Not An Enemy. They Just Wanted To Beat Him.

In a "60 Minutes" profile of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, correspondent Steve Kroft said that Goodell's father, Sen. Charles Goodell (R-NY), was on the Nixon White House enemies list. Not true. The list is here; a longer list of political opponents is here. Neither contains Goodell's name.

Nor, however, was he on the White House secret Valentine list. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller appointed Goodell, a congressman, to finish Sen. Robert Kennedy's term after his 1968 assassination. Because of his opposition to the Vietnam war, in the 1970 midterms Goodell lost the support of the state's powerful Conservative Party, which nominated James Buckley, who won -- and later made history by calling for Nixon's resignation during Watergate.

Goodell may have concluded that he was on somebody's list after Vice President Spiro Agnew called him "the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party" for waxing from a conservative congressman to a liberal, anti-war senator (and therefore, presumably, less of a man, according to the mentality of Agnew, the proto-Newt Gingrich of the Republican Party). Jorgensen, who'd had gender reassignment surgery, asked Agnew for an apology; he refused.

So Goodell wasn't an official enemy. Nixon just wanted him out of the Senate. I can well understand why his family might consider this a distinction without a difference. But we fight for every yard in a cloud of dust at The Episconixonian.