Agency of Fear Opiates and
Political Power in America
By Edward Jay Epstein
PART TWO -
THE POLITICS OF
LAW AND ORDER
Chapter 4
- The Barker of Slippery Gulch
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
Of course the fragmentation of the police in the United States has largely resulted from the deliberate intention of denying
the federal government a possible instrument of tyranny.
-EDWARD LUTTWAK,
Coup d 'Etat
Richard Milhous Nixon did not follow any of the charted channels of American politics in his
extraordinary passage to the presidency. Whereas other American presidents could point to their "humble
origins" with some sort of romantic pride (or even describe their family summer home as a "log cabin"),
Nixon really suffered during his childhood from poverty. His father, Frank Nixon, moved to California at
the turn of the century after having been frostbitten working in an open streetcar in Columbus, Ohio.
After working as a farmhand and oil roustabout, he attempted to cultivate lemons outside Los Angeles.
After Richard was born, on January 9, 1913, Nixon abandoned the "lemon -ranch," and the family moved
to the Quaker community of Whittier, California. They were so impoverished that Nixon's mother was
forced to work as a scrubwoman in a sanatorium in Arizona in order to pay for the treatment of Richard's
brother Harold, who suffered from tuberculosis. At the age of ten Richard Nixon was sent to work as a
farm laborer to help out his family. He fully understood the degrading nature of poverty; at the age of
fourteen he was forced to work as a barker for a fortune wheel for the Slippery Gulch Rodeo, a cover for
illegal gambling rooms in back of the rodeo."
Young Nixon also exercised his oratory skills on the Whittier High School debating team and won prizes
for the best oration on the Constitution. He graduated from high school in the. depths of the Depression,
and worked his way through a small Quaker college in Whittier while living at home and supporting his
family. Then, winning a scholarship, he attended law school at Duke University. Although he
distinguished himself and graduated third in his class, all the prestigious New York law firms where he
applied for a job turned down his application, apparently because he did not have the right contacts or
connections. He continued to eke out a living as a clerk in a local law office in Whittier for the first few
years after law school; then, when World War II broke out, he joined the Navy as a junior officer. He
was eventually sent to Middle River, Maryland, to assist the Navy in liquidating contracts for a
flying-boat project (in which Howard Hughes also took an active interest)
Late in 1945, a few months after he completed the settlement for the Navy on the boat project, Nixon
was invited by a group of local businessmen, in his hometown of Whittier, to seek the Republican
nomination for the congressional seat then held by Jerry Voorhis, a liberal Democrat. But until that time,
Nixon had had no grounding in local California politics-indeed, he attended his first political rally in
1945-and therefore, in lieu of local issues, he played upon a more generalized fear: the fear of
communism. In likening communism to an invisible virus that infects the body politic, he was able to
arouse fears among the public that even avowed non-Communists might serve as carriers of this dread
disease. Thus, even though his opponent Voorhis was outspoken in his criticism Of Communism, Nixon
labeled him in the public's mind as a tool of communism. The politics of fear worked for Nixon, and he
was elected to Congress in 1946 and reelected in 1948. In 1950 he defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas for
her seat in the United States Senate, having defamed his opponent as the "pink lady" and a "dupe" of
communism. In the Senate, he so adroitly managed the putative menace of international communism that
General Dwight D. Eisenhower chose him as his vice-presidential candidate. In 1952, seven years after
he entered politics as a Navy veteran, the former barker from Slippery Gulch was elected vice-president
of the United States.
During the next eight years, as vice-president, Nixon traveled widely to the various power centers of the
world, including the Soviet Union, and served as one of President Eisenhower's main liaisons with the
National Security Council. In a sense then, even as vice-president, Nixon had relatively little experience
with domestic issues in America.
In 1960, however, Nixon found that times had changed in American politics: the fears of communism
which he had so successfully exploited in the late forties and early fifties had subsided, and Americans
were becoming increasingly concerned with domestic problems rather than international ones. In a close
election in 1960 he was defeated for the presidency by John F. Kennedy; and two years later he was
defeated by Pat Brown for the governorship of California. Rather than a national hero of the Republican
party, he was now a defeated man without a future in politics. In 1963 former vice-president Nixon
moved to New York City and joined, as a senior partner, the law firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin and
Todd.
Though he had not entirely abandoned his dreams and schemes of being president, Nixon realized that
the menace of communism on which he built his early reputation no longer was an effective focus for
organizing the fears of the American public. Since the Cold War had waned as a national concern,
domestic issues received increasingly more attention in the national press. The former vice-president had
no claim to any special knowledge or competence in these domestic fields; he was rarely called upon for
public comment. Indeed, after his 1962 defeat in the California gubernatorial election, ABC News
presented Nixon's "political obituary." If he was again to become a center of political attention, Nixon
foresaw that he would have to identify himself with the control of a new menace. Thus he turned to the
growing unease that was being reported out of the major cities in America-riots had erupted in Los
Angeles, New York, and other major cities in the mid-1960s (and though not a new phenomenon in
themselves, they were for the first time nationally televised); crime rates, as reported by the FBI, had
practically doubled between 1960 and 1967; and polls were indicating that personal safety from crimes
was rapidly becoming the dominant concern of the electorate.
