The 'Deep Throat' Parking Garage

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Traversing the streets in and around Washington, D.C. is like flipping through the pages of a really good history book.  So many of the significant events in our nation’s past took place within just a few miles of the Capitol.

Several years ago, for example, I was walking along the streets of the Chinatown section of the city when I noticed a family of tourists gathered around a historical marker on a lamppost.  The sign was in front of a Chinese restaurant located on the ground floor of a small (and old) three-story building.  When my turn came to read the marker, I learned that the building had once been the boarding house owned by Mary Surratt – the place where conspirators plotted the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.  On another visit I found myself walking across a bridge dedicated to Washington, DC native Duke Ellington.

Absorbing all of the history that our nation’s capital has to offer would literally be an impossibility because history is continually being made there.

A new historical marker recently went up on Nash Street in Rosslyn, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC.  It stands outside of a parking garage and commemorates a series of clandestine meetings that helped to bring down a presidency.  The meetings were between Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and his ultra-secret Watergate informer who was nicknamed “Deep Throat,” after a popular porn film of that era.   The two met a half dozen times in a period of one year in a corner space on the third floor of the parking garage.  The information that Deep Throat passed on to Woodward eventually led to Richard Nixon resigning as President.

Woodward protected Deep Throat’s identity for more than thirty years, then in 2005, Mark Felt, the former number two man at the FBI, admitted that he had been the infamous Deep Throat.  Now, with the unveiling of the new historical marker on Nash Street, tourists and lovers of history will be able to enter the parking garage, climb to the third floor, and stand on the hallowed ground of Space 32-D where they can listen for the whispers of what a raging Dick Nixon would have surely termed “treason!”

The Deep Throat historical marker reads:

“Watergate Investigation:  Mark Felt, second in command at the FBI, met Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward here in the parking garage to discuss the Watergate scandal.  Felt provided Woodward information that exposed the Nixon administration’s obstruction of the FBI’s Watergate investigation.  He chose this garage as an anonymous secure location.  They met at this garage six times between October 1972 and November 1973.  The Watergate scandal resulted in President Nixon’s resignation in 1974.  Woodward’s managing editor, Howard Simons, gave Felt the code name “Deep Throat.”  Woodward’s promise not to reveal his source was kept until Felt announced his role as “Deep Throat” in 2005.”

With Felt’s disclosure that he was “Deep Throat,” perhaps the greatest political guessing game of the twentieth century came to a close.  Now, with this new landmark, average Americans will have access to the site where this important history was made.

By the next time that I am in Washington, DC, maybe the National Park Service will have corrected some other historical oversights and placed a monument next to the Tidal Basin to mark the spot  where Wilbur Mills' drunken stripper girlfriend, Fanne Foxe (the "Argentine firecracker"), jumped out of his car and into the water - or a plaque marking the door of the little office in the White House where Monica Lewinsky got her dress stained!

Historical preservation must continue!