Creating a New Who's Who

The most bizarrely captivating documents that John W. Dean III turned over to the Ervin committee last week were the ones he took from the White House file labeled "Opponents' List and Political Enemies Project." These lists of varying length, compiled in the summer of 1971, contained the names of as many as 200 politicians, journalists, labor officials, entertainers, scholars and businessmen and Democratic campaign contributors whom the White House staff considered to be the Administration's prime domestic enemies.

The project never seems to have got off the ground, but the idea, as Dean put it in a memorandum to Presidential Advisers H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman at the time, was to find ways in which "we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." The lists, most of which apparently emanated from Charles W. Colson and his staff, included a bewildering jumble of names both famous and obscure.

Steve McQueen and Barbra Streisand were there, as were Eugene Carson Blake, former General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, and Composer-Conductor Leonard Bernstein. So were ten Democratic Senators and twelve black members of the House of Representatives, as well as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and (would you believe?) Joe Namath.

Token Black. Most people who turned up on the lists were wryly amused and tended to wear their new status as badges of honor. "I prize it more highly than my Emmy award," declared CBS Newsman Daniel Schorr, whom the list described as "a real media enemy." Sidney Davidoff, former aide to New York's Mayor John V. Lindsay, was characterized as "a first-class s.o.b. wheeler-dealer." He was delighted. "The first thing I did was call my mother in Florida and assure her it was a good list," he said. "She wasn't sure if it was a good list or a bad list, and I assured her it was a good one." Comedian Bill Cosby quipped that he was merely a "token black on the list," and added of the President: "Anyone who would hug Sammy Davis can't be all bad." Paul Newman declared that he was "sending

Gordon Liddy to pick up my award."

Others were not so much amused as appalled. "I suppose Hitler and Stalin may have had such lists," said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "but no American President. Nixon saw himself as being above the law, and those under him acted accordingly." Democratic Congressman John Brademas of Indiana agreed. "The secret plan to use federal money and federal power to harass critics is further evidence of the contempt for law and common decency that has characterized the Nixon White House. The real 'enemies' Americans must fear are those who would subvert the rule of law and the institutions of freedom."

Senator Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota--who, like a number of other people on the lists, has undergone an unusually thorough examination by the Internal Revenue Service in the last two years--declared mildly: "It makes you wonder whether they were doing anything else over there."

It certainly does. On balance, the lists revealed not only paranoia but ludicrous judgment. As S. Sterling Munro Jr., chief aide to Senator Henry M. Jackson, put it: "Where do they get these clowns, anyway? They have absolutely no political judgment at all. My only problem now is that all my colleagues on the Senate staffs are envious."

One of the Administration's more bemused "enemies" was Sam M. Lambert, former executive secretary of the National Education Association, who voted for Nixon in 1968 and considered himself a presidential supporter.

"Heaven help all of us," he said last week, "if this is the slipshod way they do their intelligence work." One example: the listing of Thomas O'Neill of the Baltimore Sun, who died in April 1971--at least three months before the lists were compiled.

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