Egil
Krogh, Jr., was born in Chicago in 1939, the son of
a Norwegian immigrant. After majoring in English at
a small Christian Science college in southern Illinois,
dropping out of business school at the University of
Chicago, serving three years as a naval communications
officer in the Pacific, and selling hats in a department
store in Seattle, he finally graduated from the University
of Washington Law School in June, 1968. Upon graduation,
Krogh was offered an apprenticeship in the Seattle offices
of John Ehrlichman, a long-time friend of Krogh's family;
but he never had the opportunity to practice land-use
law, as he had planned. in a few short months "Bud"
Krogh followed Ehrlichman to Washington, where he was
given the impressive-sounding title deputy counsel to
the president, although in reality he was still Ehrlichman's
personal assistant. Although Krogh had little experience
in either government or politics (he had not even actively
supported Nixon's quest for the presidency), Ehrlichman
asked him to oversee the sensitive areas of federal
law-enforcement and internal security matters. Before
he had even turned thirty, Krogh thus found himself
willy-nilly presiding over an unprecedented presidential
law-and-order campaign. It was all a learning period,
and he readily acknowledged his naivete to me in 1975,
during a series of interviews.
He recalled:
I had been given the District
of Columbia liaison responsibility in February,
1969, and I remember in a meeting with the president
he said, "All right, Bud, I'd like you to stop
crime in the District of Columbia," and I said,
"Yes," I would do that. So I called the
mayor, Walter Washington, and asked him to stop
crime, and he paused for a moment and said, "Okay,"
and that was about it.
As the first year of the Nixon
administration progressed, Krogh soon found that "there
wasn't much feel for the kinds of programs that would
work in the area of law enforcement and crime control"
and, like the president, he found to his dismay that
the federal government lacked the wherewithal to diminish
street crime in any substantial way. Now he quickly
realized that his telephone order to Mayor Washington
to "stop crime" revealed a picture of naivete
in the extreme. He also found as he became more aware
of the machinery of government that most of the other
remedies for crime available to the federal government
were equally ineffectual. In his political education
Krogh found that he "didn't have the luxury ...
to conclude that because the problem was so complex
and seemingly intransigent nothing should be done."
After discussing the problem with Ehrlichman, Krogh
learned the prime requisite of "intelligent politics."
Since "the president had campaigned on his desire
to reduce crime nationally," Krogh found out that
Nixon could not now state, "I've discovered that
the federal government has little jurisdiction over
street crime in the cities, towns, and counties; and
therefore it is a matter for the states to handle. Good
luck!" Krogh did what he could to reduce crime-he
pressed for better streetlights in Washington, D.C.,
more police patrols, and other such measures, but they
failed. Krogh was thus faced with his first crisis in
the Nixon administration as he explained it to me:
During the period from
January to December, 1969, the crime rate measured
by the FBI reports indicated that crimes per day
continued to climb dramatically ... and during November
hit an all-time high.... When the president learned
the news, he became extremely upset and concerned.
He called Mr. Ehrlichman and told him this must
stop and that very immediate measures had to be
undertaken to reduce the crime rate [in D.C.] by
those in the District government, or else he would
get a new team.
Ehrlichman immediately called
a meeting of his new organ, the Domestic Council, at
Camp David to redress the situation. It was the first-and,
as it turned out, the only-full meeting of the Domestic
Council. This new White House group, originally conceived
of as a sort of domestic counterpart of the National
Security Council, was quickly converted by Ehrlichman
to a personal instrument of power. He assembled a staff
of young men in their twenties and early thirties with
little or no previous experience in government, such
as Krogh, and had them reduce the flood of ideas and
suggestions from competing sources to a series of option
and decision papers on given issues. By carefully structuring
the pros and cons of the various options, and assessing
the political as well as substantive ramifications of
possible decisions, Ehrlichman eventually established
a direct channel of information to the president which
became impervious to the qualifications and caveats
of scholars, bureaucrats, and even cabinet officials
who had previously contributed to policy. In this initial
meeting, in December, 1969, however, Ehrlichman simply
went around the table and asked various staff assistants
what measures had been taken in the area of crime control.
