L. Patrick Gray - Final Years

Final Years

In an article written in 2005 by the Felt family's attorney, deputy director Mark Felt, by then suffering from memory loss, claimed to be Deep Throat, the famous source of leaks to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

On June 26, 2005, mere days before his death from pancreatic cancer, Gray spoke about the Watergate scandal for the first time in 32 years. When asked about Mark Felt's claim to being Deep Throat, Gray told ABC's This Week that he was in "total shock, total disbelief," noting, "It was like I was hit with a tremendous sledgehammer."

Gray died on July 6, 2005, and was survived by his wife, four children, fourteen grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Before his death, Gray, using his extensive and never-released personal Watergate files, began working on his memoirs with his son, Ed Gray, who finished them. The book, entitled In Nixon's Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate was published on March 4, 2008 by Times Books, a division of Henry Holt and Company.

Gray's posthumously-published Watergate book disputes the claim that Mark Felt is Deep Throat, citing Woodward's own notes and other evidence as proof that Deep Throat was a fictional composite made up of several Woodward sources, only one of whom was Felt.