We’ve heard that paranoid line before, those of us who lived through the Nixon years. Richard Nixon was probably the most paranoid president in American history up to now. In one of his taped Oval Office conversations with Henry Kissinger in December 1972, Nixon told Kissinger “Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.”
Nixon went so far as to create an enemies list in 1971. In a memo of that year from John Dean, White House Counsel, Dean stated “This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The plan was to accomplish this by means of tax audits from the IRS and by manipulating grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, and prosecution. Paul Newman was on that enemies list and often said that being on the list was one of his proudest accomplishments.
