DRUG WARRIORS - Government Officials

Egil 'Bud' Krogh, Jr.

Tell me about your background, and how you were swept up into the Nixon
campaign.

I was a young lawyer, right out of law school, and had joined John
Ehrlichman's law firm. John Ehrlichman had been our family friend of many
years' standing, and right after the election in 1968, he came back to
Seattle. I remember vividly his coming to my office and sitting down across
from me across my desk. He put his feet up, and he said, "Do you like the
work?" And I said, "I love the work, you know, here I am, in your law firm
where I always wanted to work." And he said, "Would you consider leaving
and joining me on the president's staff?" And I thought it over for a
couple of seconds and said, "Yes, I'd consider that." . . . He came in on a
Tuesday. By Friday, I was in the transition headquarters in the Hotel
Pierre in New York City.

Tell me about Nixon's campaign. Some of the things you worked on were
issues in this campaign.

I was not directly involved in the campaign myself, but obviously, as soon
as the transition headquarters were up and running, our job was to
translate the campaign promises that the president had made into policies
and programs that we would initiate as soon as we got to Washington. One of
his major campaign themes was to restore respect for the law. He had
singled out Washington, D.C., as the crime capital of the country. . . .

D.C. was your problem, and how was it your problem? How were you told this
was your job?

. . . We were dealing with another issue with respect to how we would
respond to major antiwar demonstrations. The issue of crime in the District
came up. The president said, "Bud, now get after that. I want you to cut
the crime in the District." I had my yellow pad and I wrote down on it,
"cut crime in the District." Obviously, that's consistent with what he had
campaigned on, so I knew that was my assignment. I remember going back to
my office--this is sort of embarrassing to tell--but picked up the phone
and called the mayor, Walter Washington, a wonderful man. We became close
friends. And I said, "Mr. Mayor, my name is Bud Krogh, I've just come from
a meeting with the president, and he'd like you to cut the crime in the
District. Would you please sort of get after that, and call me back when
the crime stops?" There was a decided pause after that, and he said, yes,
he would, he would certainly look into that and get back to me, and I
figured that's it. You know, all you do is you call up from the White
House, talk to the mayor, say let's get cracking on the crime, and you'll
get a positive response.

I forget what the exact number of FBI Index crimes were being committed
each day, but the number strikes me as 169. We went through the next few
months developing some legislation in the District of Columbia, pre-trial
detention, expanding the court system, doing a lot of the things that we
had campaigned on and felt had to be done. But after about six or seven
months, the index had moved up to about 202 crimes per day, and in
anybody's judgment, that's not progress.

So, based upon that lack of progress, we felt that we had to get more
directly involved in assisting the District of Columbia, its police
department, its city council, and the mayor, with funds, and other kinds of
support--helping them with federal agencies that had developed certain
programs we thought might work. We really looked after this now as
something where the District was, in a way, almost a laboratory for how we
might be able to develop a national crime program or anti-crime program. So
that's the way things got started. . . .

So it's interesting about D.C. Not only is it where the federal government
can have some effect . . . that was really the lab . . .

The District of Columbia, I think, was viewed by many of us as our home. .
. . And it was also a place that was the capital city. This was the home
for people in foreign embassies and consulates, and it's a place where many
people come each year to visit. We felt, I think, a special obligation to
see if we could really improve it, by reducing crime in the District of
Columbia. And we felt that programs that could work in the District could
then be used in other cities, which we would then offer to other cities. .
. . So we did look at it, in a sense, as a laboratory--a place where we
could try things that we felt would have a positive effect, and then make
that available to the rest of the country.

How did you first make the connection between crime and drug use in the
District?

One of the staff people that I worked most closely with on the drug issue
right from the beginning was Jeffrey Donfeld. He had been working on this
almost exclusively from the time he started on the White House staff, and
he had access to this study that Dr. DuPont had prepared on the
relationship between heroin addiction and crime. It was basically a study
of inmates in the D.C. jail, and he found a very direct correlation between
those who had been in prison and drug addiction. With that information we
felt that, well, maybe our focus . . . should be expanded to include, what
can we do to treat that population that is addicted? If we can provide
treatment modalities for those people--whatever modality might work for
them--maybe that would enable us to achieve some reduction in the crime
problem, as well. So that study was made available to me by Jeff, I
believe, sometime in late 1969.

The idea of drugs and crime together was sort of mushy at that time. Was it
surprising to see it laid out that way?

