Part 1: Agency of Fear Opiates and Political Power in America...Legend of the Living Dead ...Nelson Rockefeller... G. Gordon Liddy: The Will to Power

Agency of Fear Opiates and 

Political Power in America 

By Edward Jay Epstein 

The Story of How the Drug Enforcement 

Administration Came to Be

PREFACE 

This book is based on the view that the American president under ordinary circumstances reigns rather than rules over the government of the United States. To be sure, the president is nominally in command of the executive branch of the government, and he has the authority to fire the officials that in fact control such critical agencies as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the criminal division of the Department of Justice, etc. (though he does not in many cases have the authority unilaterally to appoint a replacement). In practice, however, this presidential power is severely mitigated, if not entirely counterbalanced, by the ability of officials in these key agencies to disclose secrets and private evaluations to the public that could severely damage the image of the president. 

For example, in theory, six presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, had the power to fire J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI, but in each case he had the power to retaliate by revealing illicit activities that occurred during their administrations (as well as information about the private lives of the presidents). This potential for retribution by government officials is compounded by the fact that in the vast complexity of the executive branch a president cannot be sure where embarrassing secrets exist, and he must assume that most officials have developed subterranean channels to journalists, who will both conceal their sources and give wide circulation to the "leak." A president could seize control over the various parts of the government only if he first nullified the threat of disclosures by severing the conduits through which dissidents might leak scandalous information to the press. This prerequisite for power is in fact exactly what President Nixon attempted when he set up a series of special units which, it was hoped, would conduct clandestine surveillance of both government officials and newsmen during his first administration. If he had succeeded in establishing such an investigative force, he would have so radically changed the balance of power within the government that it would have been tantamount to an American coup d'etat. 

A coup d'etat is not the same as a revolution, where power is seized by those outside the government, or even necessarily a military putsch, whereby the military government takes over from the civilian government; it is, as Edward Luttwak points out in his book Coup d'Etat, "a seizure of power within the present system." The technique of the coup involves the use of one part of the government to disrupt communications between other parts of the government, confounding and paralyzing non-cooperating agencies while displacing the dissident cliques from power. If successful, the organizers of the coup can gain control over all the levers of real power in the government, then legitimize the new configuration under the name of eliminating some great evil in society. Though it is hard to conceive of the technique of the coup being applied to American politics, Nixon, realizing that he securely controlled only the office of the president, methodically moved to destroy the informal system of leaks and independent fiefdoms. Under the aegis of a "war on heroin," a series of new offices were set up, by executive order, such as the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement and the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence,- which, it was hoped, would provide the president with investigative agencies having the potential and the wherewithal and personnel to assume the functions of "the Plumbers" on a far grander scale. According to the White House scenario, these new investigative functions would be legitimized by the need to eradicate the evil of drug addiction. 

In describing the inner workings of the "war on heroin" I have relied heavily on the files supplied to me by Egil Krogh, Jr., who was the president's deputy for law enforcement before he was imprisoned for his role in the Plumbers' operations. This archive includes verbatim transcripts of' conversations the president had with presidential advisors; handwritten notes describing meetings between John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, and other principals in the administration's "crusade"; option papers drafted for the Domestic Council; scenarios designed for the media; internal analyses of political problems; drafts of presidential speeches; private reports on the drug problem; briefings for the press; and outlines of conversations Krogh had with the president. Krogh, after he was released from prison, spent more than three weeks assisting me in analyzing the material, and I then went over many of the documents with Jeffrey Donfeld, who was Krogh's assistant on the Domestic Council. The archive is by no means complete-the White House retained a large portion of Krogh's files-and it presents information only from the perspective of the White House. 

I therefore filled in the archive by interviewing officials in the various agencies that were to be affected by the White House plans for a "reorganization." These interviews took over three years, and reflect personal animosities as well as bureaucratic perspectives. Because the circumstances surrounding each interview bear directly on the credibility of the interview-why, for example, did Krogh provide me with such embarrassing documents?-I have decided to reveal all the sources for this book and comment on the motives, problems, contradictions, and gaps that I found in the interviews and documents. Unless otherwise specified, whenever references are made to persons explaining, commenting, observing or otherwise divulging information, they were made to me for the purposes of this book, and a fuller explanation of when, where, and why is provided in the final section of the book. Books and documents are listed in the Bibliography. 

The research for this book was financed in large part by the Drug Abuse Council, Inc., a privately financed foundation which was established to provide another perspective on problems of drug abuse. Assistance was also provided by National Affairs, Inc., the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Police Foundation. Esquire helped subsidize my reportage of poppy-growing in Turkey, and The Public Interest magazine supported my investigation of methadone clinics and helped me obtain the Krogh file. Research on various parts of the book was done for me by Hillary Mayer, Suzanna Duncan, Elizabeth Guthrie, and Deborah Gieringer, to all of whom I am grateful. 

I am also indebted, for their insights into the political process, to Edward Banfield, Daniel Bell, Allan Bloom, Edward Chase, Nathan Glazer, Erving Goffman, Andrew Hacker, William Haddad, Paul Halpern, Bruce Kovner, Irving Kristol, Edward Luttwak, Jerry Mandel, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Victor Navasky, Bruce Page, Norman Podhoretz, Mark Platner, John Rubenstein, William Shawn, Jonathan Shell, Leslie Steinau, Edward Thompson, Lionel Tiger, Paul Weaver, William Whitworth, and James Q. Wilson. The conclusions that I draw from their insights are, of course, entirely my own. 

E. J. E. 

NEW YORK CITY, 1976

PROLOGUE 

The Secret Police A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder. 

-EDWARD LUTTWAK, 

Coup d'Etat 

"Sometimes there's a thin line between the hunted and the hunter. . . ." 

-An anonymous federal narcotics agent 

interviewed by the New York Times 

on June 25, 1973. 

On the night of April 23, 1973, Herbert Joseph Giglotto, a hardworking boilermaker, and his wife, Louise, were sleeping soundly in their suburban house in Collinsville, Illinois. Suddenly, and without warning, armed men broke into their house and rushed up the stairs to the Giglottos' bedroom. Giglotto later recalled, "I got out of bed; I took about three steps, looked down the hall and I saw men running up the hall dressed like hippies with pistols, yelling and screeching. I turned to my wife. 'God, honey, we're dead.' " The night intruders threw Giglotto down on his bed and tied his hands behind his back. Holding a loaded gun at his head, one of the men pointed to his wife and asked, "Who is that bitch lying there?" Giglotto begged the raiders, "Before you shoot her, before you do anything, check my identification, because I know you're in the wrong place." The men refused to allow the terrified couple to move from the bed or put on any clothes while they proceeded to search the residence. As books were swept from shelves and clothes were ripped from hangers, one man said, "You're going to die unless you tell us where the stuff is." Then the intrusion ended as suddenly as it began when the leader of the raiders concluded, "We made a mistake." 

The night raiders who terrorized the Giglottos that April night were members of a new federal organization called the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) On the same evening in Collinsville, another group of raiders from ODALE kicked in the door of the home of Donald and Virginia Askew, on the north side of town. Virginia Askew, who was then crippled from a back injury, fainted as the men rushed into the frame house. While she lay on the floor, agents kept her husband, Donald, an operator of a local gas station, from going to her aid. Another agent kept their sixteen-year-old son, Michael, from telephoning for help by pointing a rifle at him. After the house was searched, the agents admitted they had made another mistake and disappeared. (Virginia Askew the next day was rushed to a mental hospital for emergency psychiatric therapy.) 

In another demonstration, that Easter week, of their extraordinary powers, a dozen agents of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement broke into a farmhouse on Cemetery Road in Edwardsville, Illinois, and imprisoned one of the occupants of the house, John Meiners, a salesman for the General Electric Company, for seventy-seven hours. "I was asleep about three A.M.," Meiners said, "when the agents rushed in and pushed me against the wall." A pistol was held to his head, and, in Meiners' words, "they began to ransack the house." Walls were smashed and windows were broken, and stereo equipment, a shotgun, golf clubs, and a camera were confiscated by the agents. Meiners was then forcibly taken to police headquarters and questioned for more than three days without being told of the crime he was alleged to have committed or being allowed to telephone a lawyer or anyone else. Finally, the General Electric salesman was released without a charge ever being filed against him. 