Until then, the law-and-order battle cry
had been used mainly by local politicians for local problems and as a shibboleth for the race problem and
crime control; Nixon found he could now use it to organize fears on a wider scale. In 1967 Nixon, using
much the same rhetoric as that employed against the threat of international communism, attempted in an
article in Readers Digest-entitled "What Has Happened to America?"-to elevate local crime to the status of a national menace jeopardizing the very survival of the nation. Successfully capturing law and order as
a political issue, he argued that "in a few short years ... America has become among the most lawless and
violent [nations] in the history of free people" because liberal decisions in the courts were "weakening
the peace forces against the criminal forces." As in his earlier war, against the Communist menace,
Nixon suggested that government officials and judges were soft on crime and were subverting the efforts
of police to prevent criminals from preying on an innocent society.
After he received the Republican nomination for president in 1968, he immediately ordered his chief
speech writers to develop law and order into a major theme of his campaign. Nixon, of course, did not
invent the issue of law and order. Until 1968, however, the law and order issue in American politics was
confined mainly to the state and local levels, as noted in the case of Nelson Rockefeller, and scant, if any,
mention of this motif can be found in prior presidential campaigns. To be sure, politicians had earlier
urged "wars" or "crusades" against alleged criminal conspiracies-notably, the Mafia as a means of
achieving a national reputation. (Estes Kefauver and Robert F. Kennedy had both waged highly
publicized wars against conspiracies of organized crime and had gained national prominence for their
efforts, though there were few indictments.*)
For the most part, however, these earlier efforts were
intended only to produce the sort of publicity which would allay the fears of the public by exposing a few
symbolic "chiefs" of the underworld (who usually turned out to be bookies). Nixon played on the
law-and-order theme in a very different way: the target be directed his audience's attention to was
unorganized crime that directly threatened the life and safety of all - muggings, murder, robbery, rape,
and burglary. The threat to the public safety that he depicted was not a handful of Mafia chiefs but the
subversion of the legal system by those who were more sympathetic to the rights of criminals than to the
protection of the innocent. Nixon shrewdly perceived that law and order could be effectively transposed
into an issue of the Democrats' undermining of public authority.
* Victor S. Navasky has given an excellent account in Kennedy Justice of how Attorney General
Kennedy presented Joseph Valachi, who claimed to be a member of the criminal conspiracy while in
prison, to the national media in order to mobilize support for legislation expanding wiretap and other
authorities being proposed by the Kennedy administration-clearly an adumbration of the future.
Even at this early stage, Nixon realized that unless he could preempt the crime issue for himself by
generalizing it, Governor George Wallace, who was making an independent bid for the presidency in
1968, could be expected to exploit it to attract votes among Nixon's natural constituency.
Though Nixon successfully developed law and order into a principal issue of the 1968 campaign, he
intentionally avoided defining the problem in anything more than a vague way. Patrick J. Buchanan, a
thirty-one-year-old journalist from St. Louis who was then working as Nixon's chief speech writer on the
law-and-order issue, recalls the polls' suggesting that the public believed that lawlessness could be dealt
with by a more determined effort of the federal government. However, at that stage, Nixon's speech
writers had little specific knowledge about the characteristics or causes of crime and disorder. Although
Governor Nelson Rockefeller had brilliantly pioneered the heroin menace in New York State, and Nixon
himself realized the political potential of a drug-abuse menace, the candidate's strategists were not yet
fully conversant with the vocabulary of dread that was used by Rockefeller to exploit the drug issue. As
late as September 12, 1968, Buchanan teletyped Martin Pollner, a member of Nixon's law firm and
campaign staff who had been a former prosecutor in New York City, that it was "vital that we get some
background on the narcotics problem in this country." Pollner immediately consulted with John W. Dean,
111, another lawyer-working in the Nixon campaign, and then wrote a four-page memorandum to
The Buchanan-"Potential Materials and Recommendations for R.N.'s Position on Narcotics and Drug Abuse."
Then, with the help of Peter Velde, another lawyer on the campaign staff, Pollner sent another
memorandum on the "narcotics problem in southern California." These analyses detailing the problems
of law enforcement and rehabilitation, however, were far too specific for Nixon. The speech he gave on
the subject of narcotics in September, 1968, in Anaheim, California, for which Buchanan requested this
research, began with Nixon's describing a letter that he had supposedly received from a nineteen-year-old
drug addict. Then, using the Hobsonian imagery of heroin's corrupting innocents, he asserted, "Narcotics
are a modern curse of American youth.... I will take the executive steps necessary to make our borders
more secure against the pestilence of narcotics." But narcotics remained only a subsidiary issue in the
1968 campaign. The strategists instead played upon the more general fear of personal violence, saturating
television across the nation with commercials that showed an obviously nervous middle aged woman
walking down the street on a dark, wet night while an announcer stated, "Crimes of violence in the
United States have almost doubled in recent years ... today a violent crime is committed every sixty
seconds ... a robbery every two and a half minutes... a mugging every six minutes ... a murder every
forty-three minutes... and it will get worse unless we take the offensive. . . ." The commercials ended
with the message, "This time vote like your whole world depended on it." After winning the election by a
narrow margin, Nixon was expected to deal effectively with the menace to law and order that he himself
had helped to popularize. But for him it was an opportunity, not a problem.
