ENEMIES LISTNixon’s Official Acts Against His Enemies List Led to a Bipartisan Impeachment Effort
Nixon’s “enemies list,” said his White House counsel, aimed to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, published his own enemies list in his 2023 book. The list does not include anyone who tried to keep Trump in office illegally after he lost in 2020. It does, however, include a number of high-level Trump appointees who chose not to help him in that effort to overturn democracy.
The Nixon administration’s enemies list inspired bipartisan revulsion. Its purpose was, in the immortal words of President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
The revelation of the list’s existence during the Watergate hearings of 1973 provoked conservative columnist and Nixon supporter William F. Buckley Jr. to use the f-word in print. Yes, Buckley called the enemies list “an act of proto-fascism. It is altogether ruthless in its dismissal of human rights. It is fascist in its reliance on the state as the instrument of harassment.”
But that was then. Now, Donald Trump has announced his intention to place in charge of the FBI someone who published an enemies list in a 2023 book.
Kash Patel’s “Government Gangsters” includes a list of “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,” which he describes as “a cabal of unelected tyrants who think they should determine who the American people can and cannot elect as president.”
Despite that description, the list does not include anyone who tried to keep Trump in office illegally after he lost in 2020. It does, however, include a number of high-level Trump appointees who chose not to help him in that effort to overturn democracy.
Targeting fellow Republicans follows Nixonian precedent. The top name on an early draft of Nixon’s enemies list was a Republican who worked in the Nixon White House on Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff.
The story of that aide, Morton H. Halperin, demonstrates the dangers of enemies lists to their makers as well as their targets. I tell this story in my book “Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate.”
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Morton Halperin committed no crime.
To Nixon and Kissinger, however, he was the man who knew too much. They mobilized the police power of the state against him, because they feared what he could reveal about them.
Kissinger, as national security adviser, had told Halperin about the secret bombing of Cambodia. The waves of B-52 attacks on North Vietnamese infiltration routes was no secret to the Cambodians, but Nixon and Kissinger kept it from the American people. The New York Times, however, soon found out and ran a front-page story about the bombing campaign.
