John Ehrlichman Quotes

• [T]he 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

  War, Lying, Hippie

  25 Copy quote

• Look, we understood we couldn't make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it.

  John Ehrlichman

  Health, White, America

  50 Copy quote

• Well, I think we ought to let him hang there. Let him twist slowly, slowly in the wind.

  John Ehrlichman

  Sarcastic, Thinking, Wind

  Quoted in Wash. Post, 27 July 1973

  18 Copy quote

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