Some of the staff assistants pointed to the "scare
legislation" that had been proposed by John Mitchell,
and other bits of symbolic politics. Finally, Ehrlichman
turned to Krogh and asked him what actions were pending
that might affect the crime rate. Krogh answered with
brutal candor, "None." The entire council
fell silent. Then, with an air of desperation, Ehrlichman
reiterated the president's orders: "The crime rate
must somehow be brought down."
As soon as he returned to Washington,
Krogh called Graham Watt, the deputy mayor of the District,
and Police Chief Jerry Wilson, and ordered them to prepare
immediately a report on what could be done in the District
in terms of improving the police force and reducing
crime, at least statistically. Even at that point, however,
Krogh realized that though pouring resources into the
District of Columbia on an emergency basis (and changing
statistics-reporting methods) could bring about an appreciable
improvement in at least the crime statistics in the
capital, these measures could not be reasonably expected
to ameliorate crime in the rest of the nation. Despite
the presidential injunction, and the threat to deploy
a new team, there was still no concept of what could
be done to implement a national law-and-order program.
By 1970 all the Domestic Council was able to suggest,
in a crime-control memorandum, was the shifting of the
"burden for responsibility in controlling, crime
to the state and local government which have jurisdiction
over local law enforcement."
Such a strategy had the obvious
advantage of providing a "solution" to the
dilemma of rising street-crime statistics. Since there
were ten times as many local police as federal police,
and the local authorities had immediate jurisdiction
over their local streets, they could more plausibly
be assigned the responsibility for the success or failure
of crime control. The rationale of devolving responsibility
also fit neatly with the conservative view that the
federal government had usurped legitimate functions
of local governments (which presumably ought to be returned),
and it could be supported by such other programs of
the Nixon administration as revenue sharing and block
grants to the states. If this strategy was adopted,
the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration could
be used as an instrument for aiding local police departments-and
gaining credit for the Nixon administration. Elliot
Richardson, then secretary of Health, Education and
Welfare, advocated such an approach. For example, in
the spring of 1971 his general counsel at HEW, Will
Hastings, suggested in a draft that he drew up for a
presidential message on narcotics addiction, "The
federal role ... must be one of leadership, of capacity
building: By providing support ... the federal government
can assist state and local agencies in dealing with
the problem. The local authorities must assume primary
responsibility." The response of the White House
strategists, however, was not favorable to this conservative
strategy of devolving responsibility. An analysis of
the HEW draft by the Domestic Council's staff asked
critically, "Is the President ready politically
to abdicate responsibility ... by implicitly placing
the burden on state and local government?" Ehrlichman
answered that such an abdication would not be politically
acceptable to the president. He explained to Krogh that
although "most of the activities in the field are
local ... conceptually we should not stress that the
federal government was shifting responsibility back
to the states because the administration was clearly
identified with handling the problem.... The President
was out in front on the issue, and ... as a matter of
policy he should stay there." Krogh then realized,
as he later told me, "To publicly disavow responsibility
at the federal level and extend it to the states would
have been perceived as a cop-out-and something that
was directly inconsistent with what [the president]
had campaigned on."
The suggestion of lawfully
using the LEAA in the war against crime also presented
a political problem. According to the legislative formulas
then existing, the vast preponderance of LEAA funds
had to be given in block grants to the states, which
then allocated the money, without any, control from
Washington, to local agencies. The Nixon administration
thus would have little control over which police departments
received funds-and for what purposes they were used
and most of the money could be expected to be filtered
down to the cities controlled by the Democrats (if only
because, at that time, most city governments were Democratic).
In evaluating the uses of LEAA, Domestic Council analysts
noted that "there was profound GOP opposition [to]
the theory of block grants" and that, moreover,
it "makes more difficult the coercing of the states
into reordering their priorities to emphasize street
crime." With the twin objectives of reducing street
crime and "maintaining the image of a massive administration
assault on crime," the Nixon strategists recommended
a change in "LEAA formulas to remit more funds
invested in high crime areas, and thus to focus publicity
on administration efforts. The memorandum concluded
pessimistically that expanded LEAA grants would tend
to induce "a bad reaction from GOP," and give
credit for "more highly visible deterrents at local
levels" to local politicians.
In any case, the issue of shifting
the burden was decisively settled by Nixon himself in
May, 1971, after an earlier meeting among Ehrlichman,
Richardson, Krogh, and others. According to Krogh's
notes of that meeting:
Secretary Richardson recommends
that the thrust of new initiatives be experimental,
thereby shifting the burden of responsibility to
the states. Expectations are [thus] not raised that
the federal government is undertaking a multi-year
responsibility. Can the President afford politically
to abdicate responsibility on this issue?