None of the ODALE agents who broke into these homes carried the required search warrants, nor did they legally have any authority to enter forcibly any of these homes to effect an arrest. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guarantees "The fight of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" and that "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized." The warrantless raid, by the ODALE agents were subsequently characterized as "extra-legal" by Myles J. Ambrose, director of that office, and the agents were suspended. In an interview in U.S. News & World Report in 1972, prior to the Collinsville raids, Ambrose explained that extraordinary procedures, to the limit of the law, were necessary because the nation was engaged in an all-out war against drugs and that the very survival of the American people was at stake. One purpose of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement was to facilitate the arrests of pushers on the street, Ambrose said further. In effect, this meant that local Justice Department lawyers assigned to ODALE could obtain warrants to authorize agents to break into homes in order to effect an arrest. The office further had the power to go before special "grand juries" to seek indictments of the arrested individuals. 

These particular incidents were reported in the press because they involved "mistaken identities" (agents had broken into the wrong homes). These agents were immediately Suspended and a full-scale investigation was launched, although they were finally acquitted after being tried on criminal charges. However, at the time, little attention was paid to the unique powers of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement. Indeed, most commentators on these particular cases, though outraged that innocent people had been terrorized, did not question the legitimacy of ODALE itself, or question the need for deploying strike forces with extraordinary powers against narcotics dealers, who were presumed to be an equally extraordinary enemy. 

Despite the matter-of-fact acceptance of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement by the press and the public, there was little precedent in the annals of American law enforcement (or government) for such an investigative agency. It had been established on January 27, 1972, by an executive order of President Nixon, without approval or consideration by Congress. The office operated out of the Department of Justice, but, interestingly, its director, Myles Ambrose, also had an office in the Executive Office of the president. ODALE was empowered by presidential order to requisition agents from other federal agencies, including the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the Bureau of Customs, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and to redeploy these agents into strike forces. These forces could use court-authorized wiretaps and no-knock warrants, as well as "search incidental to arrest" procedures. This unique office could also feed the names of suspects to a target-selection committee in the Internal Revenue Service, which would then initiate its own audits and investigations. The office received most of its funds not from congressional appropriations but from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), an appendage of the Justice Department created by Congress in 1968 for the purpose of financially assisting state and local law-enforcement units (not presidential units). Most of its operations were financed by funneling grants from the LEAA to local police departments that participated with ODALE in its raids against narcotics suspects. This method was necessary because LEAA was never authorized by Congress to disburse its funds to federal agencies. 

As long as President Nixon could focus the attention of Congress and the press on the "menace" of heroin addiction destroying America, the hope was that this new office could execute his orders free of any normal restraints from the "bureaucracy," from congressional subcommittees, and from the press, which normally reported only the stories presenting the government's statistics in the war against drugs. The power of this new instrument thus depended directly on the continued organization of fear by the White House.

Chapter 1 - 

Legend of the Living Dead 

The coup is a political weapon, and its planners have only political resources. 

 - EDWARD LUTTWAK, 

COUP dEtat 

Richmond Pearson Hobson, even as a young man, had the romantic vision necessary to heroes. On June 3, 1898, as a newly graduated lieutenant of the naval academy at Annapolis, he guided the USS Merrimac into the narrow mouth of Santiago Harbor in Cuba.-Though the Navy described his ship as an antiquated tub, Hobson saw it as a magnificent fighting ship and saw himself that night as "Homeric manhood, erect and masterful on the perilous bridge of the Merrimac. " The Spanish-American War had just broken out, and the Navy planned for Hobson to trap the Spanish fleet in Santiago Harbor by scuttling his ship in the main channel. To this end, Hobson heroically had tied a string of homemade torpedoes-to the hull of the Merrimac, but owing to a failure in the ship's steering mechanism, he was unable to get the tub into the blockading position before the charges exploded. The Merrimac rapidly and ineffectually sank without interfering with any of the Spanish shipping lanes, and Hobson himself was rescued by the Spanish and imprisoned in Morro Castle, outside Havana. 

After Spain surrendered, Hobson was repatriated. The United States Navy, faced with the difficult choice of either court-martialing Hobson or decorating him for valor, chose the latter alternative and made Captain Hobson the first celebrated hero of the short-lived Spanish-American War. Hobson thus experienced what he later described hyperbolically as "the ecstasy of martyrdom." President McKinley personally decorated Hobson, and the Navy arranged a national speaking tour for its new hero. As crowds, swarmed about the man reputed to have blocked the entire Spanish Armada, his popularity grew, and he became known as "the most-kissed man in America" (Hobson's Kisses, a caramel candy, was even named after him). By 1906, the celebrated hero of Santiago Harbor had been elected to Congress. 

Captain Hobson was at the turn of the century a hero in search of a grand cause. He first attempted to exploit his reputation as a military genius by calling for America to build a navy larger than all the other navies of the world combined, in order to protect the world against the "yellow peril" in the immediate form of Japanese military strength, which he saw increasing in Asia. He argued at every public gathering he could find that American naval supremacy was the "will of God." When his first crusade failed to excite continued interest in the nation's newspapers, and his speaking engagements dwindled, he switched his moral drumbeat to a far more pervasive enemy-alcohol, which he termed "the great  destroyer." 

Captain Hobson's crusade against alcohol, like his crusade against the yellow peril, attempted to mobilize public opinion into an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil, the outcome of which would determine the fate of Western civilization. Describing this ravaging battle, he gave statistics in various speeches for all occasions-"Alcohol is killing our people at the rate of nearly two thousand men a day, every day of the year"; "one out of five children of alcohol consumers are hopelessly insane"; "ninety-five percent of all acts and crimes of violence are committed by drunkards"; "nearly one half of the deaths that occur are due to alcohol"; "a hundred and twenty-five million white men today are wounded by alcohol." In adding up the economic cost of alcohol, he asserted that the "total loss" was more than "sixteen billion dollars," or one quarter of the gross national product of the United States. He posited a medical theory whereby alcohol attacked "the top of the brain ... since the upper brain is the physical basis of thought, feeling, judgment, self control, and it is the physical organ of the will, of the consciousness of God, of the sense of right and wrong, of ideas of justice, duty, love, mercy, self-sacrifice and all that makes character," and from that he reasoned that "the evolution of human life, the destiny of man and the will of God" were at stake in the struggle against alcohol. (While alcohol reached the "top of the brain" of "negroes," according to Hobson's theory, "they degenerate ... to the level of the cannibal." Similarly, "peaceable redmen" became "the savage" when they drank alcohol.) 

Proposing in Congress that alcohol be totally prohibited, he forged a dramatic nexus between alcohol and crime. Innocent men were converted to violent criminals in almost all cases, he argued, because alcohol had degenerated the "gray matter" in their brains. Not only did alcohol destroy self-control in 95 percent of criminal cases, but it created an economic need for those afflicted with the disease of alcoholism to steal in order to pay for their chronic habit. In multiplying the number of alcoholics by the daily cost of the habit, Hobson arrived at his $16 billion estimate of the cost of crime engendered by alcohol. 

By 1915 Captain Hobson had become the highest-paid speaker on the lecture circuit in America. He helped organize (with financial support from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which helped galvanize national support for Prohibition. Congress ordered his speech to the House of Representatives in 1912, entitled "The Great Destroyer," to be republished in 50 million copies by the Government Printing Office. (The order was never carried out by the GPO.) Defeated in his attempt to win the Senate seat for Alabama, Hobson organized the American Alcohol Education Association, which attempted to marshal American youth behind his crusading banner. 

The dramatic mythology that Hobson had popularized, if not created, which put alcohol at the root of all of society's evils, was undermined ironically by the passage of National Prohibition legislation in 1921. Neither crime rate nor death rate was diminished by the banning of alcohol; indeed, each rose during Prohibition. Human nature did not markedly change for the better. Hobson no longer had a demon on which to unleash his virtually unlimited moral indignation. In the 1920s, thus, Captain Hobson was again in quest of a great cause. 

For almost a year Captain Hobson retired from public life-or at least from public speaking engagements-and sought an issue around which another moral campaign could be organized. He soon found a new "greatest evil," which not only could be held accountable for all crime and vice but had the added advantage over alcohol of being a foreign import, thus coinciding with the xenophobia of the times. This new devil was a drug called heroin. 