There had been sort of an intuitive understanding that there was a
relationship between the two. But that study in the D.C. jail really
focused and crystallized thought that there is a very dramatic correlation
between addiction--addition to heroin--and crimes that were committed to be
able to support heroin habits. . . . So that was really the solid basis on
which we felt we could start designing a program that would really go after
the heroin addiction issue.

A couple of things were happening at this time. You were attacking the drug
problem from a number of angles. Let's talk about Operation Intercept. What
was the idea behind that?

I'm not altogether certain what the fundamental idea behind Operation
Intercept was, other than to make it clear that the United States was going
to be very serious about trying to interdict the flow of narcotics into the
United States. We felt that a program focused on the Mexican-United States
border would draw attention to that clear policy position. The effect of
Operation Intercept, in addition to tying up traffic, to Tijuana, to Mexico
City, probably was to give some of us who were working in this field a
clearer understanding of the importance of sovereignty to our neighboring
countries. I remember being in a meeting in Mexico City and being given a
very powerful lecture by the foreign minister on the importance of working
with Mexico, of not trying to intimidate them into cooperation. That's a
lesson that was critical for us to learn. In terms of actually interdicting
substances flowing into the United States, I don't think that Operation
Intercept would be looked upon as our finest hour. . . .

There were all these other international areas. At the same time ,you were
being told to go to Turkey and France and the Golden Triangle. Can you tell
me a little bit about . . . what you were sent off to do?

In addition to finding ways to attack the crime problem on the streets in
the United States, when we had the linkage between crime and drugs, it
opened our thought to the need to see this on a global scale. And to not
just try to provide more police in the local community, but how can we to
try to detect the problems with drugs--what can we do to try to stop the
flow of drugs?

That expanded our thought to where these drugs are coming from. What's the
source of this? A number of studies that the Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs had done-- Customs had also participated--pointed out that
we had a source in Turkey. We had a source in Southeast Asia. There were
sources in Mexico. There were places in France where they would take the
morphine base that came out of Turkey, and by the addition of acidic
anhydride would convert it into heroin, and then move the heroin into the
United States through many different routes; directly from France; from
France to South America; coming up in a contrabandista system from South
America to the United States.

It was important, I think, for us to understand the relationships between
the source countries, the intermediary countries, and how it flowed into
the United States to be able to design a policy to be able to respond to
that. So in 1969 and 1970, I took trips to France, Turkey, India, Burma,
Thailand, and Vietnam to try to understand better from the perspective of
those people who were working in those countries how these patterns were
developing--patterns of moving narcotics to the United States.

And that also was the background for our attempting to get the Turkish
government to agree to really outlaw the growing of poppy in Turkey. I
forget exactly what the nature of the transaction was. We gave them a
destroyer and something else, and they agreed to stop the production of
poppy for two or three years. But the problem is that we were basically
dealing with an enormous demand in the United States. You might squeeze
these sources of supply in one part of the world, but it's going to crop
out someplace else. So what we felt we needed to do was to try to develop a
global strategy. That was behind, I think, the president's decisions to
work directly with our ambassadors in these countries where poppy was being
grown or where it was being converted into heroin, and to try to enlist the
support of those countries. . . .

It's interesting how big the drug business was when you stepped into that.

When I first started working on the drug issue, I don't think I had a
concept of how large the drug business really was, and even today I
wouldn't know how to quantify it for those years. But it became apparent
that there was an enormous amount of criminal activity that was related to
the drug business, not just that by addicts who had to commit
crimes--burglary, armed robbery--to get the money to buy the drugs to
support their habits. But there was a lot of money circulating for those
who were involved in the smuggling operations and distribution systems--an
enormous amount of money. It would be very hard for me to put a number on
it. I've heard numbers like $100, $200 billion a year, how it's one of the
largest industries in the United States. I don't know whether it was of
that scope or size back in 1969 or 1970 or 1971. But we came to the
conclusion that it was an enormous financial drain as well as a huge social
problem.

At that point, was it mostly heroin that seemed to be the problem, or also
marijuana?

In 1969 and 1970, the real focus was on heroin. We felt that that's where
we had to put the resources of US government. That's where we felt there
were the greatest social pathologies that we were trying to address. There
was some concern on the part of some people about marijuana use. I had just
come out of school and a lot of my friends participated--they inhaled--and
it was just not viewed by those of us on the staff as really the critical
problem that we should be addressing. The American people had elected the
president to come in and try to attack the most severe problems. Heroin was
the one that had created a lot of the crime problem that we were trying to
solve. At that time, I don't think that cocaine was even on anybody's radar
as something we needed to deal with-- neither crack nor any kind of
cocaine. So in those first years, heroin was really the focus of our
attention.

