For my blog post today about Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life,
my focus will be on the Nixon Administration's enemies list. This will
not be a comprehensive post, going into what many authors have said
about the topic. Rather, I just want to highlight some passages that I
found interesting.
Richard Nixon, in his book In the Arena,
talks a bit about the enemies list. On page 249, he states: "During
Watergate, much attention was paid to the 'enemies list' that a member
of the White House staff had prepared. I never saw it. Regrettably,
some on the list were my personal friends."
(On another topic, as I look at that same page of In the Arena,
I see a noteworthy passage that I must have missed when I read the book
the first time around. Nixon says that Harry Truman in the 1948
Presidential election implied that Nazis were supporting his opponent,
Republican Thomas Dewey. Nixon also states that "Ideally, candidates
should hammer each other without destroying each other." That brought
to my mind a couple of things. First of all, I wrote a post
in which I critiqued Pat Buchanan's claim that those who supported
Harry Truman's "give 'em hell" campaign against Dewey were hypocritical
to then criticize Nixon's hard-hitting Senate campaign against Helen
Gahagan Douglas. If Truman was somehow linking Dewey with Nazism,
however, then I'd say that Truman's campaign was more below-the-belt
than I thought! Second, while Nixon criticizes campaigns that destroy
the other candidate, there are people who contend that Nixon actually
destroyed his opponents, Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas. Roger
Morris on the American Experience documentary about Nixon said that
Nixon's campaigns destroyed them politically, and nearly personally, and
that this engendered a lot of bitterness. But back to the White House
enemies list!)
Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Richard Nixon's youngest
daughter, talks some about the enemies list in her biography of Pat
Nixon, entitled Pat Nixon: The Untold Story. On page 376,
Julie argues that White House Counsel John Dean, who would reveal the
existence of the enemies list in his testimony before Congress against
the President, was himself the one who came up with it:
"Among the
most titillating revelations from Dean were the 'enemies lists.' Dean
produced a memo, composed by himself, on 'dealing with our political
enemies.' In addition to a list of twenty prime political opponents,
whom Dean recommended that the Administration target, were several lists
of names running into the hundreds, which were to be referred to in
determining who received White House jobs and invitations. In his book,
With Nixon, Ray Price points out that when he learned from
Dean's testimony of the existence of the lists, he called them 'Dean's
enemy lists,' because 'after all, it was Dean who proposed the unused
plan to 'screw our enemies,' and Dean who collected the lists in his
filing cabinet.'"
Julie goes on to argue that the Joint
Congressional Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation found that the tax
audits of those on the lists were no more severe than they were for
others. She also states that there were some on the list who were there
"for no apparent reason." She tells the story of how heart surgeon
Michael DeBakey, who was on the list, still extended to her parents an
offer of friendship, for he realized that they "had nothing to do with
the lists" (page 377).
Going on to Richard Nixon's memoirs, Nixon states the following on page 441 of volume 2:
"[John
Dean] talked about my attempt to have the IRS do checks on our
political opponents with no attempt to show how widespread the practice
had been among the Democrats in previous years. The fact that we had
hired a political investigator was treated as a sinister innovation,
when in fact checking up on the political opposition has been part of
politics since time out of mind. We paid our investigator with
political funds; other administrations had even used the FBI. Dean
produced an 'enemies list,' which even he has since admitted was vastly
overplayed by the media."
Here, Nixon does not necessarily contradict what he said in In the Arena,
but his focus is different: he justifies doing research on his
political opponents, and even having the IRS do checks on some of them,
on the grounds that this was customary in politics.
Jonathan
Aitken refers to John Ehrlichman's statement that Nixon was assigning
people odd jobs for investigation, some of them having to do with
investigating political opponents, or the motives of a writer who
criticized Julie. Ehrlichman became concerned that this type of work
"could not legitimately be funded by the taxpayer" (Ehrlichman, quoted
on page 417). Eventually, John Dean would do some of that work. Aitken
refers to Dean's August 16, 1971 memorandum, "Dealing with Our
Political Enemies," which (according to Aitken) recommended that a list
be compiled of the Administration's political enemies and that "various
government agencies such as the IRS should be encouraged 'to screw
them'" (Aitken cites for this page 104 of Silent Coup). But
Aitken says that Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman denied seeing the
memorandum and that "no action was taken to implement its
recommendations" (page 418). On page 419, however, Aitken quotes
Charles Colson's statement that the atmosphere at the White House tended
to reward people who brought "negative intelligence" (Colson's words)
on the Administration's political opponents.
UPDATE: Was Dean responsible for the enemies list? On page 297 of President Nixon: Alone in the White House,
Richard Reeves states: "Beginning on January 25, [1971?,] one of those
new assistants, George Bell, began to work on implementing a new Nixon
idea: organizing the staff to prepare lists of friends and enemies."
Reeves narrates that Haldeman saw a few of the lists, put together by
Bell and Charles Colson, and was asking for clarification about them.
If Reeves is correct, then Dean probably was not solely responsible for
the enemies list.