In 1971, White House Counsel John Dean wrote and circulated a memo with the subject line: “On Screwing Our Political Enemies.”   In the memo, Dean “addressed the matter of… how we [the Nixon administration] can use the available federal machinery to screw our political opponents.”

These weren’t just idle musings.  Nixon aide Charles Colson produced an enemies list (which included actor Paul Newman, journalists, union leaders, members of Congress, and later grew to include many, many more), and the administration did indeed use the machinery of federal government to “screw” its political enemies.  Morton Halperin, a critic of the administration and opponent of the Vietnam War, was on the list.  Halperin remembers that, next to his name on the list, there was the notation “a scandal would be helpful here.”  The Nixon administration bugged his home phone (without a warrant) and kept the wiretap in place for nearly two years.

Halperin wasn’t alone.  The impeachment papers prepared against Nixon charged him with conspiring to wiretap 17 people without benefit of a warrant.  Nixon and his aides were charged with conspiring “to commit various crimes against numerous citizens in the United States who opposed the policies of Richard M. Nixon.”

35 years later, you’d think it would be hard to find anyone willing to defend these practices.  But you’d be forgetting about Pat Buchanan.  Buchanan served as a speechwriter to the conniving President Nixon.  In that role, Buchanan warned Nixon not to visit Coretta Scott King on the first anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, claiming that such a visit would “outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse…some people consider [King] the devil incarnate.  Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history.”  Buchanan manged to impress even Nixon with his extremism–the president reportedly characterized Buchanan’s views on race as “segregation forever.”  After Nixon was re-elected in1972, Buchanan warned him not to “fritter away his present high support in the nation for an ill-advised government effort to forcibly integrate races.” 

Age has not mellowed Buchanan.  He remains an apologist for the president he served.  In a piece Buchanan wrote yesterday, he had this to say about the Nixon administration’s tactics: “As for an enemies list, the only mistake was writing it down.”  That’s an outrageous statement, and prompts an obvious question: does Buchanan think the tactics used against Nixon’s politicial enemies were justified?  It seems so.  Buchanan’s smug assertion suggests that the mistake the administration made was not identifying enemies, it was writing down the list so there was evidence that could be used against them.  Maybe it’s just me, but I think the mistakes the Nixon administration made with the enemies list included writing it down and then using the machinery of government to commit crimes against its enemies.  I’d be curious to know how Buchanan explains his omission of the latter point.