Heroin seemed like a problem you could almost solve. . . .

When we saw the scope of the heroin and problem and the number of addicts
that were in the country, we felt that if we could bring enough treatment
to bear on that problem, we would be able to accomplish the policy goal.
That was clearly articulated most eloquently by Dr. Jaffe--that no addict
would be able to state that he had to commit a crime because treatment was
unavailable. Our job was to make treatment available. In terms of the
modality of treatment, that would depend really upon what the need of the
addict was.

Our purpose was to try to find a way to move those modalities out into the
country in such a way that, if an addict wanted to go into treatment, it
would be there for him. And that became sort of the bedrock drive and
policy that we followed from, I believe, early in 1971 through 1972. We
felt we could get our hands around the heroin problem if we could just make
that kind of treatment available to everyone that needed it. . . .

The focus of the narcotics treatment program in the District of Columbia
was to build upon the study that DuPont had done in the D.C. jail. It was
to be able to bring to bear in the District of Columbia, or put into place
in the District of Columbia, the kinds of treatment modalities that we
thought would work. At that time, that was primarily methadone maintenance,
methadone detox. And we set up a number of clinics around the city. . . .
We found it was amazing, because in three or four months, the results were
dramatic. We found that there was an appreciable decline in the Index
crimes that were related to drug addiction. Now, with that kind of
data--and this was in May of 1970--we felt that we had something solid on
which we could then design a national program. . . .

Was there opposition to the idea of methadone treatment?

We recognized that there was quite a bit of opposition to the kind of
program that we had in the District of Columbia, the methadone maintenance
program. There was opposition particularly within the sort of the
established treatment organizations in the federal government--the National
Institute of Mental Health that was run by Dr. Bertram Brown. He was a very
fine man, but just basically disagreed with the underlying theory behind
methadone maintenance, with the government being involved in providing an
alternative synthetic opiate to an addict. He was more oriented towards the
live-in community type of treatment, and was much more cautious in how the
government ought to proceed. Dr. Brown had persuaded Secretary Elliott
Richardson that the program like we were developing in the White House
really ought not to be supported. We recognized that. . . .

Let's talk about the special problem of Vietnam.

The drug problem in Vietnam came first to my mind through Congressmen
Steele and Murphy. Congressmen Steele and Murphy had gone over there, had
done a study, came back and said this is a huge problem. And we had been
told by people in the defense department that the size of the drug problem
. . . was maybe a hundred addicts in the US military. And when I heard this
number, I realized that there's something fundamentally flawed about this.
How can that be? And it was explained, well, that's how many we had in
prison that we've managed to convict for heroin use. I realize that that
doesn't give you any sense of the scope of that population, of the heroin
population.

So when I reported this to the president, he basically said, go to Vietnam,
and to let General Abrams know that I'm sending you over there to find out
the scope of the problem. And I remember going into one firebase, got out
of the chopper, and you could hear some random firing off in the distance.
I told the colonel why I was there, and he'd gotten a radio message that
there were White House guys coming out to check on drug issues, and he
said, "Well, what do you want to do?" I said, "Well, let me wander around."

So I wandered out behind one of these tanks, and there were four guys
hunkering down there. They're smoking a substance that was very aromatic,
and they had their peace symbols and their headbands. I said to one of
them, "I'm here from the White House, and I've been asked to find out about
the scope of the drug problem." And one guy looked on, took a big toke out
of his cigarette, and then he said, "Well, I'm from Mars." I said, "Okay,
I'm just interested in knowing, are drugs available?" He said, "Oh, man,
what do you want?" And proceeded to tell me where I could go, not too far
away from their base, where I could get very good marijuana, where the
heroin was available. I found out that we weren't dealing with a problem.
We were dealing with a condition. This was a fact of life in Vietnam.

And I so reported that to the president when I came back. I said, "It's not
a problem, it's a condition. And what we need to do is find ways to be able
to diagnose people who have this condition before they leave the country,
so that we can get them treatment before they enter the United States
again." A program in Vietnam was set up very quickly. The president had to
get the attention of the defense department, and the joint chiefs. I
remember coming back from that trip and telling him what I'd seen. And he
said, "Now I want you to set up a breakfast. Bring in Mel Laird," who was
then the secretary of defense, "and bring in the service secretaries and
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and you tell them what you've seen."

