It was a little more complex than Ehrlichman, who a disturbing amount of respected publications are choosing to believe at face value, was getting into.

The first thing thing to understand is that Nixon was the original Culture Warrior. Not in a dogmatic post-Reagan, "Gospel of Wealth" sort of way-Nixon was very unhappy about the rise of the Religious Right in GOP politics throughout the 80s and early 90s, knowing what they could do to the GOP's political prospects-but he did see one of his personal missions as to act against what he saw as the increasingly "effeminate" and "degenerate" directions of American society in the early 70s. Most people of Nixon's generation absolutely loathed drugs, and Nixon was an extreme "square" even on his own generational standards. This was the man who wore a suit and tie every single day, regardless of weather or events that day, who valued strength and discipline above any other virtues: it's hardly a wonder that he wouldn't think much of pot users.

Nixon actually believed that the "decadence" of America's elite was a very dangerous thing. Nixon openly compared drug dealers to slavers of old who needed to be "hunted to the ends of the Earth". If he could have gotten away with doing so, I suspect that Nixon would have instituted the death penalty for drug dealers with multiple convictions. Nixon's rhetoric in many of his War on Drugs related speeches was ironically similar to that used by Sun Yat-Sen and Mao Zedong in describing opium. Both basically described drugs as a foreign importation sapping away at the vital, primal "strength" of society, which needed to be eradicated at all costs. Both Nixon and the Chinese Nationalists/Communists reserved special contempt for societal elites, who in their view had a responsibility to lead by example. (Nixon's... psychologically complex relationship with the "Eastern Elite", especially in the 60s and 70s, can be best explained through this prism.) Instead of doing that, they were setting a precedent and causing a "head-down" rot. He's talking about the "national spirit" and the health of society in a Spenglerian, organic sense in his speeches. He even made the Qing China comparison in one 1972 speech.

Deep down, he perceived this and other changes, particularly in foreign policy attitudes, to be destroying the only country on Earth that a man from such obscure origins as himself could rise so high. Nixon no kidding thought that the abdication of responsibility by the "Best and Brightest" and the coddling of their rioting, leftist children would open the door to anarchy, and possibly a right-wing "Thurmondian" (his words, a play on the French Revolution term with Strom Thurmond taking the place of the reactionaries) reaction. And in a sense, he was right: the backlash to liberalism did indeed come in the 70s, and when Watergate occurred and altered GOP dynamics, came in a far stronger sense than it necessarily had to in the 80s. This wasn't limited to him: Henry Kissinger, though far more subtle about it, in part because he actually successfully socially interacted with the "Eastern Elite" in stark contrast to Nixon, had something of a similar complex in how America's elite had become dangerously soft-headed.

As for private conversations, here is an extract from the tapes:

"RN: Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no. Not if they can allow, not if they can catch it, they send them up. You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they're trying to destroy us."

Unknown: "Sure, sure. Yep."

RN: "And I don't know, I, we talk oh and I and Moynihan will disagree with this, Mitchell disagree with this, [unintelligible] will and all the rest. But God damn it, we have got to stand up to these people."

And:

"NIXON: Why in the name of God do these people take this stuff?

EHRLICHMAN: For the same reason they drink. It’s a, they’re bored, it’s a, it’s a diversion.

NIXON: Drinking is a different thing in a sense. Uh, [Art] Linkletter’s point I think is well-taken, he says, “A person may drink to have a good time – “

EHRLICHMAN: Mm-hmn.

NIXON: “ – but a person does not drink simply for the purpose of getting high.” You take drugs for the purpose of getting high.

EHRLICHMAN: Yup. Yup.

NIXON: There is a difference."

And after his Presidency, in 1991, Nixon wished his administration had cracked down harder on casual drug use. He said that it was not enough to “bomb the Colombian drug plantations and clean out the ghetto crack houses,”-he insisted that the "elite user" had to be targeted. Given all of this, I think it's safe to say that Tricky was a true believer on this subject, not that of someone just cynically seeking to simply lock up political enemies. If anything, Nixon seems to be far more irrationally, emotionally offended by "elite" usage of drugs rather than black usage. If Nixon had absolute dictatorial powers, I think the first thing he would have done is launched a Mao style "Down to the Countryside" campaign for the "leftist chic crowd", before he got to blacks and your average hippie.

