In June,
1971, G. Gordon Liddy, a man possessed with a purpose,
ascended to the inner circle of power at the White House.
His attempt to take over the thousand-man Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms enforcement unit of the Treasury Department
on behalf of the White House group had been successfully
resisted by the Treasury Department earlier that year,
and his immediate superior, Eugene Rossides, had moved
to ease him out of that department entirely. But Liddy
foresaw that the heroin issue could be the very instrument
that the White House group needed to consolidate power
within the bureaucracy, and thereby extend its police
power. To demonstrate how a few determined men could
manipulate the emotions of an entire nation by invoking
a few highly visual symbols of fear, Liddy invited his
new cohorts in the White House to a series of propaganda
films being shown in the National Archives that June.
The "Inner circle" that Liddy persuaded to
view these films included John Ehrlichman, whose Domestic
Council 'had assumed by now undisputed control over
all domestic issues; Egil Krogh; Donald Santarelli,
who was then slated to head the billion-dollar Law Enforcement
Assistance Administration (LEAA), which disbursed money
to local police departments; Robert Mardian, who headed
the internal-security division of the Department of
Justice; and a number of Krogh's young assistants on
the Domestic Council. The cycle of films was climaxed
on June 13 by the showing of Triumph of the Will, a
Nazi propaganda film made under the auspices of Hitler
and Goering which graphically depicted the way a "national
will" could be inculcated into the masses through
the agency of controlled fear and frenzied outrage.
Krogh later recalled that he
had "considerable apprehension" about hiring
Gordon Liddy to work for the White House on the drug
program. Rossides had warned him that Liddy was both
disloyal and potentially dangerous." Indeed, these
were the reasons Rossides tendered for dismissing Liddy
from the Treasury Department. Disloyalty to a bureaucracy
might mean loyalty to the president, Krogh reasoned.
Moreover, given Rossides's record of bureaucratic infighting,
Krogh interpreted the potential danger of Liddy as simply
his will to act decisively and cut through red tape.
Krogh later came to the realization that Liddy had "simply
a higher energy level than anyone else" and that
therefore he could be extremely persuasive in moving
others to action. And as Krogh gradually became persuaded
that the drug issue was the best available lever for
moving and reorganizing entrenched bureaucracies in
the government, Liddy, with his ideas for mobilizing
popular support on the drug issue, seemed an "Invaluable
addition" to his staff on the Domestic Council.
Nixon's Domestic Council analyzed
the implications of launching a heroin crusade for more
than a year but found that their plans were always undercut
by bureaucrats in the various agencies of the government.
With the 1972 election quickly approaching, Krogh decided
the time was right for presidential action. Due to a
fortunate turn of events earlier that year, a military
coup d'etat in Turkey had swept into office Nihat Erim,
who was willing to suspend temporarily the cultivation
of opium poppies in Turkey-a long-term objective of
the Nixon administration-in return for some token compensation.
It seemed feasible for the president to pull a publicity
coup of his own by meeting with Prime Minister Erim
and jointly announcing what the media would assume to
be, if properly prepared by the White House staff, a
brilliant victory over heroin addiction and crime in
America (even though Turkey at the time produced only
a small portion of the world's illicit opium).
On another front, Ehrlichman
had finally been persuaded by Krogh and Donfeld that
a massive federal program to distribute the synthetic
narcotic methadone was the only real hope the administration
had of reducing crime statistics, if not crime, before
the upcoming election.
Despite the tough rhetoric
of the Nixon law-and-order campaign, crime had actually
risen in the United States, even in Washington, D.C.,
where the federal government had direct control over
the police, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports.
Substantive measures. such as court reform or reorganizing
police departments, could not possibly have an effect
on crime statistics in time for the 1972 election, Krogh
cogently argued. One of the largest categories of arrests
in urban centers was narcotics violations-which in most
cases merely meant the revolving-door arrests of junkies
and their subsequent release a few days later. Donfeld
pointed out that if large numbers of addicts received
legal methadone rather than illegal heroin, and were
enrolled in some sort of treatment program through which
the methadone was distributed, narcotics violations
could be expected to decrease dramatically in major
cities, and this alone might bring about diminished
crime reporting by local police departments. Moreover,
if addicts received free narcotics from the government,
their financial motivation for stealing might be diminished,
and this might show up In police reporting. A month
earlier, John Mitchell had objected to the methadone
scheme on the grounds that there would undoubtedly be
enormous leakage of methadone into illegal markets,
and it then would become another illegal drug for the
Justice Department to deal with. Krogh agreed that a
large amount of methadone that was given to addicts
to take home with them over weekends would be resold
illicitly, but he held that such a diversion of methadone
into the illegal market would serve to undercut the
price of heroin and thereby both disrupt the illicit
market and again reduce the financial burden of the
criminal addict. Doubts regarding any large-scale distribution
of this untried narcotic by the government remained,
but Mitchell agreed not to oppose the election-year
plan, if Ehrlichman believed that the methadone program
would dramatically reduce crime statistics.
Elliot Richardson was another
problem. Despite Krogh's fervent arguments, Richardson
prudently refused to accept methadone as a mere election-year
expedient. However, as Ehrlichman controlled access
to the president, he was confident that Richardson's
objections could be watered down and bypassed. According
to the "outlines of the discussion with the President"
kept by Krogh that month, Ehrlichman effectively skirted
the real objections of both Mitchell and Richardson
and only told the president, "Although controversial
on moral, social, and medical grounds, and although
not the answer to heroin addiction, methadone is the
most effective technique now available for reducing
heroin and criminal recidivism...... Nixon was thus
never fully apprised of the depth of dissent among his
highest ranking cabinet officers on the methadone question.