Heroin (from the German heroisch-"large, powerful") was first developed by the A. G. Bayer Company,  of Germany, in 1898 as a "non-addictive" pain-killer. This white powdery substance (known scientifically as diacetylmorphine) was refined from morphine, a natural alkaloid of opium, which for thousands of years had been derived from the dried juice of the unripe capsule of the opium poppy. When morphine was first isolated from opium in 1803, it was thought to be a universal panacea, called by physicians "God's own medicine," and was recommended for fifty-four diseases, which included everything from insanity to nymphomania. As late as 1889, morphine was recommended in medical journals as a drug for treating those addicted to alcohol on the grounds that it "calms in place of exciting the base of passions, and hence is less productive of acts of violence and crime." However, by 1898, morphine addiction was considered a serious national problem. And heroin (even though three times as powerful a pain-killer as morphine) was now recommended in medical journals as a new means of treating morphine addiction. The attempt to cure drug addiction by substituting one drug for another again proved to be a failure, and in the early 1900s, confronted by a growing number of heroin addicts, the American Medical Association defined heroin as a dangerous and highly addictive drug not suitable for medical treatment. At the same time, the United States State Department, under increasing pressure from American missionaries working in Asia who were concerned with the morality of opium trade, supported the idea of international laws to regulate narcotics. In December, 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, which attempted to control narcotics in the United States through licensing and taxation. 

Federal laws did not, however, diminish public concern over heroin. A spate of newspaper stories during the final days of World War I suggested that Germany was attempting to addict the entire American population through heroin by mixing the powder with cosmetics. And in New York City, public officials increasingly attributed bank robberies and anarchist bombings to heroin-crazed fiends. Though the postwar scare stories in the press tended to be inconsistent and fragmented, they provided Captain Hobson with fertile grounds for a new crusade. Unlike alcohol, heroin was a foreign and mysterious drug; its powers were not known to the general public. Hobson quickly foresaw the potential of reorganizing the available bits of information and assertions about this new drug into the specter of the vampire. In a frenzy of public appearances, lectures, and writings, he termed narcotics addicts "the living dead." In explaining the operations of this "demonic" drug, he used the same convenient pseudo-medical jargon that, he had previously used in denouncing alcohol. For example, explaining in the September 20, 1924, issue of The Saturday Evening Post that addiction is essentially a "brain disease" responsible for most crime, he gave the following quasi-medical explanation: 

The entire brain is immediately affected when narcotics are taken into the system. The upper cerebral regions, whose more delicate tissues, apparently the most recently developed and containing the shrine of the spirit, all those attributes of the man which raise him above the level of the beast, are at first tremendously stimulated and then-quite soon-destroyed.... 

At the same time the tissues of the lower brain, where reside all the selfish instincts and impulses, receive the same powerful stimulation. With the restraining forces of the higher nature gone, the addict feels no compunction whatever in committing any act that will contribute to a perverted supposition of his own comfort or welfare. 

According to the "scientific" explanation that Hobson popularized, the degeneracy of the "upper cerebral regions" turned the addict into a "beast" or "monster," spreading his disease like a medieval vampire. Hobson explained thus: "The addict has an insane desire to make addicts of others." As evidence of this vampire phenomenon of the "living dead," Hobson gave examples of how a mother-addict had injected her eight-year-old son with heroin; how teenage addicts infected other teenagers by secreting heroin in ice-cream cones; and how lovers seduced their partners with heroin. He suggested the calculus (which President Nixon adopted a half-century later) that "one addict will recruit seven others in his lifetime." He also fully played up the xenophobic appeal of heroin's coming from foreign lands, stating, "Like the invasions and plagues of history, the scourge of narcotic drug addiction came out of Asia...... Also, like the irreversible bite of the mythical vampire, Hobson asserted, "So hopeless is the victim, and so pitiless the master," that the heroin addicts are termed "the living dead." 

After having established the dreaded imagery of the vampire-addict, Hobson went on to organize his crusade. In a short time he had mobilized such groups as the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Moose, the Kiwanis, the Knights of Columbus, the Masonic orders, and various other lodges in his battle against heroin. (The cause of temperance having been mitigated by the Prohibition law, the heroin crusade provided a new sense of purpose for many of these organizations.) He created the World Narcotic Association and the Narcotic Defense Foundation, whose goal was to raise $10 million in ten years for "the defense of society from the peril and menace of narcotic addiction." 

He also published his own journal of "narcotic education." By 1927 Hobson claimed to have recruited "21,000 major clubs and organizations" into his various "narcotic education programs." The development of the radio networks after the First World War gave him a new national pulpit, and time was provided for his uninterrupted lectures on four hundred stations for "Narcotics Education Week," which he inspired the government to promulgate. He thus spoke to an audience of unprecedented size, and warned in 1928 that virtually all crime in America was a symptom of the new wave of heroin addiction. On the NBC network, for example, he told a nationwide audience: 

Most of the daylight robberies, daring holdups, cruel murders, and similar crimes of violence are now known to be committed chiefly by drug addicts who constitute the primary cause of our alarming crime wave.... 

Drug addiction is more communicable and less curable than leprosy. Drug addicts are the principal carriers of vice disease, and with their lowered resistance are incubators and carriers of the strepti coccus, pneumo coccus, the germ of flu, of tuberculosis and other diseases. 

New forces of narcotic drug exploitation devised from the progress of modem chemical science, added to the old form of the opium traffic, now endanger the very future of the human race.... The whole human race, though largely ignorant on this subject, is now in the midst of a life and death struggle with the deadliest foe that has ever menaced its future. Upon the issue hangs the perpetuation of civilization, the destiny of the world and the future of the human race.  

In 1929, Hobson journeyed to Los Angeles and, again using radio, warned his West Coast audience that "drug addicts are the cause of our crime wave with its daring holdups, cruel and unnatural murders, and the chief factor in the disappearance of girls who fall to the underworld in ever increasing numbers, now estimated at seventy-five thousand per year." He argued that the "suffering of slaves" was "easy and light" compared to the "living death of drug addicts." He now asserted that addicts were responsible for crime's placing "a burden exceeding ten billions of dollars yearly on the American people." At one point he placed the number of heroin addicts as high as four million, and stressed that this "army of addicts" would contaminate all other Americans in a few short years. Up until his death, in 1937, Captain Hobson continued to broadcast to millions of Americans on the perils of narcotics, and distribute through his many organizations tens of millions of pages of educational material to schools and media. Since there were few (if any) systematic studies of heroin during this period, Captain Hobson's energetic crusade created for a large segment of the American public the stereotype of an addict as a vampire-like creature with an insatiable appetite for crime and destruction and a need to infect with his disease all who came in contact with him. 

Hobson's legend of the living dead lived after him. The apocalyptic battle he depicted between the forces of good and the army of addicts provided countless politicians, police officials, and medical bureaucrats with a conceptual framework from which they could advance their particular interests. The Hobsonian notion that heroin transformed innocents into uncontrollable "desperadoes" became a persistent part of police rhetoric. For example, in explaining a "crime wave" to the newspapers in the late 1930s, New York City police commissioner Richard E. Enright said that addicts, "when inflamed with drugs ... are capable of committing any crime"; and his successor, Commissioner John O'Ryan, went further in attributing "wanton brutality and reversion to the life of the beast" to narcotics, which, he explained (apparently on Hobson's authority), "penetrate the upper brain and inflict swift and deep injury upon the gray matter so a transformation of the individual follows quickly...... 

Although such "scientific" explanations of crime provided a convenient rationale for an expanded police department, they were based on little more than the rhetoric that Hobson himself borrowed verbatim from his earlier crusade against alcohol. In fact, in more than fifty years of analysis, scientific studies have not substantiated the image of the crazed heroin fiend or "the living dead." On the contrary, virtually all of the medical and pharmacological investigations have found that heroin is a powerful analgesic that depresses the central nervous system and produces behavior characterized by apathy, lessened physical activity, and diminished visual acuity. Instead of inducing "wanton brutality," this medical evidence suggests that heroin-and other opiates-decreases violent response to provocations (as well as hunger and sex drives in individuals). For example, in studying the relation between drugs and violence, the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse concluded, in 1973, "Assaultive offenses are significantly less likely to be committed by ... opiate users." To be sure, doctors have consistently found that heroin is a habit-forming and dangerous drug, but it does not necessarily produce violent behavior. Nor, of course, has any evidence been found suggesting that it suppresses moral instincts, as Hobson claimed, or reverses the evolutionary process. Hobson's theory that heroin was the root cause of most crime in America also appealed to a number of liberal doctors and medical bureaucrats. After the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed, some doctors established clinics in which they legally dispensed narcotics to addicts to prevent them from suffering from what was known as withdrawal symptoms. In a number of notorious cases these clinics simply became wholesale narcotics distributors, selling heroin and morphine to all comers. The federal government held that such clinics were in violation of the Harrison Narcotics Act, which originally attempted to regulate the nonmedical sale of drugs. Medical authorities argued that the applicability of the act depended on the medical purpose for which the drug was being used. However, in 1922, in U.S. v. Behrman, the Supreme Court held that regardless of medical intent. such treatment could be construed as illegal tinder the act, and agents moved to close down the narcotics clinics and arrest thousands of doctors dispensing heroin and morphine. 

