Things around Watergate

I have a few things following up on today's lecture about Ellsberg and Watergate. First of all, I got a few details wrong about the Harper's article, but you can read it for yourself. Here's what John Ehrlichman told Harper's about the reasons for the war on drugs:

"The 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."

 Second, if you're curious about Bohemian Grove, it's not hard to find out about. Here's what Nixon said on the Whitehouse Tapes in 1971:

"The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time — it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco. Decorators. They got to do something. But we don't have to glorify it. You know one of the reasons fashions have made women look so terrible is because the goddamned designers hate women."

Last, there's a documentary about Ellsberg called The Most Dangerous Man in America. I'm not sure if it's on Netflix or somewhere else, but if you can find it, it's worth a watch.