Now, for the sake of historical context, one must remember that Nixon was elected on a strong anti-crime, law and order platform. The people wanted a crackdown. Often missed in the historical memory of Baby Boomers who make the TV specials and focused on the counterculture is that when Nixon spoke of a "Silent Majority", he wasn't kidding: George Wallace and Bombs Away LeMay were serious candidates in 1968, and combined, they and Nixon got nearly 60 percent of the vote. That's backlash against social liberalism by any reasonable measure. Beyond that, there was still plenty of older, conservative Democrats who might have voted for Humphrey and disliked Nixon, but would have largely agreed with Nixon's views on drugs and would have applauded his actions. This wasn't helped by the fact that there were rising cases of heroin addiction in Vietnam, and Nixon had made a promise to shift to an all-volunteer force. So, Nixon did have a political mandate to crack down on drug use, personal sentiment aside. The voters expected no less. Nixon set up a whole federal bureaucracy for this thing. To say it was simply for petty harassment of black people and hippies, especially when he still had J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and the IRS to do the same thing, doesn't really add up. He really did think it was a threat, and it showed in the depth of the measure.

That is not to say that Nixon's well documented racism or anti-hippie sentiment did not play no role. Nixon also invoked the specter of inner city riots in his anti-drug speeches, and there's no doubt that he would have had drug dealers executed without question if he had the power to do so. I'm certain he wanted to purchase freedom from petty crime via incarceration. Nixon's era inaugurated the Rockefeller Drug Laws. But history, and especially any history related to Richard Nixon, is never that simple. The War on Drugs took time to evolve. Nixon's racial attitudes are more explicitly seen in his formulation of Civil Rights and welfare policies (both better than his supporters claim and worse than his detractors claim, in a way) than the start of the War on Drugs.

Ehrlichman, it is worth noting, was ideologically antagonistic to Nixon's anti-drug views. Ehrlichman was a moderately liberal "Seattle Republican" type with three kids involved in campus protests. It is largely due to him that Nixon's domestic policies took on a liberal sheen of sorts, as Nixon famously kept his "long-term" focus on foreign policy-when people talk about Nixon's "closet liberalism", they really mean John Ehrlichman. He often conflicted with more right-wing characters in the White House, such as Bob Haldeman. Ehrlichman also retained a very strong anger at Nixon after Watergate for not pardoning him, unlike uber-loyalists like Haldeman-his book portrays Nixon in a very unflattering light. The interview was given when Nixon died in 1994, so it's quite possible that Ehrlichman was doing this in part to tarnish Nixon. And it does sound like something that Nixon would do, right, knowing the tapes and the Southern Strategy and his attitude toward hippies? Pretty clever, especially since there is a kernel of truth to it. But there is a whole lot of distance between that and what Baum's thesis actually is, and what Ehrlichman is saying.

It's also important to note, as Baum did in his book, that the Nixonian (and Carter's) version of the War on Drugs was very tame compared to what would come. Nixon allocated 2/3rds of the money allocated to treatment, particularly methadone clinics, not law enforcement. In one of the greater ironies of history, the founder of the War on Drugs also was the strongest advocate of treatment. There was strong limits to Nixon's "liberalism" on the issue to be sure, especially on decriminalization (he also made lots of references to the "Jewish" background of psychiatrists who "pushed" marijuana), but he seems to have had a much more nuanced attitude to drug addicts who wanted to clean up and just needed help to do so, than is often recognized, especially compared to his unambiguously harsh stance on drug dealers or societal elites who culturally "endorsed" such behavior. Thus, it's not really fair to blame him primarily for what the War on Drugs would become. He set the initial tone in his rhetoric and presided over things like the Rockefeller laws, but the War on Drugs did change over time. Though then again, Nixon didn't face the crack epidemic or the crime rates of the late 80s and early 90s. Take it as you will.

Sources:

Jeremy Kuzmarov: "The Myth of the Addicted Army-Vietnam and the War on Drugs"

Monica Crowley: "Nixon in Winter"

nixontapes.com

"Thirty Year's of America's Drug War"-PBS.