Many doctors interested in treating narcotics addicts assumed that these actions by the federal government impinged on the legitimate domain of medical expertise. Their protest that addicts should be treated by doctors, not police, had little popular appeal, since there was little concerti for the individual addict on the part of the public. However, when Captain Hobson connected in the public imagination the addict and the crime problem, he also provided the doctors and liberal reformers with a publicly acceptable rationale for medical treatment. Accepting Hobson's assertion that addicts committed billions of dollars' worth of crimes (which was based on no evidence whatsoever), these reformers argued that the addict was driven to crime because he was "enslaved" by his insatiable need for heroin. They argued that because the drug was illegal and expensive, addicts were forced to steal to obtain the money for it. On the other hand, doctors were allowed freely to dispense, at low cost, heroin and other narcotics to addicts, they would have no need to commit thefts, and the American public would be spared billions of dollars' worth of crime and violence. In other words, these doctors proposed that the crime problem was essentially a medical problem, and given the freedom and resources to open narcotics-maintenance clinics, they could solve the problem. 

This "enslavement theory" gained added currency in the 1960s with politicians and reformers who sought a palatable explanation for the increase in crimes in the city. Since heroin was imported from abroad, local police commissioners and mayors could claim that their urban crime rate could be controlled only if the federal government and foreign governments curtailed opium production at its source. For example, 'in 1972, New York City police commissioner Patrick V. Murphy testified: 

Local police agencies cannot ... effectively stem the flow of narcotics into our cities, much less into the needle-ridden veins of hundreds of thousands of young people. Only the Federal government is capable of making effective strides, through the massive infusion of funds to damming or diverting the ever-rising, devastating flood-tide from the poppy fields of the Middle East, South America, and Indo-China into the bodies of pathetic victims in the United States. ● ❍ 

In suggesting most crime was not the work of hardened criminals but of innocent individuals afflicted with an unquenchable addiction, the enslavement theory had great appeal to those objecting to stricter police measures as a solution to the crime problem. Despite its advantages, however, the empirical evidence gathered about drug addiction in the twentieth century runs counter to the main tenet of the theory. Reviews of criminal records of addicts have shown, without exception, that most addicts had long histories of criminal behavior that predated their addiction, or even their use of drugs.* In other words, according to all existing studies, heroin does not necessarily convert innocent persons into criminals: generally, criminal-addicts are first criminals, then addicts. Though heroin undoubtedly is used by a large number of individuals engaged in crime and other risk-taking behavior, there is little persuasive evidence suggesting that it is the cause rather than an effect in most cases. 

* See, for example, J. Tinkleberg, "Drugs and Crimes," appendix, National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, 1973, C. J. Friedman and A. S. Friedman, "Drug Abuse and Delinquency," National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, 1973. 

J. C. Jacobi, N. A. Weiner, and M. E. Wolfgang, "Drug Use and Criminality in a Natural Cohort," National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, 1973. Hobson's formulation of heroin as a chemical that would, after ingestion, render one a slave for life also provided medical practitioners with a rationale for maintenance treatment. In ruling on the Harrison Narcotics Act the courts had in effect subscribed to the theory that addiction was a dangerous condition defined by the continuous use of heroin. Thus, if the agent-heroin-were completely withdrawn from an addicted person, the "disease" would no longer exist. On the other hand, Hobson's notion that heroin induced an irreversible change in the victim whereby he was "normal" only when taking heroin, and abnormal without it, justified the dispensing of heroin by doctors as a form of medical treatment. (Methadone maintenance is merely a modern-day extension of this logic.) However, the contention that heroin irreversibly enslaves the user has not been confirmed by any large-scale study of drug use. In Vietnam, for, example, the U.S. Army found by testing urine specimens that more than 250,000 American soldiers had used heroin, and that of these, some 80,000 could be classified as addicts (in that they used it every day for long periods and suffered withdrawal symptoms). Yet, more than 90 percent of these users and addicts were able voluntarily to withdraw from the use of heroin without any medical assistance or without any permanent aftereffects. Follow-up studies showed that less than 1 percent of the total number-and less than 6 percent of the addicts-used heroin again in a two-year period after they were discharged from the Army. Doctors and scientists studying this massive data were compelled to conclude that heroin use did not necessarily lead to addiction, and that addiction was not necessarily irreversible. Indeed, the Vietnam data suggested that in large part addiction resulted from problems in adjusting to an unfriendly environment (i.e., the war in Vietnam) rather than from the chemical effects of the drug itself. Though Vietnam may be a special case in many respects, it has also been found in studies of prisoners that after they have been withdrawn from heroin, they perform normally for the balance of their terms in prison. 

Hobson's definition of narcotics addiction as a threat to the very existence of civilization subsequently became the official justification for the federal government's mounting a massive law-enforcement program against drug smugglers, dealers, and even addicts. Hobson argued in his book Drug Addiction-A Malignant Racial Cancer that, as suggested by the cancer metaphor, addiction knew no racial boundaries, and it would spread from the yellow and black to the white race by "contaminating" the vulnerable youth. The suggestions he gave in his educational material-that white girls were seduced by narcotics into a life of prostitution by men of other races-were subsumed by public officials, one of whom was Harry J. Anslinger, the director of the federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. In explaining the purpose of his law-enforcement bureau, Anslinger gave the public lurid descriptions of how Orientals used drugs to entice "women from good families" into brothels. (The persistence of this cancer theory can be found not only in contemporary stories about heroin spreading out of the ghetto but also in the newspaper reports that Patricia Hearst was "drugged" into joining an interracial group of urban guerrillas.) Anslinger soon found that the Hobsonian rhetoric could be applied to marijuana as well as to heroin, and in the mid-1930s, in asking for funds to expand his bureau, he sounded the alarm of an epidemic of marijuana addiction, asserting that this "dope addiction" had brought about "an epidemic of crimes committed by young people." After publishing an article on this subject in 1937, entitled "Marijuana: Assassin of Youth," he succeeded in having Congress -pass the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937. Anslinger's campaign to depict marijuana as a crime-breeding drug was debunked to such an extent by later critics that the prewar film Reefer Madness, which supposedly depicted how marijuana converts innocents into criminals, is today enjoyed on college campuses as a parody. 

During World War II, Anslinger waged a press campaign to convince the American public that Japan was systematically attempting to addict its enemies, including the American people, to opium, in order to destroy their civilization. Although there was no other evidence of the putative "Japanese Opium Offensive," Coast Guard ships and Internal Revenue Service investigative units were directed to work with Anslinger's bureau. In 1950, during the Korean War, Anslinger again used the Hobsonian theme, leaking a report to the press that "subversion through drug addiction is an established aim of Communist China," and that the Chinese were smuggling massive amounts of heroin into the United States to "weaken American resistance." The New York Times, after reporting the assertion as fact, explained in an editorial, "Communists ... are eager to get as many addicts as possible in the territory of those to whom they are opposed." Again, despite the yellow-peril hysteria of the time, no evidence was ever found that China was sending heroin the United States. 

For a host of reasons, then, Hobson's vampire like visions of addiction were kept alive by politicians, police officials, doctors, and enterprising bureaucrats. The drama of the "living dead" subverting our civilization was reported with great enthusiasm by the press rather than questioned. The themes were not woven together into any coherent pattern until the early 1960s, when the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, ingeniously transformed Hobson's vampire-addict notion into a political design.

Chapter 2 

Nelson Rockefeller 

The hysterical image of the vampire-addict that Captain Hobson propagated in the 1930s was brilliantly refined into a national political issue in the 1960s by Nelson Rockefeller, who, in projecting this nationwide "reign of terror," had at his disposal an unprecedented family fortune. The Rockefeller fortune was begun by Nelson's great grandfather William Avery Rockefeller, a nineteenth-century dealer in drugs who, like modern narcotics dealers, dressed in extravagant ilk costumes, used aliases, and never carried less than a thousand dollars in cash on his person. "Big Bill," as he was commonly called, hawked "herbal remedies" and other bottled medicines which, if they were like other patent medicines being sold in those days, contained opium as an active ingredient. Long before opium-the juice from the poppy-became the base of patent medicine in America, it was used in Asia as a remedy for dysentery and as a general pain-killer. Because it was a powerful analgesic, hucksters on the American frontier made quick fortunes selling their various "miracle" preparations. 