That was on a Thursday morning, and we, set up the breakfast in the West
dining room. They all came out to the U-shaped table, and the president sat
in the middle of the table, with Mel Laird next to him, and with the others
in descending rank around there. I was over in a chair, and he said, "Mel,
how many addicts do we have in the military?" And he said, " A hundred,
sir," which was the information that he had gotten from his chief of the
narcotics control program. And he said, "Well, I want you to listen to
Bud's briefing." I . . . explained what I'd seen, and the scope of it. The
president said, "We have to go after this, and we have to go after it now."
. . .

That was one of the major shifts, too, in how the military would respond to
drug use. In the past, it was a fairly common understanding that if a
person was detected, it was a major criminal offense under the Uniform Code
of Military Justice, and would potentially lead to a court martial. We felt
that there had to be a shift in that approach, so that people could
voluntarily come into treatment and not risk a court martial or being
imprisoned. Then we could respond to the problem intelligently. That was a
critical part of getting a broader acceptance, not just from the officers
in charge, but also those who we were trying to reach. We felt that they
needed to have some comfort, that if they were going to be engaging or
participating in some detection and treatment program, that they would not
be unduly penalized. And that was a very important change.

It seems like what was happening in the District and Vietnam were roughly
parallel. . . .

. . . In our Vietnam and D.C. programs, as well as what we were trying to
do through the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, was to
shift the primary focus of federal drug policy--if not the exclusive
focus--from a law enforcement model to one that included a much broader and
expanded effort to treat, rehabilitate, educate and research the demand
side. We wanted to know why were people involved in it, and how we could
help them once they were involved in drugs. It was adding health to what
had been just crime reduction as one of the principal objectives. It was a
gradual shift. It didn't happen overnight. No one just came up and said,
"Eureka, now we have to work and expand it this way." It just evolved, I
think, because of the intelligent response to the problems that we saw.

On June 17, 1971, with the president and Dr. Jaffe present, we were able to
present to the country a program that really had greatly expanded the
treatment, rehabilitation, research, and education side of this. It doesn't
mean that we stopped doing the other work, because there was still a lot of
money that was flowing into the law enforcement programs. But this added
another dimension that had not been there before, and this was quite new.
Prior to our administration, under the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics,
federal effort was. . . really primarily involved in the law enforcement
side of it. This fundamentally changed it, and was responsible for a great
deal of the success that we were able to achieve during that four-year
period. And I should say that we had four years, maybe three-and-a-half
years. The way a presidential administration works is that you've
identified a problem, you've developed the programs and policies, you've
set up the budgets, and then you've got to get some results on which a
candidate can run. . . .

When we first came into office in 1969, we did not have a clear
understanding of the relationship between drugs and crime. This was an
evolutionary learning experience. It took us about a year and a half to
really understand it, and to have the data that supported the linkage. And
we kept the president informed all the way through. "Here's what was going
on." . . . He was learning all the time about what was effective, and then
was able to support us as we moved to the next stage. . . . We were
learning the first year. We made mistakes.

We had one really tragic circumstance in the District of Columbia. We were
pushing so hard to get methadone out into these clinics. One of the
methodologies for administering methadone was to put it in Tang, and then
we were allowing addicts to take it home. I remember coming to work one
morning and being told that one of those in a treatment program that we had
funded had left the Tang with the methadone in the glass in her
refrigerator. Her daughter drank it and had an immediate reaction to it.
She almost died. It was one of those things that maybe we didn't think it
through clearly enough. I mean, what's going on here? Well, it was the
method of ingestion. And we then had to find some way to make the methadone
able to be taken either in a completely protected environment where
children didn't have access to it, or with a tablet that was so large or
kind of a bottle that could not be accessed . . . by young people. That's
the kind of thing you take personally--did we screw that up? And then,
immediately, how do we respond to it? So I wouldn't say that the
educational period, the learning curve, was free of mistakes, because we
made a lot of them.

How did you come to see the drug problem as a public health issue?

Some of us came to see the drug issue more in terms of public health than
just a law enforcement matter. . . . We didn't want to somehow be labeling
those who had an addiction problem as bad people, or as people that had
moral problems or ethical problems. When you're addicted to heroin, you
have enough to deal with just with the addictive situation. For the
government to somehow come out and from a position of some high moral
position--which is questionable, for any government to take that
position--just simply wouldn't be responsive to what we were trying to do.
And Mr. Nixon, never, to my knowledge, ever sort of viewed what we were
doing in the drug area as really something where we were imposing some kind
of a moral judgement on people. . . .