Chapter 5 -
The Bete-noire Strategy
It proved far easier to find the rhetoric to excite public fears over lawlessness than the controls for
reducing crime and disorder. During the 1968 campaign Nixon had persistently attacked the
"permissiveness" of the Democratic attorney general, Ramsey Clark, and pledged that the first step in his
war on crime would be to replace him with a more determined and tougher chief law officer. "Ramsey
Clark had been symbolic of the laissez-faire liberal approach to crime control," Egil Krogh, then deputy
assistant to the president for law enforcement recalled. "The promise of a new attorney general was all
part of the same idea that crime had gotten so much out of control that he was going to take stringent
measures." Nixon chose as a replacement for Ramsey Clark his law partner and campaign manager, John
Newton Mitchell. Like Nixon, Mitchell was indeed a determined man: he worked his way through
college and played semipro ice hockey, one of the more violent sports available. In World War II he
sought the most dangerous service available in the Navy, and was a commander of the PT boat squadron
in which John F. Kennedy served as a lieutenant. As one of the leading municipal-bond lawyers in New
York City, he dealt constantly with local politicians across the country interested in gaining a favorable
opinion for a tax-free bond issue. He joined Nixon's law firm as a senior partner in 1967 and made an
immediate impression on Nixon. Little more than a year later, he agreed to be the campaign manager for
Nixon's presidential effort, and seemed to many in the campaign to be the only person to whom Nixon
deferred. Mitchell, a self-made man who enjoyed his wealth, wanted to return to his law practice, but
reluctantly agreed to serve his new friend as attorney general.
In January, 1969, only a few days after he had assumed office, President Nixon convened a meeting in
the White House on possible law-and-order initiatives. The small inner circle of advisors who attended
that meeting included John Mitchell, who in those early days acted as a "prime minister" to the president;
John Ehrlichman, a Seattle land-use lawyer who had served as tour director in the 1968 campaign and
was now counsel to the president; Egil Krogh, the young deputy to Ehrlichman; Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, a former advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson who was then the counsel for domestic
affairs, and Donald Santarelli, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer who had drafted many of the position
papers on crime for the 1968 Nixon campaign, and who was in the process of joining the Justice
Department as a strategist for the crime-control program.
The meeting began with President Nixon's defining law and order as his "principal domestic issue." In
the extensive interviews that Egil Krogh had with me over a two-month period in 1974 he recalled that in
that January meeting the president used general terminology such as "we are a tough, law-and-order
administration, and we are going to crack down on crime." Since the rhetoric used during the campaign
in 1968 was basically "get tough," Krogh explained, "there was a clear motivation to be able to deliver to
The Bete-noire strategy the electorate In 1972 a record of improvement in crime control."
Nixon stated that the two categories of
crime that would be most useful to diminish were armed robbery and burglary, since they "instill the
greatest fear" in the electorate. As Nixon continued to describe his objectives for crime control, John
Mitchell began slowly shaking his head in a negative manner, and pulling on his pipe as if it were some
sort of semaphore signal. Asked whether he thought there was any problem, Mitchell leaned back and
explained that most of the crimes that the president was interested in controlling did not fall under the
jurisdiction or powers of the federal government. Except for Washington, D.C.. where the federal
government did have direct Jurisdiction, crimes such as homicide, assault, mugging, robbery, and
burglary were not violations of federal law but of state or local law, and even the federal government
found an indirect way of intervening in the problem, the local government would get the credit for
diminishing those classes of crimes. Moreover, John Ehrlichman pointed out, the established agencies of
the federal government, such as the FBI, the IRS, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
(BNDD), and the Treasury Department, had traditionally been reluctant to involve themselves in any sort
of offensive against such local crimes. In all, there were only a few thousand federal agents (not
including the CIA or the Department of Defense) and they could not realistically be expected to have
much effect on street crimes in the urban centers of America. Such crimes were committed, according to
the best police estimates, by teenage youth acting on spur-of-the-moment inspirations or on targets of
opportunity. Nixon quickly comprehended, Krogh said, that "the reach of the federal government's power
in law enforcement did not penetrate to the state or local level ... where most of the street crime people
were afraid of existed." Donald Santarelli was called upon to sum up the situation. He later recounted, in
an interview with me:
● ❍ In the light of many promises made in the 1968 campaign, and the unerring belief that the
Nixon administration had to do something dramatic in the area of law enforcement, it was
necessary for me to put the actual ability of the federal government in perspective for the
president and top advisors....
