Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt, has outed himself in—of all peculiar places—a Vanity Fair article written by his lawyer friend John D. O’Connor. Sucks to be Bob Woodward today. I guess we’ll find out how much on Thursday when Woodward’s account of his relationship with Deep Throat will be published in the Washington Post.
There’s something, I don’t know… ineffably and deeply disturbing about the Post running a wire story about Deep Throat revealing himself with the killer final graf: “The Washington Post had no immediate comment.” Of course the Post followed up later in the day with a confirmation from Bob Woodward:
The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee. The three spoke after Felt’s family and Vanity Fair magazine identified the 91-year-old Felt, now a retiree in California, as the long-anonymous source who provided crucial guidance for some of the newspaper’s groundbreaking Watergate stories.
W. Mark Felt, now a 91 year-old retiree was, at the time of Watergate, second-in-command at the FBI. Nixon passed Felt over for the FBI directorship, choosing instead then-assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray.
Most curious of all is that Nixon clearly suspected Felt as the source of leaked information. “It is clear from the Watergate tapes that Felt was indeed one of the targets of Nixon’s wrath,” O’Connor writes in the Vanity Fair piece. “In October 1972, Nixon insisted he would ‘fire the whole Goddamn Bureau,’ and singled out Felt, whom he thought to be part of a plot to undermine him through frequent press leaks. ‘Is he a Catholic?’ he asked his trusted adviser H. R. Haldeman, who replied that Felt was Jewish. (Felt, of Irish descent, is not Jewish and claims no religious affiliation.) Nixon, who sometimes suggested that a Jewish conspiracy might be at the root of his problems, seemed surprised. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘[the bureau] put a Jew in there? ... It could be the Jewish thing. I don’t know. It’s always a possibility.’”
It’s a goddamned shame that Hunter Thompson didn’t live long enough to see this.
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