The only actor to appear on Richard Nixon’s ‘Enemies List’
It was no surprise that Richard Nixon was a paranoid President. His election in the middle of the Vietnam War was a sign that the majority of Americans didn’t believe that the left-wing politicians of the time had what it took to run the country. As hippies and the free love movement gained increasing momentum, the majority of voters chose a man who ran on a conservative platform.
Just before his landslide reelection victory in 1972, Nixon somehow became more certain than ever that America was trying to bring him down. As such, Nixon instructed Charles Colson, a member of his White House counsel, to assemble a list of figures who were seen as being the most antagonistic and combative toward the president and his future endeavours. As such, Nixon’s Enemies List was made.
The list wasn’t even especially secretive. John Dean, who was also on Nixon’s White House counsel, sent a memo of the list to Lawrence Higby, the assistant to Nixon’s Chief of Staff, under the title ‘Dealing with our Political Enemies’. In it, he described the list’s purpose.
“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,” Dean wrote. “Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
Initially, Nixon hoped that IRS Commissioner Donald C. Alexander, whom Nixon had appointed, would carry out audits on all of the people on the list. Alexander refused. Dean was later in charge of expanding the list to hundreds of different names, but the original list became public knowledge when Dean mentioned it during his testimony on June 27th, 1973, as a part of the Watergate Scandal.
That same day, CBS journalist Daniel Schorr managed to get his hands on a printed copy of the memo containing the original list and read it out loud during his television report. Famously, Schorr found out in real-time that he was one of the people on the list. The original list contained 20 names, ranging from congressmen to journalists to Leonard Woodcock, the president of the United Auto Workers labour union.
Of the 20 figures on the original list, there was only a single entertainer: actor Paul Newman. According to Marian Edelman Borden’s biography on Newman, he and Nixon had actually shared a rented Jaguar in the late 1960s, with Newman leaving a snarky note to Nixon referring to the car’s “tricky clutch”. A handwritten note next to Newman’s name on the enemies list gave a more specific look at his inclusion. “Radical lib causes. Heavy McCarthy involvement in ’68,” the note read, referring to Newman’s support of Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy during his 1968 run for president. “Used effectively in nationwide T.V. commercials. ’72 involvement certain.”
When Newman learned of his placement on the list, he considered it an honour. “He was tickled pink and framed it,” Newman’s daughter Nell told The Associated Press in 2009, one year after her father died at the age of 83. Newman would continue to advocate for liberal causes throughout his life, undaunted by the enemies that he made along the way.