I told them that the federal government simply did not have the machinery or authority to
deal with crime in America outside the District of Columbia.... The only thing we could do
was to exercise vigorous symbolic leadership.... With the president and attorney general as
spokesmen, we could elevate the issue of crime to the level of the president.
The new strategy thus emerged. Ehrlichman suggested to Krogh that since "there were clear limits on
what the federal government could do," the alternative was to "jawbone ... to stimulate action at the state
and local level simply by making the issue [verbally]." Though the administration lacked the "tools"
actually to reduce crime, it could wage a symbolic war on crime. In 1974 Krogh explained to me that
during the first year of Nixon's administration, a whole range of "symbolic strategies" were discussed.
Harsh-sounding legislation could be proposed to Congress which would have little effect on law
enforcement but would greatly enhance the administration's public reputation for toughness (and if
Congress failed to enact these laws, it could be blamed for "softness" toward crime).
Repressive-sounding words such as "preventive detention" could be bandied about by administration
officials, thus provoking an outcry in the "liberal press" which would add to the appearance of the
relentless war on crime by the administration. A presidential spokesman could also directly attack judges
in the courts for being sympathetic to criminals in order to make the administration seem, by contrast,
hardline. The Nixon strategists thus decided early on that though they could not directly reduce street
crime in America, they could gain enormous publicity for their crime offensive by calling attention to
their repressive-sounding plans and ideas for law enforcement, and thereby create a bete noire for the liberal press to focus on.
Since President Nixon was by 1969 cultivating a new image for himself as a reasonable and moderate
man (and allowing Vice President Agnew to make the more provocative speeches), John Mitchell was
chosen for the role of Mr. Law and Order. Krogh later explained, "The president felt that Mitchell would
represent the law and-order image that had been developed" by the "speech-writing staff" and would
effectively use their "language of crime control" to stir public reactions. Mitchell's public role was to
identify himself with a remorseless, hard-line attitude toward crime and criminals. In both public
appearances and private briefings for the press he was to stress the urgent need for isolating criminals
from the rest of society through strict application of the laws and long prison sentences. When, for
example, H. R. Haldeman, the president's chief of staff, was planning a presidential briefing on drugs for
television writers in April, 1970, he decided on a strategy whereby the president would "tie in the
attorney general in such a way as to position him in the minds of TV writers and producers as the
spearhead of the anti-drug movement within the administration," according to a White House
memorandum. John Mitchell's criticism of the supposed laxity of criminal judges was also "part of the
speech rhetoric land] part of the political needs at the time," according to Krogh's later explanation to me
of the 1969 strategy. As for the "political law-and-order bills" that Mitchell exhorted Congress to pass,
Krogh then explained, "It was my view that while these bills would suggest a tough law-and-order
demeanor by the administration, the legislation itself did not provide an enhanced ability to the police
department or to the courts to reduce crime as such. The no-knock legislation struck me, and also Mr.
Ehrlichman, as almost inherently repressive in tone."
Indeed, Jerry Wolfson, then police chief of
Washington, D.C., specifically told Ehrlichman and Krogh that the no-knock legislation was unnecessary
since the police had "adequate authority to enter a dwelling" where there was a probable cause, and the
police chief viewed the no-knock bill as "law-and-order window dressing rather than as initiatives that
would strike at the core of the problem." Such technical advice was disregarded, however, since the act
of proposing draconian-sounding law-and-order bills was intended to serve "a political purpose," as
Krogh put it, "rather than really being directed at curbing the real problem." Thus, tough-sounding
law-and-order bills were proposed. An internal memorandum in the files of President Nixon's Domestic
Council (circa July, 1970), entitled "Crime Control and Law Enforcement, Current Status-Political
Position for the 1970 Election," commented, "The administration's position in the crime field depends on
our ability to shift blame for crime bill inaction to Congress." To their surprise, however, the
Democratic-controlled Congress rapidly passed even the most repressive-sounding crime bills by
lopsided margins (since not even Democratic congressmen wanted to appear to their constituents as
voting against a law-and-order bill).
To be sure, the private views and unpublicized actions of the attorney general did not always fit the
public image being projected - Mr. Law and Order. For example, during one cabinet meeting that Krogh
recalled, Mitchell strongly objected to President Nixon's demand for mandatory rather than flexible
sentences for drug offenders. Even though the President replied, "That's my position, and I cannot have it
look as if I am weak or receding from a hard-line position," Mitchell argued that the mandatory sentences
would be "irrational" and "counterproductive." Ultimately, the president adopted Mitchell's more
moderate view (although Mitchell's position was not made public). Although Mitchell asked the more
sophisticated public to watch "the deeds, not the words" of the administration, the bete-noire strategy
frightened and provoked the more liberal audience. Numerous political commentators in the press
interpreted Mitchell's bombast quite literally as a call for a national police crackdown. Such negative
publicity was intentionally not repudiated by the White House or the attorney general, since there existed in fact a curious coincidence of interests between the Nixon strategists, who wanted to depict a hard-line
attorney general, and their political opponents, who wanted to depict a repressive attorney general.
