“I think Ehrlichman was waiting for someone to come and ask him. Baum said he had no reason to believe Ehrlichman was being dishonest and viewed them as “atonement” from a man long after his tumultuous run in the White House ended. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.”Įhrlichman’s comments did not surface until now after Baum remembered them while going back through old notes for the Harper’s story. “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. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “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. “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. drug epidemicĮhrlichman died in 1999, but his five children in questioned the veracity of the account. RELATED: 2016 candidates on the front lines of N.H. The comments come as there has been a marked shift in attitudes toward handling drug use – ranging from the legalization of marijuana in various states to White House candidates focusing heavily on treatment as an answer to New Hampshire’s heroin epidemic while they were campaigning across the state. And Nixon’s derision for minorities in private is well-known from his White House recordings. However, Nixon’s political focus on white voters, the “Silent Majority,” is well-known. It’s a stark departure from Nixon’s public explanation for his first piece of legislation in the war on drugs, delivered in message to Congress in July 1969, which framed it as a response to an increase in heroin addiction and the rising use of marijuana and hallucinogens by students. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”Įhrlichman’s comment is the first time the war on drugs has been plainly characterized as a political assault designed to help Nixon win, and keep, the White House. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “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. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday. One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper’s Magazine.
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