Odnośniki
- Indeks
- Harry Turtledove Crosstime 04 The Disunited States of America (v1.0)
- Gary B. Nash The Forgotten Fifth, African Americans in the Age of Revolution (2006)
- Ann Lee Bressler The Universalist Movement in America 1770â1880 (2001)
- 0415325072.Routledge.Power.A.New.Social.Analysis.Mar.2004
- Edward M Lerner Small Miracles (pdf)
- hdh_aristoteles_a_politica
- James Blish Seedling Stars 1 Seeding Program
- Moore Sean U Conan i szalony Bóg
- Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey Halfblood Chronicles 03 Elvenborn
- Brief_History_of_the_United_
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- effulla.pev.pl
intentionally avoided defining the problem in anything more than a vague way. Patrick J. Buchanan, a
thirty-one-year-old journalist from St. Louis who was then working as Nixon's chief speech writer on the
law-and-order issue, recalls the polls' suggesting that the public believed that lawlessness could be dealt
with by a more determined effort of the federal government. However, at that stage, Nixon's speech
writers had little specific knowledge about the characteristics or causes of crime and disorder. Although
Governor Nelson Rockefeller had brilliantly pioneered the heroin menace in New York State, and Nixon
himself realized the political potential of a drug-abuse menace, the candidate's strategists were not yet
fully conversant with the vocabulary of dread that was used by Rockefeller to exploit the drug issue. As
late as September 12, 1968, Buchanan teletyped Martin Pollner, a member of Nixon's law firm and
campaign staff who had been a former prosecutor in New York City, that it was "vital that we get some
background on the narcotics problem in this country." Pollner immediately consulted with John W. Dean,
111, another lawyer-working in the Nixon campaign, and then wrote a four-page memorandum to
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The Barker of Slippery Gulch
Buchanan-"Potential Materials and Recommendations for R.N.'s Position on Narcotics and Drug Abuse."
Then, with the help of Peter Velde, another lawyer on the campaign staff, Pollner sent another
memorandum on the "narcotics problem in southern California." These analyses detailing the problems
of law enforcement and rehabilitation, however, were far too specific for Nixon. The speech he gave on
the subject of narcotics in September, 1968, in Anaheim, California, for which Buchanan requested this
research, began with Nixon's describing a letter that he had supposedly received from a nineteen-year-old
drug addict. Then, using the Hobsonian imagery of heroin's corrupting innocents, he asserted, "Narcotics
are a modern curse of American youth.... I will take the executive steps necessary to make our borders
more secure against the pestilence of narcotics." But narcotics remained only a subsidiary issue in the
1968 campaign. The strategists instead played upon the more general fear of personal violence, saturating
television across the nation with commercials that showed an obviously nervous middle aged woman
walking down the street on a dark, wet night while an announcer stated, "Crimes of violence in the
United States have almost doubled in recent years ... today a violent crime is committed every sixty
seconds ... a robbery every two and a half minutes... a mugging every six minutes ... a murder every
forty-three minutes... and it will get worse unless we take the offensive. . . ." The commercials ended
with the message, "This time vote like your whole world depended on it." After winning the election by a
narrow margin, Nixon was expected to deal effectively with the menace to law and order that he himself
had helped to popularize. But for him it was an opportunity, not a problem.
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The Bete-noire strategy
Agency of Fear
Opiates and Political Power in America
By Edward Jay Epstein
Chapter 5 - The Bete-noire Strategy
It proved far easier to find the rhetoric to excite public fears over lawlessness than the controls for
reducing crime and disorder. During the 1968 campaign Nixon had persistently attacked the
"permissiveness" of the Democratic attorney general, Ramsey Clark, and pledged that the first step in his
war on crime would be to replace him with a more determined and tougher chief law officer. "Ramsey
Clark had been symbolic of the laissez-faire liberal approach to crime control," Egil Krogh, then deputy
assistant to the president for law enforcement recalled. "The promise of a new attorney general was all
part of the same idea that crime had gotten so much out of control that he was going to take stringent
measures." Nixon chose as a replacement for Ramsey Clark his law partner and campaign manager, John
Newton Mitchell. Like Nixon, Mitchell was indeed a determined man: he worked his way through
college and played semipro ice hockey, one of the more violent sports available. In World War II he
sought the most dangerous service available in the Navy, and was a commander of the PT boat squadron
in which John F. Kennedy served as a lieutenant. As one of the leading municipal-bond lawyers in New
York City, he dealt constantly with local politicians across the country interested in gaining a favorable
opinion for a tax-free bond issue. He joined Nixon's law firm as a senior partner in 1967 and made an
immediate impression on Nixon. Little more than a year later, he agreed to be the campaign manager for
Nixon's presidential effort, and seemed to many in the campaign to be the only person to whom Nixon
deferred. Mitchell, a self-made man who enjoyed his wealth, wanted to return to his law practice, but
reluctantly agreed to serve his new friend as attorney general.
In January, 1969, only a few days after he had assumed office, President Nixon convened a meeting in
the White House on possible law-and-order initiatives. The small inner circle of advisors who attended
that meeting included John Mitchell, who in those early days acted as a "prime minister" to the president;
John Ehrlichman, a Seattle land-use lawyer who had served as tour director in the 1968 campaign and
was now counsel to the president; Egil Krogh, the young deputy to Ehrlichman; Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, a former advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson who was then the counsel for domestic
affairs, and Donald Santarelli, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer who had drafted many of the position
papers on crime for the 1968 Nixon campaign, and who was in the process of joining the Justice
Department as a strategist for the crime-control program.
The meeting began with President Nixon's defining law and order as his "principal domestic issue." In
the extensive interviews that Egil Krogh had with me over a two-month period in 1974 he recalled that in
that January meeting the president used general terminology such as "we are a tough, law-and-order
administration, and we are going to crack down on crime." Since the rhetoric used during the campaign
in 1968 was basically "get tough," Krogh explained, "there was a clear motivation to be able to deliver to
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The Bete-noire strategy
the electorate In 1972 a record of improvement in crime control." Nixon stated that the two categories of
crime that would be most useful to diminish were armed robbery and burglary, since they "instill the
greatest fear" in the electorate. As Nixon continued to describe his objectives for crime control, John
Mitchell began slowly shaking his head in a negative manner, and pulling on his pipe as if it were some
sort of semaphore signal. Asked whether he thought there was any problem, Mitchell leaned back and
explained that most of the crimes that the president was interested in controlling did not fall under the
jurisdiction or powers of the federal government. Except for Washington, D.C.. where the federal [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]