Journalistic attacks, such as Richard Harris's book Justice, which emphasized the dramatic differences
between Attorneys General Ramsey Clark and John Mitchell in their administration of justice, played
willy-nilly into the bete-noire strategy by heightening the repressive image of the new attorney general.
This convergence of political imagery strongly reinforced the notion that the country was entering a
period of political repression-much to the chagrin of some members of the Nixon administration. For
example, Krogh's young staff assistant Jeffrey Donfeld complained to Attorney General Mitchell in 1970
that some of his statements were being misinterpreted by the public as calls for political repression, and
suggested that the administration's rhetoric on law enforcement could be toned down so as to avoid any
confusion. By the time that Donfeld walked back from the Department of Justice to the White House,
word had reached his superior, Egil Krogh, who summoned him to his office and explained
good-naturedly, "Fool ... don't you think those guys know what they're saying! Don't you think it is all
calculated for a specific purpose?" At that moment Donfeld realized that "they weren't trying to correct
the charge of repression ... it was all a matter of perspective and from their perspective, a tough image
was exactly what they wanted." Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat with a liberal constituency, was
unwilling to be part of a bete-noire strategy and fought for nearly six months to have the Justice
Department respond to the charges being made in the press that the administration was committing
genocide or otherwise attempting to murder the leaders of the Black Panther party in the United States.
Though the charges were demonstrably false in a number of cases-most of the alleged shooting incidents
occurred before Nixon assumed office (and while John Mitchell was still a bond lawyer)-the
image-makers in the Department of Justice were not completely adverse to publicity that identified the
attorney general as someone who was battling black militants, and Moynihan's protests fell on deaf ears.
Though the bete-noire campaign achieved success in some quarters-notably, the media-in identifying
John Mitchell and the Nixon administration with the image of a hard-line, law-and-order offensive, it
failed to impress the public at large. The Domestic Council crime control memorandum quoted earlier
began by noting, "According to the polls, the public is not yet persuaded that the administration has
succeeded with the anti-crime drive." Moreover, crime statistics, which the memorandum termed "the
major indicator for success or failure," showed a large increase in all the categories of street crime
against which Nixon had pledged an offensive, and newspapers, especially the Washington Post, were
now citing this failure with great concern, and sometimes with hidden glee. The administration's record
of prosecutions and convictions also turned out, upon evaluation, to be much less drastic than its
rhetoric-prosecution of federal drug cases actually dropped by almost 10 percent between fiscal 1969 and
1970. Even in the District of Columbia, where the administration had direct influence over the policies of
the police department, crime had increased markedly. As the 1970 mid-term election approached, the
Nixon strategists realized that new and more dramatic efforts would be necessary. They thus suggested,
in another crime-control memorandum, that the attorney general develop "certain highly visible efforts in
the crime area" such as "organized crime crackdowns ... to clearly demonstrate-in the public
mind-totality of the administration commitment."
The Domestic Council memorandum noted that
although "organized crime is being attacked through eleven strike forces soon to be increased to
twenty-one strike forces . ... this program needs more publicity." And to that end it asked that Mitchell
specifically consider the "apprehension of top-level hoodlums involved in organized crime on a regular
basis." The law-enforcement planners in the White House believed that the continuous arrests of suspects
with Italian-American or "racketeer" names would be reported by the press as a major crackdown on the Mafia (even if the suspects were released immediately), according to Krogh's interpretation of the
memorandum. He explained to me that the White House was concerned with "visibility," which was
understood by the Nixon White House to mean simply getting the president's efforts in the headlines, and
the most direct means of achieving such coverage of the crime issue was simply for the attorney general
to make a series of spectacular arrests.
Mitchell, of course, was aware that previous administrations had established their reputations by making
a few highly publicized arrests of men suspected of belonging to the Mafia or other organized crime
groups. In 1962, for example, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy dispatched one hundred FBI agents
(and a large number of sympathetic journalists) to Reading, Pennsylvania, to raid an otherwise quiet dice
game. As Victor Navasky pointed out in his account of the Justice Department under Kennedy, this
proved to be "a brilliant publicity coup-since it advertised the new Kennedy anti-crime legislation. . . ."
In such raids Attorney General Kennedy pioneered the development of strike forces, or groups of federal
agents detached from their normal duties and chains of command. These strike forces quite commonly
made illegal break-ins (or "surreptitious entries," as they called them) in order to plant concealed
microphones in the homes of suspected gamblers or racketeers. Even though such illegally obtained
information could not be used to prosecute criminals, the disclosures were leaked to magazines and
newspapers to keep the campaign in the headlines.
Until 1967, this was the traditional way of waging
war against the Mafia. However, when J. Edgar Hoover became embroiled in a damaging controversy
after it was revealed in court cases that the FBI had illegally broken into residences on behalf of the
strike forces, and the new attorney general, Ramsey Clark, refused to give authorizations for such
activities, the situation changed radically. Even though Mitchell may well have been willing to authorize
the renewal of such activity, J. Edgar Hoover was understandably reluctant to again endanger the
reputation of his agency. (Attorney General Kennedy, although he had also authorized such activity, later
publicly denied it, leaving Hoover out on a precarious limb.)