I remember sitting next to him in a helicopter when we were leaving New
York and looking down and he said, "You know, when people think about
drugs, they're just disgusted by it. They just want to lock them up, and
throw away the key. But it's more complex than that." He knew what we had
been doing in these treatment programs. I never heard him say that anybody
was a bad person because they got caught up in an addiction situation. He
had great sympathy for people, and also some disgust for what it led to.
But he never put it on a basis that we somehow were going to bring any
moral judgements to bear. . . .

What happened on June 14?

The period from, say, mid-June to June 17--June 14 through June 17--was
really D-day, in terms of the narcotics programs. This is where everything
was brought together in one place and launched. On the foreign side, we had
traveled all over the world. I'd been to Thailand, Burma, Turkey, and
France. We wanted to bring back to Washington the ambassadors, and with the
secretary of state and the president, Dr. Kissinger, and the National
Security Council staff, explain to them that their assignment as
ambassadors was to help us stop the flow of drugs into the United States as
a matter of US foreign policy. While it was important to get along with
their host countries, this was an issue that we wanted them to be guided by
what was coming out of Washington, because we wanted them to really help us
interdict the flow of drugs from those countries. . . .

Now, that preceded by three days or four days the June 17 White House press
briefing where Dr. Jaffe was presented to the country, and the overall
program was then presented to the nation. We had the Special Action Office
for Drug Abuse Prevention that was working on the demand side--treatment,
rehabilitation, research, education. Then we had the Cabinet Committee for
International Narcotics Control, chaired by Secretary of State William
Rogers. Their focus was, how do we get these countries to help us interdict
the flow of narcotics into the United States? . . .

Were there conflicts among the various agencies assigned to addressing the
drug problem?

One of the . . . major organizational problems that we had to deal
with--and I don't think we ever cured it--was the relationship between the
Department of Justice and the Treasury Department. . . . Treasury never
really liked the fact that it had lost the Bureau of Narcotics. It retained
substantial jurisdiction on certain matters on the drug issue with the
Customs Bureau, which Miles Ambrose was appointed to direct. But there was
sort of an on-going competition between the Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs and the Bureau of Customs. I remember having to mediate one
particular dispute where there was an altercation at one of border points.
A Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs agent wanted to have a mule go
through the border, and the Customs agent wanted to stop him at the border
and they both drew guns. And I remember telling them, I said, "You know,
gentlemen, the president had declared war on drugs, but shooting each other
isn't part of it." I was just trying to have them see that we have to work
together. . . .

We finally decided that the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs would
be the principal law enforcement agency. They would have agents abroad, and
so would Customs. Customs would be able to have agents in our embassies and
they would share information. Then the two of them would help make the
determination of what to do with narcotics that were flowing into the
United States, whether it ought to be interdicted at the border or whether
it should go through the border, where we would have a chance to apprehend
those that were part of the planning of that smuggling operation. So we
basically worked it out so that the agents in the embassies would be the
ones with the assignment to work together. And I was traveling enough at
the time and talked with both Customs and BNDD agents to see that they did
work extremely well together.

So often a lot of the conflict is at a higher political level, rather than
at the level of the agents who really do acknowledge the need to work
together, and do so very effectively. Sometimes the problem is ego
conflicts going on in Washington, rather than substantive differences
between people who are engaged in trying to do something together. . . .
There were also some basic philosophical differences between how the Bureau
of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs saw its law enforcement mission and how
the Bureau of Customs saw its mission.

BNDD was attempting to figure out what the major syndicates were--the large
systems of moving narcotics into this country. They were concerned about
stopping it, obviously, but they were trying to attack these criminal
syndicates at higher and higher levels. And they put money on the street in
sometimes in order to see who was involved in drug distribution networks to
try to figure out how they could crack that.

Customs was, I think, much more oriented towards, "If we got them coming
into this country, we nailed them there. We interdicted at the border. We
arrest them and lock them up." So you had two different approaches. Part of
our job was to figure out how to reconcile those two. We needed to work out
some guidelines, so that we would know what type of intelligence would be
useful for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to accomplish their
mission, and what kind of intelligence would be useful and appropriate for
Customs to get so that they could accomplish their mission. It was complex
trying to figure out who would be doing what. I'm not sure we ever
completely worked that out when we had BNDD and Customs vying with each
other. The effort was eventually to bring them all together in the Drug
Enforcement Administration. . . .

Over time, we were persuaded that the federal government needed to expand
its law enforcement mission to include some activity at the street level.
And that led to the creation of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement,
where the effort was to try to get federal support into the task forces
that were working at the street level--not just to be trying to penetrate
the kingpins at the top level of these criminal organizations. . . . We'd
already put into place the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention,
and the Cabinet Committee for International Narcotics Control. This was an
effort to reach down to the street level and try to help local law
enforcement there.

