CLIQUES

Paul Newman called it his greatest achievement. Political columnist and Mideast expert Milton Viorst said it actually helped his career. President Nixon’s Enemies List--a confidential memorandum listing the government’s enemies, with 20 names highlighted for “priority reprisals”--was written 20 years ago and released during the Watergate hearings. “It was and remains an honor I relish,” says Maxwell Dane of Doyle, Dane and Bernbach advertising agency. (Dane was No. 4).

“Art Buchwald took me to lunch when the list came out,” says columnist Mary McGrory (No. 20), then with the Washington Star-News. “We walked into the restaurant and I got a standing ovation. Buchwald was so furious he didn’t make the list, he threatened to bring a class-action suit.”

Although McGrory could have expected to be on such a list, some were bewildered, such as Ed Guthman (No. 3), then an editor at The Times, now a professor at the USC School of Journalism. “All I could think,” says Guthman, “was that Newsday (owned by Times Mirror) was doing some tough stuff on Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo and the White House felt ‘it must be that Kennedy fellow.’ ” Guthman had worked for Robert F. Kennedy at the Justice Department.

Dane, who is now retired, says he never could figure out the cause of his sudden notoriety. “(White House Counsel Charles) Colson had put a note alongside my name: ‘Hit them hard and start with Dane.’ Our agency handled LBJ’s 1964 campaign and I was a member of the (American) Civil Liberties Union. It was stupidly compelling.”

“It was about trying to undermine all opponents,” says Sterling Munro (No. 10), then a top aide to Democrat Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington, now an investment banker in Seattle. The list, he says, explained things such as his problems with the Internal Revenue Service and the telephone maintenance truck parked near his home for months.

“But if our phone was tapped,” he says, laughing, “they couldn’t have gotten much--we had three teen-age daughters at the time.”