Moreover, in 1970, Mitchell himself was
under a drumfire of attack in the press and in the courts about the authorization of wiretaps, and this
made disclosure of electronic surveillance for national-security purposes much riskier-at least as far as
the FBI was concerned. Although Mitchell could increase the 'number of strike forces, as the
memorandum recommended, they were far less effective instruments for generating publicity without the
potential for disclosing ' embarrassing information from wiretaps and electronic surveillance.
Suggestion in 1970 of rounding up Italian-American gamblers and racketeers also presented a political
problem for Mitchell. An Italian anti-defamation league, with such notable sponsors as Frank Sinatra, was
claiming with some justification that the use of terms like "Mafia," "Mafiosa," and "Cosa Nostra" was
creating the false impression that Italian-American citizens were behind all organized crime in America.
Since Italian Americans were a group that the Nixon strategists hoped to appeal to in the 1972 election,
Mitchell acceded to these protests by prohibiting the Department of Justice from using such epithets to
describe organized crime. Under these conditions there seemed little profit in image-making to be gained
from the traditional Mafia hunt.
As became increasingly clear from privately commissioned public opinion polls, the attempts of the
Nixon strategists at image manipulation had by and large failed. Although John Mitchell had been
successfully projected as a repressive attorney general and bete noire by the liberal community, the more
conservative constituency on which Nixon depended for reelection was not made fully aware of the war
on crime. Nixon's speech writers blamed the media for suddenly changing the issue from repression of
criminals to "repression of dissent," as Patrick Buchanan explained to me. In any case, the Nixon
strategists demanded, in their "Prognosis for the 1972 Election," that the Nixon administration be in a position by 1972 to claim that it "has mounted the most massive effort to control crime in the nation's
history." Apparently they still hoped that "statistical results [would] come from the District of Columbia,
where the administration has direct control over the number of police and the comprehensiveness of the
drug fight." Nixon himself demanded "substantive" results, which meant to Ehrlichman and Krogh that
they would have to produce statistics and numbers on arrests and convictions. Mr. Law and Order
reminded Ehrlichman and Krogh that there was only one area in which the federal police could produce
such results on demand-and that was narcotics. The program for narcotics control, which Krogh himself
had quietly developed, now turned out to be the only alternative for realizing the law-and-order results
which Nixon demanded.
Chapter 6
The Education of Egil Krogh
Egil Krogh, Jr., was born in Chicago in 1939, the son of a Norwegian immigrant. After majoring in
English at a small Christian Science college in southern Illinois, dropping out of business school at the
University of Chicago, serving three years as a naval communications officer in the Pacific, and selling
hats in a department store in Seattle, he finally graduated from the University of Washington Law School
in June, 1968. Upon graduation, Krogh was offered an apprenticeship in the Seattle offices of John
Ehrlichman, a long-time friend of Krogh's family; but he never had the opportunity to practice land-use
law, as he had planned. in a few short months "Bud" Krogh followed Ehrlichman to Washington, where
he was given the impressive-sounding title deputy counsel to the president, although in reality he was
still Ehrlichman's personal assistant. Although Krogh had little experience in either government or
politics (he had not even actively supported Nixon's quest for the presidency), Ehrlichman asked him to
oversee the sensitive areas of federal law-enforcement and internal security matters. Before he had even
turned thirty, Krogh thus found himself willy-nilly presiding over an unprecedented presidential
law-and-order campaign. It was all a learning period, and he readily acknowledged his naivete to me in
1975, during a series of interviews.
He recalled:
● ❍ I had been given the District of Columbia liaison responsibility in February, 1969, and I
remember in a meeting with the president he said, "All right, Bud, I'd like you to stop crime
in the District of Columbia," and I said, "Yes," I would do that. So I called the mayor,
Walter Washington, and asked him to stop crime, and he paused for a moment and said,
"Okay," and that was about it.
As the first year of the Nixon administration progressed, Krogh soon found that "there wasn't much feel
for the kinds of programs that would work in the area of law enforcement and crime control" and, like
the president, he found to his dismay that the federal government lacked the wherewithal to diminish
street crime in any substantial way. Now he quickly realized that his telephone order to Mayor
Washington to "stop crime" revealed a picture of naivete in the extreme. He also found as he became
more aware of the machinery of government that most of the other remedies for crime available to the
federal government were equally ineffectual. In his political education Krogh found that he "didn't have
the luxury ... to conclude that because the problem was so complex and seemingly intransigent nothing
should be done." After discussing the problem with Ehrlichman, Krogh learned the prime requisite of
"intelligent politics." Since "the president had campaigned on his desire to reduce crime nationally,"
Krogh found out that Nixon could not now state, "I've discovered that the federal government has little
jurisdiction over street crime in the cities, towns, and counties; and therefore it is a matter for the states to
handle. Good luck!" Krogh did what he could to reduce crime-he pressed for better streetlights in
Washington, D.C., more police patrols, and other such measures, but they failed. Krogh was thus faced
with his first crisis in the Nixon administration as he explained it to me:
● ❍ During the period from January to December, 1969, the crime rate measured by the FBI
reports indicated that crimes per day continued to climb dramatically ... and during
November hit an all-time high.... When the president learned the news, he became extremely
upset and concerned. He called Mr. Ehrlichman and told him this must stop and that very
immediate measures had to be undertaken to reduce the crime rate [in D.C.] by those in the
District government, or else he would get a new team.