What was the idea of the creation of the DEA?

Towards the end of Nixon's first term, there was some recognition that we
hadn't designed the optimum organization to administer the law enforcement
programs in the drug area. We had the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs. We had the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement. We still had
Customs with their authorities at the border. There was an intelligence
organization operating in the Department of Justice. There were, you might
say, a lot of suburbs with no downtown. What people needed to do over the
next year or two was to find some way to bring those together into one
organization. A little bit like what we did with the treatment program, but
the treatment program was special action. It was only going to be in
existence for three years and then go out of business. In the law
enforcement arena, the idea was to bring them all together in to one
permanent agency. I understand that that's what eventually led to the Drug
Enforcement Administration. . . .

What happened when you came back from inspecting the programs that had been
set up to treat soldiers in Vietnam?

After we had had our inspection trip in Vietnam, Jerry and I talked through
what we were going to tell the president. It was quite apparent from the
programs that we had set up in both Long Binh and Cam Rahn Bay that we were
not getting the percentages of soldiers that were addicted to heroin that
had been predicted or had been identified by Congressmen Steele and
Congressman Murphy earlier on. It was a much lower percentage. Now, maybe
some people were able to beat the system when they went through it. But we
were gratified to see that it was a lower percentage than the fifteen
percent that they had estimated of the entire in-country population being
addicted to heroin.

So we were able to present that to the president, and let him know that,
while we still had a condition, it wasn't as severe a condition as we
originally thought. The very fact that we had systems in place to detect
people acted as a sort of interim effect. It would get people to stop using
before they were leaving country and hopefully, then, their habits would
not lead them to commit crimes back in the United States. That was our
fear--if we didn't detect and offer some treatment, people that had picked
up an addiction in Vietnam would return to the United States, and be
compelled to commit crimes to be able to maintain those habits.
Fortunately, that fear was not well founded. It was a much lesser problem,
and a number of studies that had been done subsequently that proved that out.

Soon after this, the Pentagon Papers were released. What effect did that have?

(Laughter) This was the end of my life in many ways. Right after the
meeting that we had in San Clemente with the president, I was given a file
by John Erlichman. The file contained the information about the release of
the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. I was ordered by John Erlichman
to go get a copy of "Six Crises," which was the president's first book. And
the president said, "Tell Bud to read the chapter on Alger Hiss,' because
he sees a relationship between Alger Hiss and Daniel Elsberg and his
decision to release the Pentagon Papers. The president wants him set up an
office in the White House to examine all the ramifications with respect to
the release of these top-secret documents--why were they released? Who was
involved in it? That was the assignment that I had for the next five or six
weeks. That, incidentally, was going on concurrently with setting up the
Cabinet Committee for International Narcotics Control and doing a number of
things in the drug program. And I have regretted, and will regret to my
dying day that we did not use better judgment in how that program was set
up in 1971. . . .

What was that set up to do? . . .

In late July and August of 1971, we established the Cabinet Committee for
International Narcotics Control. The effort here was to bring together into
one cabinet committee all the departments, as well as the White House
offices that were responsible for setting foreign policy in the field of
narcotics control. For example, we have the Department of Agriculture
there, because we were dealing with poppy, and were there alternative crops
that we might make available or support the Turkish government in making
available to those who had grown poppy in the past, like sugar beets? So
Agriculture had a role to play in that, as well as in maybe trying to
attack the growing of poppy in various parts of the world. The Department
of Treasury included Customs. The Department of Justice, the Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and the Department of State, which was
responsible for foreign policy all over the world. In addition, we had
staff members from Henry Kissinger's staff, the National Security Council
staff, and I was designated to be the executive director of that cabinet
committee.

So while I was working directly with John Erlichman and the president, he
had Henry Kissinger's staff, Secretary of State Bill Rogers' staff. We had
everybody there that was responsible for this. The cabinet committee worked
very well in setting policy, and working with the embassies. There was no
conflict because we were all together, trying to work out common problems.
It didn't stay in effect for very long, but it was something that was the
right organizational response to what we were dealing with at that time. . . .

What did you list as your success?

When it comes to evaluating how well you're doing, it's not just the
operational indices. You really have to look at substantive results. Let me
try to distinguish the two. If you're in a law enforcement organization,
the operational indices are that we've seized more narcotics. We've
arrested more people. We've convicted more people. We have a larger
population of people [in jail] that were involved in drug crimes than
before. Those are operational indices. But it doesn't really go ask, are
there less narcotics available? Is there really less crime because of that?