Advised instead that methadone was the only means at
the administration's disposal for reducing crime statistics
by election time, the president tentatively approved
the methadone program.
At one meeting in early June,
with H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and others, Krogh
noted that the president expressed a desire to have
changes in personnel through the federal agencies dealing
with the drug problem. According to the memorandum in
the President's File of that meeting, "he wants
people brought in from outside of the government ...
and he wants a sense of urgency injected throughout
the whole program. The President said that no one's
feelings should be spared ... the President wants the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to be shaken
up; he wants budgets cut and government hacks fired."
This was also the moment Krogh and Ehrlichman were waiting
for to reorganize the government bureaucracies. A "special-action
office," operating directly out of the White House
under the aegis of Krogh, would take over the operations
of various agencies in the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare. Such a move would particularly undermine
NIMH and HEW, which had advocated a scientific rather
than a law-and-order approach to the drug problem. Krogh
advised Ehrlichman that "bureaucratic sluggishness
has made it difficult for NIMH to accept and implement
new ideas ... note the philosophic direction of NIMH
and why it has not helped development." Ehrlichman
in turn told the president, "There is no mechanism
to insure concerted action. Efforts and coordination
of the seven agencies dealing with drugs failed even
at the Domestic Council level." He thus recommended
to the president at the beginning of June that a joint-action
group on drugs be established by executive order and
include members of both his Domestic Council and Henry
Kissinger's National Security Council. This group, according
to the outline of the discussion with the president,
was to have responsibility for the "inter-relations
of law enforcement agencies" and for coordinating
"International considerations to domestic considerations."
Before a heroin crusade could
be properly launched, however, public attention had
to be focused on the drug menace. Krogh thus planned
a scenario which would begin in early June with the
deliberately leaked news of American ambassadors in
various countries being recalled over the drug issue.
It would then reach an exciting climax with President
Nixon's proclaiming to both houses of Congress a national
emergency over the heroin epidemic. And it would finally
be resolved on June 30 by the well-publicized announcement
that Turkey had agreed to an opium ban. According to
the June scenario, heroin crises would be periodically
intensified as the president was proposing new legislation
to Congress. When Krogh asked Haldeman in a memorandum
on June 7, "Should new drug abuse legislation be
introduced (1) to [create a more] unified authority
(2) to add new authority in the area or (3) to add visibility
to the President's program?" Haldeman, always businesslike,
answered that the purpose of proposing new legislation
was (3)-in other words, public relations. The second
stage in the June scenario was to convene an emergency
cabinet meeting. Ambassadors were to be urgently recalled
from Turkey, NATO, Thailand, and France, with someone
leaking to the press that "the president has a
plan" to eradicate opium. Three days before the
meeting, it would further be officially announced that
the ambassadors were on their way home, and that "the
president would propose new initiatives." An arrangement
was made with ABC Television secretly to televise portions
of the cabinet meeting, so it could later be released
to the American public, with the White House reserving
the right to edit the tape for its own benefit. It was
also planned that at the meeting Ingersoll would brief
the cabinet on the dimensions of the epidemic, and the
president would ask Ingersoll, who was proving increasingly
troublesome to the White House group, some embarrassing
but difficult questions, according to the handwritten
scenarios prepared by Krogh and his staff.
The president's declaration
of a national emergency was to be a masterpiece of fear-mongering,
rivaling the rhetoric of Governor Nelson Rockefeller
in New York State, which had provided Nixon's speech
writers with vivid metaphors for public hysteria over
heroin. Nixon's speech would compare "the epidemic"
to a cancer spreading across the youth of the nation.
This cancer would threaten the safety of every citizen,
not only through the possibility of addiction but also
by precipitating a national crime wave. The very nation
would be imperiled by this new threat. The president
would then propose a I sweeping reorganization of government
and supplemental appropriations for the law-enforcement
agencies. After the speech, according to the scenario,
high administration officials would brief members of
the press on the emergency and the president would meet
privately with media executives. Meanwhile, Charles
Colson, a special counsel to the president, was to arrange
major leaks-to Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World
Report-of the spreading heroin crisis.
Finally, at the end of June,
the scenario called for the prime minister of Turkey
be flown to the United States to meet with President
Nixon and jointly announce the opium ban. If all went
well, the scenario planners hoped that the public-and
the news media would accept this as a first victory
in the war against heroin and endorse other elements
in the president's crusade, including the reorganization
of the bureaucratic agencies of the government. The
scenario assumed that congressmen would not be able
to resist the drumfire of publicity about the "drug
menace" or to vote against any element of the president's
crusade without appearing to their constituents to be
soft on drugs. As one of Krogh's assistants later explained
to me, "If we hyped the drug problem into a national
crisis, we knew that Congress would give us anything
we asked for."
The carefully orchestrated
scenario unfolded as planned during the first two weeks
in June, 1971. Surreptitious news stories about the
emerging heroin crisis began surfacing in the nation's
press. Congressmen demanded immediate action. On Monday,
June 14, as scheduled, five American ambassadors were
recalled to Washington and harangued by President Nixon
about the threat of a national drug crisis. On June
13, 1971, with the final draft of President Nixon's
speech declaring a national emergency over the heroin
issue, the White House planners had seemingly succeeded
in manufacturing a crisis to which Congress would respond
with funds and reorganization authority. That night,
however, an unforeseen event preempted their publicity
drive: the New York Times decided to begin publishing
the Pentagon Papers.
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