Ehrlichman immediately called a meeting of his new organ, the Domestic Council, at Camp David to
redress the situation. It was the first-and, as it turned out, the only-full meeting of the Domestic Council.
This new White House group, originally conceived of as a sort of domestic counterpart of the National
Security Council, was quickly converted by Ehrlichman to a personal instrument of power. He assembled
a staff of young men in their twenties and early thirties with little or no previous experience in
government, such as Krogh, and had them reduce the flood of ideas and suggestions from competing
sources to a series of option and decision papers on given issues. By carefully structuring the pros and
cons of the various options, and assessing the political as well as substantive ramifications of possible
decisions, Ehrlichman eventually established a direct channel of information to the president which
became impervious to the qualifications and caveats of scholars, bureaucrats, and even cabinet officials
who had previously contributed to policy. In this initial meeting, in December, 1969, however,
Ehrlichman simply went around the table and asked various staff assistants what measures had been
taken in the area of crime control. Some of the staff assistants pointed to the "scare legislation" that had
been proposed by John Mitchell, and other bits of symbolic politics. Finally, Ehrlichman turned to Krogh
and asked him what actions were pending that might affect the crime rate. Krogh answered with brutal
candor, "None." The entire council fell silent. Then, with an air of desperation, Ehrlichman reiterated the
president's orders: "The crime rate must somehow be brought down."
As soon as he returned to Washington, Krogh called Graham Watt, the deputy mayor of the District, and
Police Chief Jerry Wilson, and ordered them to prepare immediately a report on what could be done in
the District in terms of improving the police force and reducing crime, at least statistically. Even at that
point, however, Krogh realized that though pouring resources into the District of Columbia on an
emergency basis (and changing statistics-reporting methods) could bring about an appreciable
improvement in at least the crime statistics in the capital, these measures could not be reasonably
expected to ameliorate crime in the rest of the nation. Despite the presidential injunction, and the threat
to deploy a new team, there was still no concept of what could be done to implement a national
law-and-order program. By 1970 all the Domestic Council was able to suggest, in a crime-control
memorandum, was the shifting of the "burden for responsibility in controlling, crime to the state and
local government which have jurisdiction over local law enforcement."
Such a strategy had the obvious advantage of providing a "solution" to the dilemma of rising street-crime
statistics. Since there were ten times as many local police as federal police, and the local authorities had
immediate jurisdiction over their local streets, they could more plausibly be assigned the responsibility
for the success or failure of crime control. The rationale of devolving responsibility also fit neatly with the conservative view that the federal government had usurped legitimate functions of local governments
(which presumably ought to be returned), and it could be supported by such other programs of the Nixon
administration as revenue sharing and block grants to the states. If this strategy was adopted, the Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration could be used as an instrument for aiding local police
departments-and gaining credit for the Nixon administration. Elliot Richardson, then secretary of Health,
Education and Welfare, advocated such an approach. For example, in the spring of 1971 his general
counsel at HEW, Will Hastings, suggested in a draft that he drew up for a presidential message on
narcotics addiction, "The federal role ... must be one of leadership, of capacity building: By providing
support ... the federal government can assist state and local agencies in dealing with the problem. The
local authorities must assume primary responsibility." The response of the White House strategists,
however, was not favorable to this conservative strategy of devolving responsibility. An analysis of the
HEW draft by the Domestic Council's staff asked critically, "Is the President ready politically to abdicate
responsibility ... by implicitly placing the burden on state and local government?" Ehrlichman answered
that such an abdication would not be politically acceptable to the president. He explained to Krogh that
although "most of the activities in the field are local ... conceptually we should not stress that the federal
government was shifting responsibility back to the states because the administration was clearly
identified with handling the problem.... The President was out in front on the issue, and ... as a matter of
policy he should stay there." Krogh then realized, as he later told me, "To publicly disavow responsibility
at the federal level and extend it to the states would have been perceived as a cop-out-and something that
was directly inconsistent with what [the president] had campaigned on."
The suggestion of lawfully using the LEAA in the war against crime also presented a political problem.
