Words&Dirt

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.  Five years later?  Six?  It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era––the kind of peak that never comes again.  San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of.  Maybe it meant something.  Maybe not, in the long run…but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.  Whatever it meant…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time––and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights––or very early mornings––when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket…booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)…but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that…

There was madness in any direction, at any hour.  If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda…You could strike sparks anywhere.  There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle––that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.  Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that.  Our energy would simply prevail.  There was no point in fighting––on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark––that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

––Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson, pg. 66-8

“The new administration held two big strategy sessions on crime, one just before Nixon took office and another shortly after his inauguration.  Also attending these meetings, in addition to Krogh, were Santarelli (soon to be an aide to Mitchell), GOP chief house counsel John Dean, Ehrlichman, and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a domestic policy adviser.  Nixon himself sat in on the initial meeting.  The first order of business was to figure out which crimes to target.  Mitchell made clear in both meetings that the crimes that seemed to most worry the public––armed robbery and burglary––weren’t the purview of the federal government.  Moreover, there was no political benefit to tackling those crimes.  Even if the administration’s policies worked, local law enforcement would get most of the credit.

They decided that the high-profile target of the new administration’s promised anticrime effort would be drug control.  Drug use, they thought, was the common denominator among the groups––low-income blacks, the counterculture, and the antiwar movement––against whom Nixon had unified ‘ignored America.’  Because the drug trade crossed both state and international borders, there were also no federalism issues.  So it was decided that the new Nixon administration would push for massive budget increases for agencies like BNDD and LEAA.  They would ask for a thousand new police officers for DC––an idea that, oddly enough, came from Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in a personal plea to Ehrlichman.  And of course, they’d demand no-knock and preventive detention for federal drug agents, just as they would for police in Washington, DC.

The Nixonites mulled a number of other constitutionally dubious drug war proposals in addition to the preventive detention and no-knock proposals.  They wanted to authorize the use of ‘loose search warrants.’  These would have allowed police to apply for a warrant for contraband, then search multiple properties to find it.  The idea came precipitously close to a writ of assistance, but without the restrictions on nighttime service and knock-and-annouce.  Combined with the no-knock provision, it would have essentially authorized police to kick down the doors of entire neighborhoods with a single warrant.  Loose warrants didn’t make the final crime bill, but the idea was really only about ten years ahead of its time.  Starting in the 1980s, police would conduct raids of entire city blocks, housing complexes, and neighborhoods.  The Nixon administration also wanted to strip away attorney-client privilege, as well as the privilege afforded to conversations with priests and doctors, and to expand wiretapping authority.  They even came up with an early precursor to California’s eventual ‘three strikes and you’re out’ law.

No one had any idea if these policies would work, but in a way it didn’t matter.  The strategy was as much about symbolism and making the right enemies as it was about effectiveness.  There was much discussion over whether the policies sounded harsh enough or sounded too harsh.  There was at least come discussion over whether they would actually work.  But there was very little internal discussion about whether the policies were constitutional, whether they were susceptible to abuse, whether they would have unintended consequences, or what impact they might have on the communities they’d be enforced against.”

––Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, pg. 71-2