Wouldn’t you know it: Deep Throat turns out to be a Jewish story. It so happens that Richard Nixon was so paranoid about a Jewish conspiracy out to get him that it even carried over to his search for Deep Throat.
As recalled by John D. O’Connor, the San Francisco lawyer whose article in Vanity Fair this week revealed W. Mark Felt to be Deep Throat, Nixon had zeroed in on Felt as a source of press leaks damaging to the White House. Felt, now 91, was then the No. 2 man in the FBI, after having worked as an anti-Nazi spy hunter earlier in his FBI career. On the Watergate tapes recorded in October 1972, Nixon was heard to say that he would "fire the whole goddamn bureau" to stop the leaks.
"Is he [Felt] a Catholic?" Nixon then asked his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. When Haldeman replied that Felt is Jewish, Nixon fumed: "Christ, [the bureau] put a Jew in there?" O’Connor in his article pointed out that Nixon had suggested on more than one occasion that a Jewish conspiracy might be behind the campaign against him. And he notes that in that Oval Office conversation about Felt, Nixon brought it up again.
"It could be the Jewish thing. I don’t know," Nixon said. "It’s always a possibility."
But O’Connor writes that, in fact, Felt is not Jewish, that he is of Irish descent and claims no religious affiliation.
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