investigation that helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon.
As both praise and criticism of Joan Felt and her family swirled last week in the national media, she disclosed the family's motivations for coming forward now, why money was a family consideration and how her father remains a "sensible and wise" participant.
Felt, who has lived with her father in a two-story home in northwest Santa Rosa for the past 13 years, said her 91-year-old father deserved to be released from the secret he had held so long.
"I think it's so important for a person getting into elder years, when death is somewhere around the corner, to be unburdened," Felt said. "At that time of your life, you (shouldn't) be holding up appearances or have something troubling your heart and have to keep it a secret."
Her comments came two days after a media frenzy that included reporters and camera crews camped on her front lawn. Joan Felt, 61, took a quiet moment in her car on the way home from Rohnert Park for an exclusive cell phone interview with The Press Democrat.
While she wouldn't talk about her father's decision to go public, and while the family has refused to make him available for interviews, she was frank about her own motives.
"There were many reasons why we decided to do it. I won't deny that to make money is one of them," Felt said. "My son, Nick, is in law school and he'll owe $100,000 by the time he graduates. I'm still a single mom, still supporting them to one degree or another, and I am not ashamed of this," Felt said.
In the past week, Washington Post Editor Bob Woodward, who closely guarded Felt's identity as the source in many of the key Watergate stories, as well as his partner Carl Bernstein and former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, has each publicly questioned Mark Felt's competency and his ability to withstand family pressure to reveal the secret.
Joan Felt said she understands the concern, but the news articles portraying her father as mentally incapacitated are simply wrong. She confirmed that her father has struggled. He suffered a stroke in 2001 and has had a series of surgeries to battle heart problems and repair a broken hip.
Mental capacity defended
"His health is frail, yes, but he's very present and cogent and capable of making decisions," she said.
If the family is successful in reaching a book deal, which some agents have said could be worth more than $1 million, they would be in good company. Woodward and Bernstein wrote a best-selling book on the Watergate scandal, "All the President's Men," which was made into a movie. And Woodward's publisher is rushing into print a book on Mark Felt, "The Secret Man," due out in July.
The story of the unmasking of Deep Throat is inseparable from the story of the Felt family, from a father and daughter estranged following the social revolution of the 1960s to the eventual reconciliation that last week brought the world to a Santa Rosa doorstep.
Mark Felt's formative years were spent in modest circumstances in post-World War I Idaho. He worked his way through the University of Idaho and George Washington University law school. He waited tables, stoked furnaces and worked for an Idaho senator as a clerk.
Fellow University of Idaho student Audrey Robinson caught his eye and the two were married in 1938 by the House chaplain, ready to begin their life in Washington, D.C., together.
Drawn to the FBI in 1942, Felt developed a deep and unwavering commitment to the Bureau that would shape the rest of his life.
"I am willing to stake my loyalty and dedication to my country against that of anyone," he wrote in his memoir, penned in 1979.
While he was wrestling with Watergate, his daughter Joan was raising a family. She gave birth to three children after embracing a counterculture lifestyle that did not include marriage. As Nixon was winning a landslide election in 1972, she was stepping away from an elite education that included two language degrees from Stanford University and traveling to Chile on a Fulbright scholarship to study Spanish.
Her father strongly disapproved, straining their relationship. With the birth of her first child in 1974, Joan Felt became the breadwinner of her young family, working a variety of low-paying jobs and living in small rentals in Guerneville and Santa Rosa.
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