One of the odder footnotes to the recent unveiling of W. Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” was provided by a brief exchange between Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, immortalized on the Watergate-era White House tapes.

As both men muse whether the disgruntled FBI deputy-director could be the highly-placed executive source feeding information to the Washington Post, Nixon asks if Felt is Catholic. Haldeman mistakenly replies “Jewish,” even though Felt is of Irish descent. Nixon responds, “It could be the Jewish thing. I don’t know. It’s always a possibility.”

The remark is one of many on the Watergate tapes testifying to a strain of paranoid anti-Semitism running through Nixon’s twisted psyche. Despite this, several of his advisers were Jewish, including Henry Kissinger, Leonard Garment and William Safire.

Another was Ben Stein, a speechwriter whose subsequent resume includes being a minor character actor, host of a Comedy Central game show and a columnist for the right-wing American Spectator magazine. Writing in the Spectator last week, Stein apparently mistook the reporting of Nixon’s remarks about Felt’s “Jewishness” as being accurate, and wrote in response:

“And it gets worse; It’s been reported that Mark Felt is at least part Jewish. The reason this is worse is that at the same time that Mark Felt was betraying Richard Nixon, Nixon was saving Eretz Israel. It is a terrifying chapter in betrayal and ingratitude. If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment’s shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it.”

Whew! It’s hard to know what to make of this, except to suggest that a book on “All the President’s Jews” about the members of the tribe who loyally walked the halls of the Nixon White House, is probably long overdue. I guess it’s a good thing that Rabbi Baruch Korff, “Nixon’s rabbi,” died 10 years ago and didn’t live to see this day.

As for “saving Eretz Israel,” Stein is perhaps referring to Nixon’s approval of the U.S. arms airlift that did provide invaluable aid to this country during the Yom Kippur War. But that came in November 1973, when Nixon was already tussling with the Supreme Court over the Watergate tapes, and long after Felt had anything useful to provide to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Stein’s outburst is best understood in the context of the effort by those who continue to support or defend Nixon, to now attack Felt for his role in Watergate. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan goes even further than Stein, blaming Deep Throat for no less than the fall of South Vietnam and the subsequent genocide in Cambodia, because of his role in bringing down the president. Heck, good thing Felt really wasn’t Jewish.

More serious is to ask whether Felt really deserves to be seen as a hero. As has been noted, as a senior FBI official of the J. Edgar Hoover-era, he himself approved numerous acts of illegal wire-tapping. What’s more, he may well have acted more from personal motives than ideological concerns, after Nixon passed him over for promotion to succeed Hoover as FBI chief.

Still, it’s clear from Woodward’s own recounting of the story of their relationship, that Felt was genuinely alarmed by Nixon administration abuses that went far beyond anything the FBI had done; at one point he even referred to the White House schemers as “Nazis.”

But was Deep Throat justified in his means of leaking to the press, instead of, as some argue, risking exposure by providing what he knew to the grand jury charged with investigating the Watergate break-in?

I think so, and not just as a journalist myself. Felt knew that Nixon had corrupted the highest echelons of the U.S. law enforcement community, including FBI head F. Patrick Gray, and two attorneys-general, John Mitchell and Richard Kleindeinst, all of whom later went to jail. No wonder Deep Throat felt the press was the only outlet he could trust to both protect himself and make proper use of the information he could give.

This context is what distinguishes Felt from, say, former Israeli Justice Ministry official Leora Glatt-Berkowitz, who was convicted last year of breach of duty for leaking classified information to the media from the corruption investigation involving Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in an attempt to bring him down. Although Ehud Barak recently made a point of calling Glatt-Berkowitz a hero, her actions would only have been justified had the entire judicial system been corrupted here to the degree that it was in the United States during the Watergate era.

So was Mark Felt a hero? I still wouldn’t call him that, and certainly not in comparison to the real heroes of the Watergate saga, men such as Sen. Sam Ervin, Judge John Sirica and Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.

And oh yes, Woodward, Bernstein and their Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee. Though I came of age in the Watergate era, I can’t quite say that their example was what inspired me to take up the journalistic profession. But “All the President’s Men,” the book and movie, have served as invaluable inspirations and guides in my work, textbook examples of how the job is done right. In that regard, it’s interesting that Felt is now being cited in the current journalistic debate about the use of anonymous sources. But in fact, Deep Throat was never used as a primary source, only as deep background to be confirmed by other multiple sources, which testifies to the sound reporting done by Woodward and Bernstein.

However, about that Bernstein guy; hmmm, does sound a bit Jewish, don’t you think, and Dustin Hoffman certainly looked it. Maybe Nixon had a point after all. Luckily, Eretz Israel survived anyway, as did the rule of law in my native land.

Calev Ben-David is editor of the Jerusalem Post, where this column previously appeared.