Unleashed Memoir #2 The Enemies List
The second of many parts of my memoir-in-gestation. This time, a trip back in history to my last brush with an enemies list a half century in the past, but with lessons for today
Since Donald Trump has been making an ever-expanding point of going after his enemies with a vengeance—many of them journalists—it occurs to me this might be the time to look back at my own brush with an enemies list from the past—during the presidency of Richard Nixon. I was a young reporter for The New York Times in those days, a paper that along with the Washington Post was the bane of Nixon's existence. Now, however, the threat is even closer and more frightening, for so many of us. “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” This time, the speaker is the leading, and most terrifying candidate for a presidency that Donald Trump has pledged to turn into an instrument of his own malevolent will. Americans should take the threat seriously.
To commemorate a moment from my own past, frozen in time, but with an important message, you will find here an excerpt from my memoir, "Don't Shoot, I'm an American Reporter," which is still being written. From time to time, Unleashed Memoir will present excerpts from this work where and when they resonate especially.
In late February 1972, I had a phone call from the son of a friend of my father. The young man had just recently left the Nixon White House where he’d served as an assistant to a leading advisor to the President on domestic affairs and who had some passing acquaintance with a top presidential aide who would play a central role in my little drama—the flamboyant Patrick Buchanan.
Buchanan and chum
What I hadn’t realized was that my friend had been at least tangentially involved in the controversy over busing in America’s inner cities. Busing was an indirect consequence of the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education that ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. As a result, even many northern schools began bending over backwards, busing black children from inner city schools to the suburbs or to largely white neighborhoods, often with quite disruptive results. Not surprisingly, by the time the 1970s arrived, the White House was forced to look into the question whether the federal government needed to get involved—especially since federal funds subsidized the operations of many underfunded public schools.
As it happens, when my source, whose confidentiality I have guarded for a half century, left the White House, he took with him a quantity of internal memos involving the busing question that passed between White House officials, up to and including the President. Might I be interested in seeing them? Might I? How fast could I get over there.
Not surprisingly, The New York Times was immediately interested and decided that a team effort was necessary, so off I went to Washington to partner with Bob Semple, the paper’s chief White House correspondent. There was a wealth of material in these papers, but Semple had picked up word that President Nixon was about to ask Congress for legislation that would call a halt to all new busing orders by Federal courts as part of a package—the Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1971—to improve the education of inner city children in situ, hence removing the need for lily white suburban schools to suffer the contamination represented by minorities from afar.
When the disclosure arrived on March 16, we were ready. Semple’s story led the paper with a two-column headline: “Nixon Asks Bill Opposing Halt In New Busing Orders; Seeks Education Equality.” My sidebar ran below it on page one: “Rehnquist Urged a Busing Ban In 1970 Memos to White House.” A more detailed “chronology” of the evolution of White House views ran three days later on page one, making use of the full range of these memos.
At the time William H. Rehnquist had prepared his memos, he was serving as Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department. By the time my story appeared, Rehnquist had moved on—barely two months into his term as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and more than a decade later would be moved up to Chief Justice by President Ronald Reagan. So, though Rehnquist refused to discuss any of this with me, clearly his views mattered a whole lot more than even at the time he expressed them in his memos. There were two such memos—dated March 3 and March 5, 1970, prepared at White House request, and they urged that President Nixon back a constitutional amendment prohibiting busing as a vehicle of school desegregation.
Nixon decided, in the end, to take another route—Congressional legislation. Yet his plea for “education equality” actually ran directly counter to the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that had touched off the entire issue. Separate but equal was neither legal nor constitutional and in no sense what the Founding Fathers had intended in the Bill of Rights. Indeed, Rehnquist had suggested that only a constitutional amendment would resolve many of the potential difficulties inherent in antibusing legislation, including a multiplicity of conflicting Federal court rulings, which a potentially hostile Supreme Court would ultimately be forced to resolve. Rehnquist even suggested the actual wording of the amendment, which The Times reproduced in its entirety. There was a minor stir about my story, but the real impact would be felt only sometime later.
The fact is there was a whole host of memos in the collection I was given. They were from and to a who’s who of top Nixon administration officials. This was the basis of Semple’s longer piece. At which point, The Times was pretty much finished with them. I wasn’t. So, on March 8, with my story written and awaiting publication, I found my way to Lewis Lapham, the venerable editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine who would later have a remarkable second career as founding editor and publisher of Lapham’s Quarterly.
I laid out for Lewis what I had and showed him some of the juicier examples. He hit on an ingenious, and ultimately most impactful, proposal. Two of the memos were from one of Nixon’s young, but powerful advisors and a top speechwriter—Patrick Buchanan, then 32 years old. His memos suggested, in just one of his typically inflammatory and colorful moments, “The ship of integration is going down and we should not be aboard.”
Clearly, they were not intended for consumption beyond the Oval Office, certainly not in a national magazine of some considerable reach and influence inside and outside the Beltway. Yet Lapham suggested that Harper’s simply reproduce one of them, splashed across two pages in the magazine. Delighted.