In any case, Big Bill, who advertised himself as a "Cancer Specialist," was sufficiently successful in selling drugs to stake his son John Davison Rockefeller to the initial capital he needed to go into the oil business in Cleveland. Young Rockefeller found that oil was far more profitable than herbal medicine. He foresaw that concentration and combination rather than competition were the order of the future. Moreover, he realized that the leverage for gaining control over the burgeoning oil industry lay in the hands of the railroads. Since oil was more or less a uniform product, costing the same at the wellhead and fetching the same price at the market, any refiner who could ship his oil to market for even a few cents less a barrel than his competitors could eventually drive them out of business. With this insight Rockefeller played the railroads in Cleveland against each other until he was given a surreptitious discount, or "rebate," by the railroads, which provided him a decisive advantage over his competitors. By the turn of the century Rockefeller's company, Standard Oil Company, refined more than 90 percent of the oil in the United States and two-thirds of the oil in the world. Rockefeller's personal fortune was equal to some 2 percent of the GNP of the entire United States. 

Rockefeller's only son, John Davison Rockefeller, Jr., used the fortune to launch a number of crusades of his own, including financing a large part of the movement to prohibit alcohol in the United States (an effort in which Captain Hobson was then playing a leading role). Although his crusade against alcohol ultimately failed, he was not discouraged from public enterprises. He built Rockefeller Center at the height of the Depression as a monument to the family's enterprise, and encouraged his second-eldest son, Nelson, to enter public life. 

Nelson first learned the techniques of propagating and controlling information when he was appointed coordinator of inter-American affairs at the age of thirty-two by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and given the responsibility of running a $150-million propaganda agency in Latin America. To gain complete control over the media of Latin America, Rockefeller engineered a ruling from the United States Treasury which exempted from taxation the cost of advertisements placed by American corporations that were "cooperating" with Rockefeller in Latin America. This tax-exempt advertising eventually constituted more than 40 percent of all radio and television revenues in Latin America. By selectively directing this advertising toward newspapers and radio stations that accepted "guidance" from his office, he was effectively able to control the images that the newspapers and radio stations of Latin America projected about America during World War 11. 

By 1945 more than 75 percent of the news of the world that reached Latin America originated from Washington, where it was tightly controlled and shaped by Rockefeller's office. In developing this mode of psychological warfare, Rockefeller learned not only the vulnerabilities of the press but the techniques of manipulating news. By supplying a daily diet of some 30,000 words of "news"-including editorials, articles, news photographs, and "exclusive features"-to the media of Latin America, Rockefeller came to appreciate the reality that journalists acted mainly as messengers of dramatic and titillating stories, rather than as any sort of independent investigators. As long as Latin Americans were spoon-fed manufactured anecdotes and dramatic happenings that fell within the generally accepted definition of "news," they would not question the interest or politics that lay behind the disclosure of this information to them. This education in the management and manipulation of news was to prove invaluable to Nelson Rockefeller in his political career after World War II. 

After serving briefly in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, Nelson Rockefeller decided in 1958 to run for elective office as governor of New York State. As the former coordinator of information in Latin America he had little difficulty in mobilizing support for himself in the media, and he succeeded in projecting an image of himself as a liberal, or, at least, as an enlightened Republican. Appealing to both the liberal constituency in New York City and the Republican constituency in the upstate areas, Rockefeller was easily elected governor. His more expansive ambition of being elected president, however, presented a much more difficult problem in image management. The highly sophisticated polls of public opinion that Rockefeller commissioned in the early 1960s (and George Gallup, of the Gallup Poll, had worked for him in Latin America) indicated that a Republican candidate could not win in a national election without attracting large numbers of the more liberal-leaning independent voters-and this would require maintaining a liberal-Republican image. Yet, Rockefeller was also aware that to win the Republican nomination and the support of the more conservative stalwarts of the Republican party required a hard-line and even anti-liberal image. As a result, the more Rockefeller tried to amass support in the media, and among independent voters.. by projecting a liberal image, the more he lost support among more conservative Republicans. Unable to resolve this dilemma of conflicting images, Rockefeller was decisively rejected by delegates at the 1964 Republican convention, who instead enthusiastically endorsed Senator Barry Goldwater, who went on to lose the general election by a disastrous proportion of the vote. 

After his 1964 defeat, Rockefeller ingeniously developed an issue which seemed to resolve the political dilemma by appealing to both the hard-line element in the Republican party and the liberal-to-moderate element among the independent voters-the drug issue. By proposing measures for oppressing drug users that were more draconian than anything ever proposed by Senator Goldwater or by his most hard-line followers, Rockefeller hoped to placate the law-and-order Republicans by toughening his image. At the same time, analysis of public opinion showed that the more liberal independents and modern Republican voters would not object to measures that enhanced their personal safety. As Rockefeller subsequently pointed out, in 1973, in a speech to the New York State legislature, "Every poll of public concern documents that the number one growing concern of the American people is crime and drugs-coupled with an all-pervasive fear for the safety of their person and property." To exploit this well-researched "all-pervasive fear" and turn it into a national political issue, Rockefeller worked to establish in the popular imagination a connection between violent crimes and drugs. He argued that even if drugs did not in themselves induce violent behavior, the user, physiologically dependent on the drug, felt compelled to steal in order to pay for his habit. Rockefeller correctly foresaw that this more sophisticated "dependency theory" could be used to inspire another wave of fear in the public (as well as among intellectuals) that heroin addicts were jeopardizing the lives and property of citizens, and therefore drastic action was necessary. 

* Of course, one could apply a similar "dependency theory" to other disabled groups-alcoholics, cripples, blind people, or even divorced women with two children-arguing that since their disability prevents them from easily obtaining employment. they need money to compensate for their disability, and they will be compelled to steal. 

Masterfully employing the tactics of psychological warfare that he and his staff developed in Latin America during World War II, Rockefeller first began expanding the drug issue during his gubernatorial reelection campaign in 1966. Depicting heroin as an infectious disease that, like the common flu, could be spread to unwilling victims in both the ghetto and the suburbs, Rockefeller boldly declared that the epidemic of addiction in New York State had reached the proportions of a plague and was threatening the lives of innocent middle-class children. Demanding "an all-out war on drugs and addiction," he rushed a law through the legislature providing for the involuntary confinement of drug addicts for up to live years for "treatment," even if they were not convicted of any crime. Although the courts had consistently ruled that addiction itself is not a crime, this new procedure, known euphemistically as "civil commitment," permitted officials to lock up addicts in "rehabilitation centers," even if they were not convicted of a crime. 

While the phrases "treatment" and "rehabilitation center" were shrewdly designed to imply a medical model dealing with drug addiction, and thus appealed to Rockefeller's liberal constituency, there was in 1966 no program of medical treatment for addiction in New York State. There was not even a concept or an operational definition of what addiction was or how it could be treated. If, for example, addiction were defined as being the physical dependence on a drug, then coffee and tobacco would fall in the same category as heroin under the "civil commitment" law. On the other hand, if addiction were defined as being a permanent metabolic change in the nervous system-one that was irreversible-then the various programs of detoxification, or gradual withdrawal from heroin, being used in "rehabilitation centers" would not treat the disease any more than withdrawing patients from insulin would treat diabetes. Indeed, at the time of the passage of the 1966 law, doctors could not even agree whether addiction was produced by the chemical agent heroin or by the environmental depravity in which the addict lived. Rockefeller shrewdly perceived, however, that he did not have to concern himself with these medical problems and confusions. Demanding the imprisonment of some 25,000 addicts in New York (the number he was giving in those days) without time-consuming trials, Rockefeller realized that he could bait his liberal opponents in the election-Frank D. O'Connor, the Democratic candidate and a former prosecutor, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., the Liberal party candidate-into opposing this new and hastily conceived law. When in the heat of the campaign O'Connor did in fact criticize Rockefeller's rehabilitation program as "an election-year stunt" and "medically unsound," Rockefeller was finally in a position fully to exploit the drug issue. In speech after speech he asserted, as he did in a rally in Brooklyn on November 1, 1966: 

● ❍ Frank O'Connor's election would mean narcotic addicts would continue to be free to roam the street- to mug, snatch purses, to steal, even to murder, or to spread the deadly infection that afflicts them possibly to your own son or daughter. Half the crime in New York City is committed by narcotic addicts. My program-the program that Frank O'Connor pledges to scrap-will get addicts off the street for Lip to three years of treatment, aftercare, and rehabilitation....  