And so, you, you really can't just be beguiled by saying, "We put more
money out there. We made more arrests." Those are important things to
understand, but the real thing is, are we getting a better result? Are
there fewer narcotics available? Is the price higher? Are we having more
people that we can treat that are no longer engaged in criminal activity?
Those are the substantive results that you're trying to get.

From May of 1970, when we got the initial response to the drug programs in
the District of Columbia, we could see a reduction in the crimes committed
attributable to drug problems. That's what we really wanted to see. And in
1972, we were able to see that in a number of cities where they had been an
actual reduction--not just a decrease--in the rate of increase. . . . The
trend lines were very promising in 1972. We felt that if we could continue
that kind of pressure over the next few years, we could maybe effectively
have solved the heroin problem. That's not to say that there would not have
been people using heroin; but in terms of its most serious effect, in terms
of its relationship to crime, and the basic policy being, "No addict would
be able to say that he had to commit a crime because he couldn't get
treatment." That's what we wanted to be able to demonstrate. Other people
came in to work on these issues after some of us left, and they changed the
policy. That was certainly their prerogative to do so. I still feel there
was a lot that we did that was correct and should have been continued.

What do you think we should do to combat the drug problem today?

I frankly, don't know enough about the facts on the ground are. Our program
was designed to respond to the facts on the ground as we saw them. Now
these are shifting. We have different drugs being used today. Cocaine
wasn't even on the scope back in 1969 and 1971. It's a major issue today. I
don't know if there is a drug like methadone that you could use with heroin
that would give you the same effect with cocaine. There may be things under
development. It's a different set of circumstances. As a matter of policy,
my sense is that I would probably opt for programs that would really try to
help the treatment side--rehabilitation, education, the demand side. That's
where primary focus ought to be. . . .

What is your response to the criticism that some of the law enforcement
policies developed during the Nixon era were too harsh, or violated
individuals' civil rights?

Some programs that were initiated, in retrospect, got too close to
breaching the wall of what is not acceptable under the Fourth Amendment. I
know the "no-knock" authority was one that had been recommended as a way to
be able to get in and be able to stop the destruction of evidence before it
got flushed or something like that. Those kinds of programs can lead to
abuses, and they have.

. . . I know that there has been some suggestion that the Nixon
administration was supporting programs that would lead to a breakdown in
civil liberties, and that we were trying to expand federal power into areas
that had historically been the domain of state and local law
enforcement--the exercise of police power by the states. But there were
also areas where we just simply didn't do that. . . . There was an effort
to look at it issue by issue, where ought the federal government to be
involved and where ought it not to be involved. But there was no overall
policy effort to get the federal government into state and local law
enforcement and more directly impacting the lives of individual citizens.

In my own case, dealing with the Pentagon Papers investigation, one of the
things was so serious. We did not--and I did not--fully understand what the
Fourth Amendment required of me in terms of authorizing a . . .
surreptitious entry--using a sort of intelligence term, as opposed to
burglary, which it really was. We felt that national security justified
what was done. But in the cold light of day, afterwards, we realized that
that was not the case. Without a warrant, it's a crime, and government can
not go there. And, unfortunately, we were not sensitive to that at the
time, and paid a price for it. . . .

The overall effort was to use every legitimate possible means at our to try
to attack this problem and the drug problem. Sometimes we moved into
domains where we were not going to be effective. The effort behind the
Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement was to try to get federal presence on
the street. Now, this may not have been the wisest policy choice, but we
felt at the time we could leave no stone unturned, and that we were going
to move into that area. There was a tremendous amount of zeal behind what
we were doing, too. The people that worked on these programs came to work
each day saying, "What can we do today?" It was a very exciting atmosphere.
It was a place where I look back with a fierce affection of what we were
able to do that I thought was effective. I regret the mistakes that we
made, but we really tried our hardest.

Tell me about Elvis's visit to the White House.

It was December 21, 1970. I got a call from Dwight Chapin, who was one of
my best friends on the White House staff. And he said, "The King is here."
And I said, "King who?" I looked at the President's schedule and said,
"There aren't any kings on the president's schedule." He said, "No, not
just any two-bit king, the real king. The King of Rock--Elvis. He's right
here in Washington and he wants to see the president." And I thought that
was just an elaborate practical joke. . . . We did those things in those
days. I felt that this is just a joke, that this wasn't true. But he sent
over a letter that he said had been written by Elvis Presley, asking to
meet with the president to help him with the drug problem. . . .

