How Nixon's 'enemies list' led to an impeachment effort
President Richard Nixon used the government as a weapon against his perceived enemies
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.
