Unleashed Memoir #2 The Enemies List

A reprise, with the sad passing of Lewis Lapham, a central figure in this, the second of many parts of my memoir-in-gestation. A trip back in history to my last brush with an enemies list.

On July one of America’s (and the world’s) great editors, the incomparable Lewis Lapham, who steered Harper’s and then his own Lapham’s Quarterly to glory for many decades, passed away in the Rome that he loved so well. He was 89. This reprise excerpt chronicles an incident from more than a half century in the past, when Lewis was 36 and had just seized the reins at Harper’s and I was a 26-year-old tyro at The New York Times. Its denouement came 17 years later, for both of us after we realized to what we had, separately and ensemble, been subjected as members of a Nixon-era enemies list.

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 Times, 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. None of these papers, incidentally, was ever classified secret or even confidential. They were simply quite embarrassing, especially to their authors. Might I be interested in seeing them, he asked?  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.