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.”
