For five days in 1970, Nixon personally approved suspending the Fourth Amendment
In 1970, White House aide Tom Charles Huston compiled a real, 43-page proposal for coordinating domestic intelligence operations against antiwar and left-wing groups, including illegal mail opening, break-ins, and expanded electronic surveillance. On July 23, 1970, President Nixon personally approved it, and the document was formally submitted to the directors of the FBI, CIA, DIA, and NSA. Five days later, on July 28, he rescinded it, reportedly after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected. Senator Charles Mathias later summarized the episode this way: for those five days, many constitutional lawyers believe the fundamental guarantees of the Bill of Rights were suspended by presidential mandate.
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Get the dossier: $5 instant download →The document's explicit purpose was coordinating the government's fractured domestic intelligence apparatus against the antiwar movement and the broader counterculture, which Nixon viewed as a serious internal security threat. Its methods went well beyond what any agency could legally authorize on its own: warrantless electronic surveillance, opening private mail, and break-ins at the homes of American citizens who had committed no crime, all explicitly authorized by direct presidential mandate rather than any court.
Rescinding the plan on paper did not erase its influence. The Interagency Evaluation Committee, created in December 1970, was formed directly from the Huston Plan's own recommendations and met seven times through July 1971. Richard Ober, the same officer who ran the CIA's Operation CHAOS, became the agency's representative on that committee. Meanwhile, NSA's own MINARET and SHAMROCK programs, along with the CIA's CHAOS, continued operating throughout this entire period regardless of the plan's official rescission, and Nixon himself, in later taped conversations with aide Fred Buzhardt, worked to establish that nothing had actually been implemented under the plan's name specifically.
This establishes that a sitting U.S. president personally reviewed and formally approved a written plan authorizing illegal surveillance methods against American citizens, that the approval was transmitted in writing to the heads of four major intelligence agencies, and that the plan was rescinded within a week under internal pressure. This is confirmed by the Church Committee's own investigation and subsequent National Security Archive document releases, including Nixon's own recorded conversations discussing it.
What this does not establish is a clean, simple story of the plan being fully undone the moment it was rescinded. The CIA's own 1973 summary for the Church Committee claimed no further action was taken after the July 27 rescission letter, a claim that sits uneasily alongside the surveillance programs that continued operating under other names during the same period.
Document: The Huston Plan, White House proposal by Tom Charles Huston. Approved July 23, 1970. Rescinded July 28, 1970.
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