In about an hour, through the OMB security office of the Oval Executive
Office building I get a call saying that "Elvis Presley is here with his
two bodyguards." And they came down the hall to my office and he really was
Elvis Presley, dressed in a purple jumpsuit and a white shirt open to the
navel with a big gold chain and thick-rimmed sunglasses. And he came in and
I must say, I was very impressed with him. I had been a big fan of his
during the 1950s. He proceeded to tell me about how much he felt for his
country. He wanted to help the country, to do what he could. He felt he had
an obligation because he'd been given so much. He talked about serving in
the military, and felt that that was his duty.

And I thought, "Well, you know, this guy seems to be saying the things that
that Richard Nixon would like to hear, so let's see if we can't set up a
meeting." So I wrote a memo to the president suggesting some talking points
and, and Dwight Chapin wrote a memo to then-Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, to
get approval for this meeting. And it came back approved. . . .

So I called back over to their hotel and said, "The meeting's on. Come on
over." So he showed up about twelve o'clock. I got a call from the Secret
Service telling me we had a little problem, because Elvis had brought a gun
in to give the president, a nice Colt automatic with bullets in the display
case. I had to go over and explain to them that "No guns in the Oval
Office" was standard policy around here. I hoped he'd understand. . . . And
he seemed to take that in good grace.

But anyway, we walked in a half an hour later into the Oval Office and the
president got up. It was a little bit awkward at first, because I'm not
sure that Elvis really believed that he was there. They had a really weird
discussion about a lot of things that had nothing to do with the talking
points I had written. Elvis was telling the president how difficult it was
to play in Las Vegas. The president said, "I understand, Las Vegas is a
tough town." And then Elvis said, "And you know, the Beatles came over here
and made a lot of money and said some un-American things." And the
president looked at me, like, "Well, what's this about the Beatles?"

And then the real reason for the trip finally came out as Elvis said, "Mr.
President, can you get me a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs?" And the president looked and he said, "Bud, can we get
him a badge?" And I said, "Well, Mr. President, if you want to get him a
badge, we can do that." He said, "Well, get him a badge."

Well, Elvis was so happy about this, he steps around the side of the desk
and he goes over and he grabs him. And one of my abiding memories while
thinking, "This is probably the last thing I'll ever do in the Oval
Office," was Elvis Presley hugging Richard Nixon, who's sort of standing
there looking up, thinking, "Oh, my God!" You know? (Laughter) And they
parted. And then Elvis asked if he could bring in his bodyguards, to which
the president said, "Bud, do we have time for that?" And I thought, "You're
this far into it, why not finish it off." So, I said, "Yes, sir, you've got
a few more minutes."

So [his body guards] came in and, and the president shook hands with them
and told Elvis, "You've got some big ones here, Elvis." And he said, "Yes,"
and the president went behind his desk, and opened up the bottom drawer to
give them each a gift. Well, Elvis just sensed that there was a lot of
stuff in that drawer. So he went behind the desk and, as the president is
taking out the cufflinks and the paperweights and the golf balls, Elvis is
reaching in towards the back of the drawer and taking out the real gold
stuff, the valuable presents--because they were sort of lined up in order
of expense, or cost. The higher the roller, the more expensive the present.

So Elvis starts taking all these things out, and he says, "Mr. President,
they have wives." And so he dived back into the drawer again and out come
the presents for the wives. And they walked out of there--of course, this
was four days before Christmas--with their hands filled with all of these
presidential goodies. And after that, we got him a badge, which Elvis,
apparently, carried with him for a long time. It's on display at Graceland.
I went down there after I wrote a little book about this, and the wallet in
which the badge had been carried was well worn. It showed that he felt that
he'd been given more authority than the badge really suggested. This was
just an honorary badge, but he took it like he'd been given a real agent's
badge. We had to tell him that there were no federal agents-at-large.
That's what he'd asked me about. But that remains one of the more humorous
incidents of my time in the White House.

PBS Frontline Series Follow Up by Tom O'Connell, Kevin Zeese, Doug McVay,
and Eric Sterling:
http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/2000/ds00.n170.html#sec1

Campaign for the Restoration & Regulation of Hemp's HempTV website has the
full, two part, total of almost 4 hours of video of the PBS Frontline "Drug
Wars" available on the web for free video streaming using the Real Player 8.

To watch Part one of Drug Wars, go here:

http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_drugwars1.html

To see part 2, go here:

http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_drugwars2.html

Click this link for an index to this series:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1551.a01.html