(Rockefeller never gave a source for his assertion that half the crime in New York was caused by drug addicts; nor did he give sources for most of the other statistics he used.) 

Fully resurrecting the vampire imagery of an earlier time, Rockefeller brilliantly exploited the fear that New York citizens would lose their lives and children to murderous addicts. Since Rockefeller lost few votes among the addicts he was threatening to quarantine in prison, he easily won reelection. As a Democratic leader explained on CBS television, O'Connor underestimated the fear of people about rampant crime: "Parents are scared that their kids might get hooked and turn into addicts themselves; people want the addicts off the streets, they don't care how you get them off." 

Through the instrument of this generalized fear, Rockefeller was able not only to harden his law-and-order image to meet the political requisites of his own party (and to win elections) but also to project a new nationwide menace which he alone among the nation's politicians had the "experience" to solve. His newly created Narcotics Addiction Control Commission (NACC), which supposedly supervised the involuntary rehabilitation of addicts under the 1966 law, had on its staff many more public-relations specialists than medical specialists. Turning to the modus operandi that Rockefeller developed in Latin America, the commission published its own nationally circulated newspaper, Attack, as well as newsletters, pamphlets, and background briefings for journalists interested in writing on the new reign of terror." This new agency was thus able systematically to coordinate and cultivate a highly dramatic image of the heroin addict as a drug slave who ineluctably is compelled to steal and ravage by his heroin habit-a disease which can be "treated" only by quarantining the addict. If Rockefeller had not succeeded in establishing a quasi-medical vocabulary for heroin addiction, this proposal might have been recognized as a repressive form of pretrial detention for suspected criminals. 

The size of the addict population in New York proved to be conveniently flexible over the years 1966-1973. When it was necessary to demonstrate the need for greater police measures or more judges,* Rockefeller and his staff expanded the number of putative addicts from 25,000 in 1966 to 150,000 in 1972 to 200,000 in 1973. For other audiences, and especially when Rockefeller wanted to show the efficacy of his program, the army of addicts was conveniently contracted in public speeches to under 100,000. (if the addict population had really increased from 25,000 to 200,000 between 1966 and 1973, as can be inferred from Rockefeller's various claims, this 800-percent increase would hardly demonstrate success in his extraordinary war against addicts.) Rockefeller suggested in one of his tracts against heroin that "addiction appears to spread exponentially." The image of an uncontrollable epidemic of heroin addiction being responsible for most crime in America appealed not only to police officials around the country, who could use this fear to justify the need for more men and money, but also to doctors and hospital administrators who were eager to expand their treatment facilities and rehabilitation staffs. Thus, little resistance was offered to the dubious medical claims put forth by Rockefeller's public-relations men. By December, 1971, the alleged army of addicts in New York had been hyped to such proportions that Rockefeller could seriously write in the New York Law Journal: 

● ❍ ow can we defeat drug abuse before it destroys America? I believe the answer lies in summoning the total commitment America has always demonstrated in times of national crisis.... Drug addiction represents a threat akin to war in its capacity to kill, enslave and imperil the nation's future: akin to cancer in spreading deadly disease among us and equal to any other challenge we face in deserving all the brain power, man power, and resources necessary to overcome it.  

Continuing, he rhetorically asked, "Are the sons and daughters of a generation that survived a great depression and rebuilt a prosperous nation, that defeated Nazism and Fascism and preserved the free world, to be vanquished by a powder, needles, and pills?" 

* One by-product of this putative "reign of terror" was that Rockefeller was able to gain authority in 1973 to appoint one hundred "narcotic judges" in New York State, and since judgeships are one of the most prized rewards of New York State politics, Rockefeller also gained a measure of influence for himself. 

In the next few years Rockefeller used statistical legerdemain with unprecedented skill to convert heroin into a multibillion-dollar issue. 

Since the police generally assumed that many addicts were criminals who had shoplifted, burglarized abandoned buildings, "boosted" merchandise from parked trucks, forged welfare checks, and committed other forms of petty larceny, Rockefeller and his staff decided that by simply multiplying the total number of estimated addicts by what they assumed each addict's habit cost him to maintain, they could ascertain, as one of his advisors put it, an impressive "billion-dollar figure." For example, if they assumed, as they did in 1970, that there were 100,000 addicts in New York and that each addict had a habit of $30 a day, they could calculate that the "army of addicts" was compelled to steal $1,095,000,000 worth of goods to pay for their combined habit. The estimated numbers were quite elastic, if not totally arbitrary, for political purposes. By playing with the estimate they could arrive at any figure they believed was necessary to impress the populace with the danger of addicts. 

There was, however, a stumbling block to the billion-dollar estimates. The total amount of reported theft that was not recovered in New York City in the Rockefeller years was never more than $100 million a year, and only a fraction of this could be considered stolen by addicts (since the largest segment, automobiles, was stolen by teenage joy-riders, and eventually recovered). Governor Rockefeller thus commissioned the Hudson Institute, a "think tank" with close connections to the Rockefeller family and institutions, to reanalyze the amount of theft which possibly could be attributed to addicts. After studying the problem, Hudson Institute reported back to Rockefeller in 1970: "No matter how we generate estimates of total value of property stolen in New York City, we cannot find any way of getting these estimates above five hundred million dollars a year-and only a part of this could be conceivably attributed to addicts." The governor, schooled in the art of controlling information, found it unnecessary to accept such a statistical defeat. He simply persisted in multiplying the maximum possible amount of theft in New York City by ten and arrived at a figure of $5 billion, which he attributed entirely to heroin addicts. Rockefeller's long experience in psychological warfare had taught him that large, authoritative-sounding numbers-like $5 billion a year-could be effectively employed in political rhetoric. Thus, in testifying before the United States Senate in 1975 that addict crime was costing the citizens of New York State "up to five billion dollars," Rockefeller could be fully confident that no senator would bother to chip away at his hyperbole. 

In May, 1970, Rockefeller's staff, apparently excited by the wave of national publicity their heroin imagery was gaining for the governor, presented plans to declare a "drug emergency" and asked President Nixon and Mayor John Lindsay to set up "emergency camps" to quarantine all of New York City's addicts. In commenting on the plan, Rayburne Hesse, a member of Rockefeller's NACC, wrote in a private memorandum, "The press would love the action, the editorialists would denounce the vigilante tactics ... civil libertarians would be aghast. . ." and for these reasons went on to recommend the plan. The point, -however, was not to round up addicts but simply to fuel the national concern. Thus, although the plan was disseminated to the press and aroused much publicity, it was never put into effect. 