According to the legislative formulas then existing, the vast preponderance of LEAA funds had to be
given in block grants to the states, which then allocated the money, without any, control from
Washington, to local agencies. The Nixon administration thus would have little control over which police
departments received funds-and for what purposes they were used and most of the money could be
expected to be filtered down to the cities controlled by the Democrats (if only because, at that time, most
city governments were Democratic). In evaluating the uses of LEAA, Domestic Council analysts noted
that "there was profound GOP opposition [to] the theory of block grants" and that, moreover, it "makes
more difficult the coercing of the states into reordering their priorities to emphasize street crime." With
the twin objectives of reducing street crime and "maintaining the image of a massive administration
assault on crime," the Nixon strategists recommended a change in "LEAA formulas to remit more funds
invested in high crime areas, and thus to focus publicity on administration efforts. The memorandum
concluded pessimistically that expanded LEAA grants would tend to induce "a bad reaction from GOP,"
and give credit for "more highly visible deterrents at local levels" to local politicians.
In any case, the issue of shifting the burden was decisively settled by Nixon himself in May, 1971, after
an earlier meeting among Ehrlichman, Richardson, Krogh, and others. According to Krogh's notes of that
meeting:
● ❍ Secretary Richardson recommends that the thrust of new initiatives be experimental, thereby
shifting the burden of responsibility to the states. Expectations are [thus] not raised that the
federal government is undertaking a multi-year responsibility. Can the President afford
politically to abdicate responsibility on this issue?
Ehrlichman then recommended to the president that "our posture not be worded in a tone which
suggests, 'it's the problem of state and local government.' " President Nixon endorsed the option recommended by Ehrlichman, thereby ending any further consideration of the alternative of portraying
the states as responsible in maintaining law and order.
Confronted with the seemingly impossible task of bringing about highly visible reductions in the reported
muggings, burglaries, and robberies across the nation, and having found that all conventional levers of
government could not easily be brought to bear on this problem, Krogh was compelled to seek out new
and unorthodox tactics for prosecuting the war on crime. As Ehrlichman's emissary for the District of
Columbia he had met Robert DuPont, a young and articulate psychiatrist who had been operating with
missionary zeal a drug-treatment center in the District. Early in 1970, DuPont suggested to Krogh and his
staff a "magic-bullet" scheme for quickly reducing crime statistics across the nation: since narcotics
addicts committed much of the street crime in America in order to obtain money to pay for their drug
habit, DuPont argued, the federal government could immediately reduce crime by breaking the
dependence of addicts on illicit suppliers. The young psychiatrist impressed Krogh with "a statistical
analysis which demonstrated that his client had reduced crime in the District" (even though it turned out,
as a 1972 study by the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse found, that the correlation he
presented wits based on a statistical artifact).
The proposition put forth by Captain Hobson in the
1920s-that crime was itself a disease caused by narcotics and cured by breaking the addictive habit-was
thus rediscovered in 1970 by Krogh. G. Gordon Liddy, who was then developing law-enforcement
pro-rams for the Treasury Department, also impressed Krogh with the potential for a massive federal
offensive against narcotics as a means of dealing with the law-and-order problem. Liddy dramatically
described how Rockefeller had masterfully identified narcotics with the crime problem in New York
State, and periodically stirred the popular imagination with his highly publicized crackdowns on addicts.
He argued persuasively that the Nixon administration could achieve the same effect. Most important, the
president himself had shown a keen interest in the possibilities of a war on drugs. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, concerned about the reports of heroin abuse in the ghettos, had persuaded the president that
the State Department should do everything diplomatically possible to curtail opium production in foreign
countries such as Turkey, and that the president should elevate the suppression of narcotics to an issue of
national security policy. The State Department, however, concerned about diplomatic complications, did
little to implement this presidential directive. Moynihan later recalled, in a telegram to Kissinger:
● ❍ In August 1969 1 made a trip abroad with this matter primarily in mind ... in Paris I met
with the American minister ... land] told him of the Washington decision to make the
international drug traffic a matter of highest priority in foreign affairs, and this elicited...
genuine puzzlement. The minister knew almost nothing of the subject and certainly had no
inkling that his government back home was concerned about it.
Krogh himself had some doubts about the immediate consequences of such a full-scale attack on
narcotics production and distribution. He wrote in a memorandum to the Domestic Council on July 23,
1970, "If the supply of opiate and other addicting drugs is curtailed, the price of these drugs would likely
rise, and the demand will continue, for the buyer is addicted; crime could go up in order to acquire more
money for the more expensive drugs." In other words, if addicts were really stealing to pay for their
habit, government efforts to reduce the supply of heroin could result in more, not less, crime. Krogh,
however, was persuaded by his staff that the "crackdown" would drive most addicts into "treatment
programs," where they would be effectively taken off the streets. He thus proposed a double-pronged
attack on narcotics: while the State Department and National Security Council attempted to diminish the
supply of heroin in the world available to the American market, and the Bureau of Narcotics and the
Customs Bureau attempted to arrest as many of the smugglers and distributors of heroin as possible, the White House would also work to expand the treatment programs so that they could absorb a large
number of addicts. Although John Ehrlichman also had doubts about the complexities involved in a war
on drugs, especially since it was not an area that was yet researched by the White House, he was
persuaded by Krogh that it was the only real alternative the White House had to reduce crime statistics by
the 1972 election. The war on narcotics thus received White House sanction.
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