1. The list was compiled by a guy called Charles Colson, who served as Nixon's Special Counsel and was Nixon's "hit man" of sorts. It basically was a compiled database of people who the government was to take illegal steps to harass. Not quite on the level of Roman proscription, but pretty awful. The significance also reverberates in American pop culture-see Futurama.

2. People on the list were to be targeted to be "screwed" by means of federal contacts, IRS audits, legal issues, and the like. This was inconsistently applied at best: Noam Chomsky was on it, and as he mentioned, he didn't even have his taxes audited. Carl Djerassi was on it, and Nixon gave him a national science medal for inventing birth control. Congress didn't find any evidence that the List was used systematically to misuse the FBI and IRS.

(Whether Nixon knew it even existed is an open debate, and obviously, it's highly unlikely he knew the contents of it in full due to what I just mentioned. But he constantly pressed for people in the White House to be more aggressive against his enemies, citing his predecessors and their political usage of IRS, and he kept Colson around knowing that he catered to his dark side. If he did not misuse the IRS via the List, it wasn't for a lack of trying-he openly vents his desire to go full out with the IRS in his second term.)

3. On a certain level, no. Other major American politicians have been accused of or have been stated by intimates as having "naughty and nice" lists as well. Nixon was far from the first or last President to try and misuse the IRS or government contracts for political purposes. (Nixon himself was the victim of a "political audit" in 1961 courtesy of JFK.)

There undoubtedly is a certain group of people under the label of "don't invite this person to a White House function under any circumstances" under any modern American administration, and under a fair amount, they have been targeted for worse. The immature "peon" level of the Nixon White House, at Colson's pushing, managed to turn it into another scandal during Watergate by actually making a list and giving it that name. '

But what does makes Nixon's list unusual is the sheer depth and "out of control" factor of a White House that clearly believed it was surrounded by enemies. Nixon created a culture where that could happen.