"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 black, 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."- John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon's Chief Domestic Advisor
djrogers|5 years ago
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
-- Ehrlichman died in 1999, but his five children in questioned the veracity of the account.
“We never saw or heard anything from our dad, John Ehrlichman, that was derogatory about any person of color,” wrote Peter Ehrlichman, Tom Ehrlichman, Jan Ehrlichman, Michael Ehrlichman and Jody E. Pineda in a statement provided to CNN.
“The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.” --
Just pointing out that your quote is an alleged quote, and may or may not be accurate.
dontbeevil1992|5 years ago
As far as the pushback from the family, I would just say that it wouldn't be the first time that someone is different at work than with his family. The worst people in history still sometimes had families and pets who they treated much better than minorities and political enemies.
Furthermore, Ehrlichman may not have been racist enough to spout it unprompted, the way Nixon is recorded as being. But he would not be the first person on Capitol Hill to be craven enough to go along with racism when it helps them attain or maintain power.
renewiltord|5 years ago
Edda Goering on her father, the famous Hermann Goering:
> "My only memories of him are such loving ones. I cannot see him any other way."
> "The things that happened to the Jews were horrible, but quite separate from my father."
We, of course, are well-informed and know that "the things that happened to the Jews" are not, in fact, "quite separate from her father". I suspect that children of people are not reputable character references.
cscurmudgeon|5 years ago
Many of them are outside of the US sphere of influence.
https://drugabuse.com/blog/the-20-countries-with-the-harshes...
dontbeevil1992|5 years ago
First, how do the actions of other countries have bearing on what is true about the history of our country?
Second, I don't know the details, but seems to me that powerful people in other countries could, just like the U.S., be reaping political and financial benefits from criminalizing drugs.
floor2|5 years ago
A single person claims to have heard this statement and waited until after Mr. Ehrlichman's death, decades later, to publish the quote.
tl;dr - You're spreading misinformation because it confirms your biases
res0nat0r|5 years ago