John Dean Was Not A Football Fan

Okay, I admit it. I Googled my name and Mr. Nixon's. And I found this letter that the New York Times published on April 23, 1995:

That the famous White House "enemies list" was kept not by football fan Richard Nixon, as Robert Lipsyte suggested, but by his accuser, John Dean, ought to have been abundantly clear from Joe Namath's being listed incorrectly as a Giant. If the President had laid eyes on the list even once, can anyone imagine that error surviving?

JOHN H. TAYLOR
Director, the Richard Nixon Library
Yorba Linda, Calif.

The Mountain Of Muhammad

Yesterday a St. John's friend invited me to speak to her and her fellow AP students at Mission Viejo High School. They're studying the power of ideology in our political and cultural life and wondered how Richard Nixon fit into the picture. I argued that Nixon embraced just one ideology, anticommunism, which he transcended -- or, rather, leveraged -- in order to make the world safer by virtue of his openness to constructive relationships with communist regimes in Moscow and Beijing.

I took along some show-and-tell items, including this late-1980s photo of me (with hair and spectacles) loitering behind Muhammad Ali, Nixon, and former New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath. Nixon had given up his Secret Service protection in 1985, so in crowded rooms it sometimes fell to his private guard or me to take the point. At this event, a fundraiser in Manhattan for a Nixon friend's medical charity, I was edging forward, my eyes over my shoulder on the boss, when I ran up against a brick wall that turned out to be the former heavyweight champion of the world.