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President Richard Nixon’s administration maintained an enemies list. Nixon scholar Ken Hughes quotes White House counsel John Dean – yes, that avuncular, reasonable guy you see now on CNN – saying that the aim was to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
The revelation of that list, writes Hughes, who conducts research at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, “inspired bipartisan revulsion” in Congress and provoked conservative columnist and Nixon supporter William F. Buckley to call 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.”
Hughes writes about one case in which the Nixon administration spied on and conspired to silence a White House aide believed to be critical of the president’s policies. The very acts – among them, an extended FBI wiretap – used to silence a dissenter “who committed no crime” has lessons for the incoming Trump administration, says Hughes. That’s because Donald Trump’s choice for FBI head, Kash Patel, has assembled an enemies list, too, on which Patel includes “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State.”
But “an enemies list isn’t a weapon against the ‘Deep State,’” writes Hughes. “An enemies list was a tool that a president used to create a deep state of his own.”
Also in this week’s politics news:
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