Ehrlichman then recommended
to the president that "our posture not be worded
in a tone which suggests, 'it's the problem of state
and local government.' " President Nixon endorsed
the option recommended by Ehrlichman, thereby ending
any further consideration of the alternative of portraying
the states as responsible in maintaining law and order.
Confronted with the seemingly
impossible task of bringing about highly visible reductions
in the reported muggings, burglaries, and robberies
across the nation, and having found that all conventional
levers of government could not easily be brought to
bear on this problem, Krogh was compelled to seek out
new and unorthodox tactics for prosecuting the war on
crime. As Ehrlichman's emissary for the District of
Columbia he had met Robert DuPont, a young and articulate
psychiatrist who had been operating with missionary
zeal a drug-treatment center in the District. Early
in 1970, DuPont suggested to Krogh and his staff a "magic-bullet"
scheme for quickly reducing crime statistics across
the nation: since narcotics addicts committed much of
the street crime in America in order to obtain money
to pay for their drug habit, DuPont argued, the federal
government could immediately reduce crime by breaking
the dependence of addicts on illicit suppliers. The
young psychiatrist impressed Krogh with "a statistical
analysis which demonstrated that his client had reduced
crime in the District" (even though it turned out,
as a 1972 study by the National Commission on Marijuana
and Drug Abuse found, that the correlation he presented
wits based on a statistical artifact). The proposition
put forth by Captain Hobson in the 1920s-that crime
was itself a disease caused by narcotics and cured by
breaking the addictive habit-was thus rediscovered in
1970 by Krogh. G. Gordon Liddy, who was then developing
law-enforcement pro-rams for the Treasury Department,
also impressed Krogh with the potential for a massive
federal offensive against narcotics as a means of dealing
with the law-and-order problem. Liddy dramatically described
how Rockefeller had masterfully identified narcotics
with the crime problem in New York State, and periodically
stirred the popular imagination with his highly publicized
crackdowns on addicts. He argued persuasively that the
Nixon administration could achieve the same effect.
Most important, the president himself had shown a keen
interest in the possibilities of a war on drugs. Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, concerned about the reports of heroin
abuse in the ghettos, had persuaded the president that
the State Department should do everything diplomatically
possible to curtail opium production in foreign countries
such as Turkey, and that the president should elevate
the suppression of narcotics to an issue of national
security policy. The State Department, however, concerned
about diplomatic complications, did little to implement
this presidential directive. Moynihan later recalled,
in a telegram to Kissinger:
In August 1969 1 made a
trip abroad with this matter primarily in mind ...
in Paris I met with the American minister ... land]
told him of the Washington decision to make the
international drug traffic a matter of highest priority
in foreign affairs, and this elicited... genuine
puzzlement. The minister knew almost nothing of
the subject and certainly had no inkling that his
government back home was concerned about it.
Krogh himself had some
doubts about the immediate consequences of such a full-scale
attack on narcotics production and distribution. He
wrote in a memorandum to the Domestic Council on July
23, 1970, "If the supply of opiate and other addicting
drugs is curtailed, the price of these drugs would likely
rise, and the demand will continue, for the buyer is
addicted; crime could go up in order to acquire more
money for the more expensive drugs." In other words,
if addicts were really stealing to pay for their habit,
government efforts to reduce the supply of heroin could
result in more, not less, crime. Krogh, however, was
persuaded by his staff that the "crackdown"
would drive most addicts into "treatment programs,"
where they would be effectively taken off the streets.
He thus proposed a double-pronged attack on narcotics:
while the State Department and National Security Council
attempted to diminish the supply of heroin in the world
available to the American market, and the Bureau of
Narcotics and the Customs Bureau attempted to arrest
as many of the smugglers and distributors of heroin
as possible, the White House would also work to expand
the treatment programs so that they could absorb a large
number of addicts. Although John Ehrlichman also had
doubts about the complexities involved in a war on drugs,
especially since it was not an area that was yet researched
by the White House, he was persuaded by Krogh that it
was the only real alternative the White House had to
reduce crime statistics by the 1972 election. The war
on narcotics thus received White House sanction.
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