Rockefeller's crusade against addicts reached its zenith in 1973, when the governor declared that a reign of terror existed with "whole neighborhoods ... as effectively destroyed by addicts as by an invading army." The elements of fear in his heroin story had already been articulated and established by the various publications and briefings of his narcotics commission. Again in the century, addicts had taken the place of medieval vampires-infecting innocent children with their disease, murdering citizens at large, causing all crime and disorder. Rockefeller thus had little difficulty in 1973 in pressing through the legislature laws which totally bypassed the discretion of both the court and the prosecutors, and made it mandatory that anyone convicted of selling or possessing more than a fraction of an ounce of heroin (or even amphetamines or LSD) would be imprisoned for life. This new "Attila the Hun Law," as It was called in the state legislature, extended the mandatory life sentence to sixteen year-old children, who heretofore had been protected by the youthful offender law. For information leading to the arrest of drug possessors or sellers, thousand-dollar bounties would be paid. And in another legal innovation the bill provided a mandatory-life-imprisonment sentence for the novel crime of ingesting a "hard" drug before committing any number of prescribed crimes including criminal mischief, sodomy, burglary, assault, and arson. Under this new law a person would be presumed to be guilty of ingestion if he took any of these drugs within twenty-four hours of committing any of these crimes. Since addicts by definition continually took these drugs, they could be rounded up and mandatorily sentenced to concentration camps for life for committing any of a number of petty crimes, for which judges previously would have hesitated before putting them in prison at all. As Rockefeller shrewdly anticipated, the passage of such extraordinary laws (which were only slightly modified by the state legislature) created an instant furor in the nation's press. Rockefeller thus strengthened his reputation among the hard-line element of the Republican party without losing much support elsewhere, since few people in America were concerned with the fate of drug addicts. Rockefeller later justified the law by explaining in his Senate testimony that "about 135,000 addicts were robbing, mugging, murdering, day in and day out for their money to fix their habit....." Though this depiction of a huge army of addicts carrying out daily mayhem against the citizens of New York no doubt further excited popular fears, it hardly fit the police statistics at Rockefeller's disposal. If 135,000 addicts maintained their "day-in, day-out" schedule, they would have had to commit something on the order of 49,275,000 robberies, muggings, and murders a year, which would mean that the average resident of New York would be robbed, mugged, and murdered approximately seven times a year. In fact, there were only about 110,000 such crimes reported in New York City in 1973, or only 1/445th the number of crimes that Rockefeller claimed were being committed solely by addicts. Even here, as Rockefeller was well aware, virtually all analyses showed that the addicts were responsible for only a minute fraction of the violent crimes he attributed to them in his constant rhetoric. Most murders and manslaughters were the result of intrafamily disputes, not addiction. Most muggings were the work of juveniles, not hardened addicts. Indeed, the Hudson Institute concluded, in the aforementioned study commissioned by Rockefeller, that less than 2 percent of addicts in New York financed their habit by either robbery or muggings (and they also concluded that there was only a fraction of the number of hardened addicts that Rockefeller claimed there were). Moreover, in 1972, another analysis by the New York City police department concluded, "Both the volume and seriousness of addict crime are exaggerated." Only 4.4 percent of those arrested in the city for felonies against person-which include murders, muggings, and robberies-were confirmed drug users (and only a small percentage of these could possibly be classified as addicts). Addicts generally refrain from such crimes against persons, according to most views of addict behavior, because it involves too high a risk of being caught, imprisoned, and withdrawn from their drug. Petty crimes against property, however, such as burglarizing abandoned houses, involve much fewer risks and potentially much higher profits. The proposals for putting addicts in concentration camps for life, thus, if actually carried would have an infinitesimal effect on decreasing violent crimes against persons. The "Attila the Hun Law" was never enforced with any great enthusiasm against addicts-or even against pushers. The purpose was to provide Rockefeller with a law-and-order image that would satisfy even the most retrograde member of the Republican party. And Rockefeller played the politics of fear so adroitly in the national media that President Nixon borrowed from him many rhetorical images and the statistical hyperbole linking heroin and crime in the public's mind. In his brilliant coordination of information and misinformation about addicts, Rockefeller succeeded in making the heroin vampire a national issue and himself vice-president, even if in the next two years the laws themselves proved unworkable.

Chapter 3 

G. Gordon Liddy: 

The Will to Power 

Until the late 1960s, the "drug menace," despite the apocalyptic metaphors associated with it, served mainly as a rhetorical theme in New York State politics. The addicts arrested in occasional police sweeps were almost always booked, for the statistical record, then released in what became known as "revolving door" arrests. G. Gordon Liddy, however, foresaw a more durable purpose in the drug menace: the public's fear of an uncontrollable army of addicts, if properly organized, could be forged into a new instrument for social control. 

George Gordon Battle Liddy, named after a New York political leader, was born on November 30, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York. Brought up a staunch Catholic, Liddy was educated at St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey, and at Fordham University, where he made a reputation for himself as a fervent anti-Communist. Upon graduation in 1952, Liddy immediately enlisted in the Army, with the aim of becoming a paratrooper. An appendicitis attack, however, disqualified him from airborne training, and instead he fought a more prosaic war in Korea as a lieutenant in the artillery. Discharged in 1954, he returned to Fordham Law School, where he distinguished himself on Fordham Law Review and graduated in 1957. 

For the next five years Liddy realized a childhood ambition by serving in the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. After the gunpoint capture of one of the ten most wanted fugitives in 1959, Liddy became the youngest supervisor in the entire FBI and was attached to J. Edgar Hoover's personal staff at FBI national headquarters, in Washington. Combining a skill with words and a zeal for anticommunism, Liddy served as Hoover's personal ghostwriter, writing law-and-order articles for various magazines and preparing speeches for the director to give at public functions. He quickly became well versed in the use of dramatic metaphors and symbolic code words in the rhetoric of law and order. From his vantage point on the director's personal staff he also became familiar with the extralegal operations of the FBI, such as break-ins and wiretaps. Despite his admiration for Hoover, he realized during these years of service that the FBI was an inefficient and bureaucratic agency and was somewhat less than an effective national police force. In a memorandum to President Nixon ten years later he analyzed the deficiencies of the FBI and concluded that because it conformed too closely to rules and to congressional measures of performance, it could not be counted on as a potent instrument of the presidency. Disappointed in the FBI, Liddy resigned from Hoover's staff in 1962 and went into private law practice with his father, Sylvester L. Liddy, in New York City. (The exact nature of his private practice during these years has never been ascertained.) 

Since his wife, Frances Purcell Liddy, came from a lawyer's family in Poughkeepsie, New York, he  decided to move there in 1966 and apply for a job as an assistant district attorney in Dutchess County. 

Raymond Baratta, then district attorney of Dutchess County, interviewed Liddy and found him "militant but soft-spoken." Liddy carried with him sealed recommendations from the FBI, and Baratta, impressed with his energy, decided to give him the position he sought. Liddy quickly became famous, if not notorious, in Poughkeepsie as a gun-toting prosecutor. During one criminal trial he even fired off a gun in the courtroom to dramatize a minor point in the case. He also proved himself a local crusader against drugs. Joining forces with the chief of police in Wappingers Falls, he traveled from high school to high school in the county, lecturing on the dangers of narcotics and employing the rich rhetoric of Captain Hobson. The police chief, Robert Berberich, recalled in 1975 that Liddy carried with him samples of "everything but heroin" for his lectures. In speeches before church groups and fraternal orders in 1966, Liddy also warned, in a variation of Hobson's yellow-peril theme, that the addicts of New York City would eventually make their way up the Hudson Valley and contaminate Poughkeepsie with their vice and crime. As the "legal advisor" in 1966 to the Poughkeepsie police department he also went along on every marijuana and narcotics raid that he could find or inspire, and his colleagues in the district attorney's office found him brilliant in presenting what otherwise would be routine arrests to the local newspapers. Despite his constant efforts to alarm the citizens of Dutchess County, Liddy found that "the menace ... was still thought of as principally a threat to others." 

On a cold midnight in March, 1966, Liddy finally found a way to shatter the illusions of Dutchess County and gain national publicity for himself. The coup began with a raid on the home of Timothy Leary, a former psychologist at Harvard who had gained some prominence (and notoriety) from his experiments with the hallucinogenic drug LSD. After being dismissed from Harvard for distributing LSD to students, he made the mistake of renting a large mansion in Liddy's bailiwick a, Millbrook, New York. LSD was neither an addictive drug nor one associated with crime, but Leary's presence in Dutchess County provided Liddy with a golden opportunity. "For some time, the major media had been covering the activities of Dr. Timothy Leary," Liddy subsequently explained in Trite magazine. "Leary's ability to influence the young made him feared by parents everywhere. His message ran directly contrary to everything they believed in and sought to teach their children: 'tune in' (to my values; reject those of your parents), 'turn on' (drug yourself); 'drop out' (deal with your problems and those of society by running away from them)." In other words, Liddy realized that Leary could be portrayed as a Pied Piper, using mysterious drugs to turn the young against their parents. He also noted, "Local boys and girls have been seen entering and leaving the estate ... fleeting glimpses were reported of persons strolling the grounds in the nude." He thus suggested that drugs were eroding the morality (and virginity) of Dutchess County youths, or, as he put It, "to fears of drug induced dementia were added pot induced pregnancy." He even foresaw that if citizens' fears about drugs were properly stimulated, "there would be reenacted at Millbrook the classic motion picture scene in which enraged Transylvanian town folks storm Dr. Frankenstein's castle." Even though Liddy was mixing his myths up a bit (Transylvania was the haunting place of the vampire Dracula, not of Frankenstein's monster). He correctly perceived the connection in the public imagination between the drug addict and the medieval legend of the living dead. And it was this connection of fears that Liddy set out to exploit with his midnight raid. 

