Friday, June 15, 2018
This is worse than awful...............
……….An insider's take on Richard Nixon's 1971 "War on Drugs":
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
-full post is here. Read the whole thing
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Thanks for sharing Mr. Layman. Our current AG, Lil' Jeff Sessions didn't get the memo. E.
ReplyDeleteI am very suspicious of this story. John Erhlichman carried a sizable amount of animosity against Nixon for not pardoning him. Richard Nixon was, if anything, rather liberal on civil rights matters. He pushed affirmative action, advocated an innovative "black capitalism" program to increase black-owned businesses, and desegregated schools. All of those actions go against the Erhlichman narrative.
ReplyDeleteMichael
Hmmmm. E.
ReplyDeleteMichael,
ReplyDeleteNot sure how we find out the truth here. Nixon was a complicated man. The comment section in Mark Perry's original post offers additional insights but not much clarity. While I certainly found Erhlichman's narrative believable based on what I remember thinking as a twenty-something, you raise an interesting motivation for him to cast unfair stones. Need to do some more digging. Thanks for reminding me that all is not always as it seems. S