Two months later (as a monthly, it took some time to get such an item into print), I’d somewhat lost track of the publication date, the phone rang in my cubicle in Commack, Long Island where I was serving as The Times bureau chief. It was the National Editor, and he had a copy of an Associated Press story announcing publication of the Buchanan memo and crediting me as the source.
“That was one of the memos we had that you shared with Semple, right?” he asked. I agreed and pointed out that The Times had decided we had milked them of their main news value. He agreed. No foul.
I leaned back, basking in self-congratulation, until the phone rang a second time. I picked it up. There was none of the, “This is the White House calling, please hold for ….” This was direct. And this time the voice did not identify itself, but it was unmistakable.
“Where did you get those memos?” snarled a clearly unhappy Pat Buchanan.
“Oh, they came in over the transom,” I shot back, in a response I thought quite adroit considering how unexpected was the challenge.
“You’d be amazing what else can crawl in over that transom,” snapped Buchanan and slammed down the phone.
I didn’t think much more of this at the time, though I did dine out on that brief exchange for some considerable period.
But next year, something curious happened. My father Saul Andelman, you see, did my taxes every year. He was not an accountant, but he was an attorney who did quite a lot of tax work, and he was absolutely meticulous with his taxes, and with mine. They were, especially in those days, hardly heavy-lifting. I had my salary—barely $15,000 a year—and the odd business deduction from stories I wrote for The Times on vacation when I could not submit expenses. I kept every scrap of receipt and, with the care my father devoted, I was never audited.
Until 1972. Then I was summoned for a full office audit. My dad went in my stead, fully armed with documents and receipts. I got a refund out of that process. This went on, each year for four years. The summons, dad’s appearance, a refund. Mind you, neither of us had ever before been audited even once in our lives.
Finally, dad was fed up and he rang up an acquaintance who happened to be District Director of Internal Revenue in Boston. He promised to check it out. A few days later, he rang my father back. It won’t happen again, he pledged. What had happened, dad asked.
“Your son’s name somehow managed to find its way onto a list in Washington. It’s been removed.” Watergate, by then, had come and gone. Nixon resigned as President in 1974. Buchanan stayed on briefly under his successor, Gerald Ford, then left as well, but his legacy, at least some residue of multiple enemies lists, clearly had lived on, certainly, at least for me.
End of story? Not exactly.
In December each year, New York City’s elite Buckley School used to hold a Christmas book sale where distinguished parents or alumni who’d written books would come and autograph them, the proceeds going to the school’s endowment fund. In December 1988, following our return from France where I’d served as CBS correspondent, my son Philip was enrolled at the school, so we went to the book sale.
At one of the tables sat Lewis Lapham, an alumnus himself, autographing his latest work. I told him the story about Buchanan and my tax audit, which I’d never had a chance to tell him before. There was a long, thoughtful, indeed stunned pause.
"What years did that happen?” he asked quietly. I told him.
“You know, I was audited for several years myself during that period, then suddenly, it just stopped.”
We both burst out laughing. I suspect that Buchanan himself hardly remembered this incident—certainly not the young Timesman who was behind it.
For 20 years later, when he was writing his book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World, perhaps not realizing the intersection of our paths so many decades earlier, Buchanan asked my friend Veronique Rodman at the American Enterprise Institute for a copy of my latest book, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.
Then, some months later, when C-Span Book TV went on a tour of his home library, he pulled my book off his shelf and told his audience:
There’s a new book by David Andelman, that’s right here…[he pulls it off the bookshelf and holds it up to the camera, thanks Pat!]….you know I fortunately got that one, and I told him, I wrote him a note thanking him. I saw this. He was speaking at AEI, and this was just after my book was being handed in almost. And I got this book, and he is terrific, not on the breakup of Germany, because I knew plenty about that, but on what was done to Hungary, and what was done to Austria after World War I—and the tremendous bitterness and animosity, you see them just handing people back and forth to different places and you say they made a dog’s breakfast out of. And he describes in detail what was done and how it was done. So, this was really a useful book. And I wrote him and thanked him. I think I talked to him, I don’t know if I talked to him or not, but I wrote him and thanked him.
Nope, you didn’t talk to me, Pat, or I might not have been able restrain myself from passing along that long ago yarn. But today, very much a lesson taken. Indeed, his next sentences were most illuminating. My book, he said, had arrived….
“….right at the end and I had to start expanding the chapter. You know one of the problems you’ve got as an author [or a reporter, he might have added] is, it’s like a painting. When do I stop. When is this think finished. And you’ve gotta hand this in."
Or as John Hohenberg, who taught international journalism at Columbia, used to say quite famously to us, at the end of the day, you simply have to “go with what you’ve got.” And what we’d had was quite a lot indeed. Hopefully a lesson for our time as well.
Great story… the stuff of which memoirs are made…best