What is a Man Advantaged

if he gain the whole world, but lose himself...

I like to consider myself pretty plugged in. I am, after all, a near native of Washington DC. So I was shocked when the first news I got on the revealing of Deep Throat wasn't until I got home from work. I walked in the door about 7:15 and my husband's first words were "have you heard about Deep Throat?"

Okay, I have to admit that my first thought was "are you KIDDING? I just got HOME? I don't have the energy to watch *a movie* with you."

I was 7 years old when the Watergate scandal broke. My thinking at the time wasn't about the "right or wrong" of the President's acts. In fact, what I most remember is watching my mother as she watched Nixon annouce his resignation - tears running down her face. I was angry at the people who made my mother cry. But the name "Deep Throat" had no staying power with me.

Later in life the term "Deep Throat" would take on a different meaning, one that registered when I confused the name of a character I was playing in a school play. I came home from school and told my mother I was playing the character "Linda Lovelace." In fact, I was playing "Linda Lovely" but she didn't know that and I stood in shocked silence while she strictly informed me that no daughter of hers would play a porn star.

Adolescent curiosity erased any vestige of Nixon's Deep Throat from my memory and planted a different reference altogether.

25 years later Deep Throat is back in my vocabulary, in a way more adult than my 7 year old brain could understand and my 15 year old brain would have cared about.

Today Deep Throat has a name. Mark Felts. Journalists are calling Felts a hero. Those closest to the late-President call him a traitor. I'm looking back at the events of 1972-1973 and thinking about the secrets kept. Mark Felt had nothing to gain and everything to lose by his actions. Except his personal knowledge that he fought back against a corrupt government the only way he could, the way every Washington insider does, through the press. That there was no personal gain could not be clearer. He remained anonymous for more than 30 years.

Linda Tripp could take a lesson from him.