John Ehrlichman

Questions to ask.

How can that be objective media? There were firing questions at Ehrlichman when he was testifying.

Is that fair? But the Watergate allegations were proven right, Pat.

Yes, we're not arguing that.

Yeah.

Havana Moon, you know, Solomon Burke, the Hawaii Five-0 theme song when they come into the thing, the Nixon war on drug speech where, you know, he's saying, we've got to stop all, you know, these little Timmy's brother died from, and then later on, of course, they admit that it's just a ruse to jail black and brown people and split the vote and to have privatized prisons, right? I mean, literally, Ehrlichman admits it, right? Yeah.

So we have all that stuff as cultural background.

That's great.

And the Nixon White House.

You know, Segretti was the guy that came up with all the dirty tricks, with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, you know, the plumbers.

You know, all the stuff that was going on on the Democratic Convention, you know, bugging, you know, not just the DNC office, but trying to get surveillance off of some of the delegates

for the Democratic Party.

Nixon complains on tape that Hoover won't investigate because Marks' daughter is married to that son-of-a-bitch Ellsberg.

So in July, John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, sets up a unit in the executive office building next door to the White House to do the work instead.

Two young aides, Bud Crowe and David Young, run it.

A former CIA officer named Howard Hunt and a former FBI agent named Gordon Liddy do the fieldwork.

Ellsberg's father-in-law is Louis Marks, the toy manufacturer, and he's one of J. Edgar Hoover's donors.

The director has already removed the agent who tried to interview him.

So on July 17th, the president's domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, summons a 31-year-old lawyer from his old Seattle firm, Bud Crowe, to a closed-door meeting and gives him a unit of his own, with rooms in the executive office building next door to the White House.

Krogh's first call is to a former FBI agent at the Treasury Department, Gordon Liddy, who joins on July 20th.

But one of them was in the face of a bill for universal health care, Nixon needed an alternative.

And his chief domestic policy advisor, a guy named John Ehrlichman, who your listeners might recognize as the guy that kind of you know, just kind of said the quiet part about the war on drugs.

You know, this is the guy that said, look, this is what the war on drugs was about.

You know, we had two enemies, black people and the anti-war left.

It was a lie.

What was his name? Ehrlichman? Whatever Nixon's deputy chief of staff was before he died, he got it off his chest.

He's like, yeah, we tarred the hippie with the psychedelics, the anti-war folks with psychedelics.

And then we we hit the African-Americans with cannabis, with marijuana.

But a detached, loner president who secluded himself so much from bureaucrats and politicians, press and public, was particularly reliant on a few key intermediaries to do his will.

His right-hand men were domestic advisor John Ehrlichman and chief of staff Bob Haldeman, known unaffectionately as the Prussians.

In foreign affairs, Nixon's main interest, the man who mattered was the National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger.

Up close, Kissinger caught something of the essence of his boss.