In planning the night operation, Liddy explained, "We hoped to find not only a central supply of LSD belonging to Leary, but also his guests' personal supplies of marijuana and hashish... it was necessary to strike quickly, with benefit of surprise, if the inhabitants were to be caught in their rooms and any contraband found in the rooms established as possessed by the tenants." To avoid the necessity of having to depend on testimony of witnesses, Liddy planned to wait until Leary and his friends were all asleep in their rooms, then, to catch them red-handed, "We would perform a classic 'no knock' entry-that is, kick in the front door." After that, Liddy himself was to lead "a quick charge upstairs by the bulk of the force of deputies, who were then to fan out and hold the inhabitants in their rooms pending a systematic search." 

All, however, did not go as Liddy planned. Instead of retiring at about eleven P.M., as Liddy presumed, the residents of the estate gathered at about that time in the living room and began showing a film. Liddy recounted in True magazine in 1974: "The deputies assumed that the movies were pornographic, and there was some competition for the assignment to move into binocular range to obtain further information ... [but] presently the lucky man returned to report in a tone of complete disgust, 'it ain't no dirty movie; You'll never guess what them hippies are watching. A waterfall.' " 

The film did not finish until nearly one A.M., by which time most of the deputies were extremely cold and exhausted. Finally, the raiding party moved in on the sleeping foe. Liddy introduced himself to Dr. Leary, who meekly surrendered. And some incriminating marijuana and LSD were indeed found on the premises. However, because Liddy had not fully advised Leary of his rights, as they were defined by the United States Supreme Court in the Miranda decision that year, the judge dismissed the charges against Leary and his followers. Though Liddy viewed the Supreme Court as an "unelected elite" that had usurped power in the United States, he acquiesced in the decision. After all, he had successfully "exposed" Leary in the newspapers of Dutchess County (and Leary subsequently left the county), and he had established his own reputation as a drug fighter. 

By successfully waging his crusade against drugs (albeit in a county which had few, if any, criminal addicts), Liddy established a formidable reputation for himself in the county. The next logical step was gaining power. Liddy saw life itself as a contest for power. He said, on a national television broadcast some years later, "Power exists to be used ... the first obligation of ... someone seeking power is to get himself elected...... In this contest for power Liddy posited that the man with the strongest will for power would win. He wrote his wife, philosophically, "if any one component of man ought to be exercised, cultivated, and strengthened above all others, it is the will; and that will must have but one objective-to win." In June, 1968, Liddy first attempted to win the race for office by running against the incumbent, Albert Rosenblatt, for the Republican nomination for district attorney of Dutchess County. He had little support from Republican politicians and was defeated in a party caucus by a vote of 25 to 4. 

Liddy next turned the focus of his attention to the Republican nomination for Congress from the Poughkeepsie district. Openly challenging Hamilton Fish, Jr., who held the Republican seat, he mounted a bitter primary campaign in the summer of 1968, which the Democratic opponent, John S. Dyson, described as "hyper-adrenaline and bitterly anti-communist." He traveled from fraternal lodge to fraternal lodge in Dutchess County, relentlessly pursuing the theme of vampire-addicts jeopardizing the life and safety of Dutchess County citizens. Law and order became his battle cry; his campaign advertisements contained such slogans as "Gordon Liddy doesn't bail them out-he puts them in" and "He knows the answer is law and order, not weak-kneed sociology." Despite the vigor of his campaign, he was defeated in the primary by the incumbent, Hamilton Fish, by only a few thousand votes. 

Liddy had lost a few battles in 1968, but not the war. Victory, he realized, proceeded from a superior mind-set, and not from any temporary configuration of voters: "The master who instructed me in the deadliest of the Oriental martial arts taught me that the outcome of a battle is decided in the minds of the opponents before the first blow is struck." Liddy, in a letter to his wife published in Harper's magazine in October. 1974, credited the "mind-set of the ... SS division Leibstandarte" for the Nazi victories, and contrasted this with "the ill-disciplined, often drugged dropouts that make up a significant portion of the nation's armed forces today. He entered the congressional fray again in 1968, this time as a candidate for the nomination of the New York State Conservative party. And as the strongest law-and-order candidate of Dutchess County, he easily won this nomination. 

Liddy now presented Hamilton Fish with a serious problem in his bid for reelection to Congress. The public-opinion polls showed in September, 1968, that it was going to be an exceedingly close race between Fish and Dyson. As the Conservative candidate and the locally celebrated prosecutor who had "captured Timothy Leary," Liddy threatened to win enough votes among conservative Republicans to ensure Fish's defeat and a Democratic victory. Though Liddy himself could not win the election, he had cleverly maneuvered himself into a position to make a deal. Gerald Ford, then the Republican leader in the House of Representatives and a friend of Hamilton Fish's, went that fall to Poughkeepsie and personally arranged for Liddy to endorse the candidacy of Hamilton Fish. In return for abandoning his Conservative campaign Liddy was promised a high position in the Nixon administration, if Nixon was elected. Liddy also agreed to head Nixon's campaign effort in Dutchess County. 

After Nixon's victory in 1968 Hamilton Fish returned to Congress, and Gordon Liddy also went to Washington. In 1969 Liddy was appointed special assistant to the secretary of the treasury. He served directly under Eugene T. Rossides, who had direct responsibility for all the law-enforcement activities of the Treasury Department, including the Customs Bureau, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unit, the Internal Revenue Service enforcement division, and the Secret Service. Rossides, a shrewd and enterprising Greek American who had been an all-American football player at Columbia University and had managed a number of Governor Rockefeller's campaigns in New York City, now planned to expand the role of the Treasury Department in law enforcement. He found that Gordon Liddy's high energy level and determination were just what he needed in the impending struggle for power within the administration. 

Liddy thus became Rossides's "spear carrier." One of his first assignments was to work on Task Force Number One, a joint task force being set up by the Justice Department and the Treasury Department to combat narcotics smugglers. Rossides was concerned that John Mitchell would use this task force to expand his own Justice Department domain to the detriment of the Treasury Department's customs bureau, and Liddy was given the task of protecting and promoting Treasury interests on the task force. Though most of the energy of the presidential task force was consumed in bureaucratic wrangles, Liddy foresaw the 'full potential of the drug issue as an instrument for reorganizing agencies of the government. 

It contained an undisputed moral vantage point-since no one in the Nixon administration could be expected to sympathize with addicts, or even with drug users-and could therefore be used to support extraordinarily hard-line positions. Moreover, since the drug problem implied a new and mysterious threat (no one in the Nixon administration had very much knowledge about the effects or the epidemiology of narcotics), one could argue that existing agencies and methods were inadequate to meet this new menace. Because they were dealing with an unprecedented "epidemic," any innovative measure, no matter how unorthodox, could be considered and discussed. Liddy's experience in the FBI had taught him that government agencies tend to expend their potential power on routine activities in their established areas of competency, and that a new area of competency, such as the drug menace, could lead to a new potential for power. 

Rossides also assigned Liddy to work as his representative on the working group of the ad hoc committee established by the president to deal with international narcotics traffic. Rossides was especially interested in suppressing the opium grown in Turkey. On the working group Liddy met with executives from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Although the CIA was prohibited by its charter from domestic activities, drug traffic was international in scope; therefore, Liddy realized, it provided a unique liaison between the intelligence community and the government. 

In drafting various pieces of legislation for the Treasury Department (including sections of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 and the Explosives Control Act of 1970) Liddy also had considerable contact with congressional subcommittees. Here again he found the drug issue a great potential for power: though few individual congressmen fully understood the medical issues involved in drug abuse, most understood the potential political consequences for failing to support measures directed against drug abuse. More important, congressmen tended to see drug abuse as an issue that didn't fall within the traditional lines of authority of any single agency, and were therefore more willing to consider "reorganization" measures to deal with it. 

Liddy's expertise in drug abuse brought him into direct contact with the inner circle of the White House. He especially impressed Egil Krogh with his knowledge of the Leary case and his subsequent plans for legally or illegally extraditing Leary from Afghanistan, where he was then a fugitive. By 1971, when Liddy was enforcement legislative counsel of the Treasury Department, the White House had become progressively interested in ways of bypassing the bureaucrats in the various investigative agencies of the government, such as the FBI, Customs Bureau, and CIA. G. Gordon Liddy had developed a plan for using the war against heroin as a cover for reorganizing various agencies of the government, or at least for making them more effective. Thus, with his "will to power," Liddy began drawing up memoranda for the White House staff for the creation of a unique special police unit attached, in all but name, to the White House, with uncommon powers to deal with drug abuse.

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The Barker of Slippery Gulch