Political Book Notes
political book notes Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America. Edward Jay Epstein. Putnam’s, $9.95. One day in 1971, a Volkswagen camper, a snorkel projecting from its...
...White House staffers slipped Time and Newsweek stories on the spreading heroin crisis...
...From G. Gordon Liddy came memos suggesting a White House police unit with uncommon powers to deal with drug abuse...
...Oscar Lewis, Ruth M. Lewis, Susan M. Rigdon...
...Putnam, $8.95...
...Bernard Rubin...
...to Modernity: Reflections on sFoacciinegty , u ! olitics and Religion...
...Walter Laqueur...
...Data that produced an estimate of 69,000 addicts in 1969 was reworked to yield 560,000 in 1971...
...The War Against the Automobile...
...Terry Wetherby...
...The War Managers...
...Conversations: Working Women Talk About Doing a “Man’s Job...
...of Illinois Press, $15...
...Marxism and Politics...
...The Penalty of Death...
...Dutton, $10...
...Inside Wall Street: Continuity and Change in the Financial District...
...New Republic, $8.95/$3.95...
...The climax of this build-up was to be a presidential declaration of national emergency and a concomitant sweeping reorganization of the government...
...Press, $10/$2.95...
...A welcome reminder that Chesterton was an original mind whose anti-elitism remains relevant today...
...Laurence J. Peter...
...Dropshot: The United States Plan for War with the Soviet Union in 1957...
...Robert S. Kerr: The Senate Years...
...The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire...
...Jobs: How People Create Their Own...
...of Oklahoma, $12.50...
...Rigged statistics were disseminated...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $10.95...
...Big Business and the Mass Media...
...and with its contingent of former CIA and counter-intelligence agents, it had the talent to enter residences surreptitiously, gather intelligence on the activities of other agencies and interrogate suspects . . . . ” Epstein offers2 considerable amount of new material, much of it from Egd Krogh’s fdes, to support his contention that Nixon coolly sought to establish his own police arm to master the bureaucracy...
...Stein &Day, $10...
...Oxford Univ...
...Robert Sobel, Norton, $9.95...
...The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson, Vol...
...The seizure of heroin that a trafficker could replace for $5,000 was reported as having a “street value” of $210,000...
...Epstein, who established his reputation as an investigative reporter with Inquest, his report on the Warren Commission, contends that American presidents reign but do not rule, their power being circumscribed by the ability of the bureaucracy, particularly such investigative agencies as the FBI, IRS, and the CIA, to leak damaging information...
...Not all was so ludicrous in the war on heroin, a war seen by Epstein as the vehicle through which Richard Nixon tried to effect a coup d’etat...
...Peter L. brger...
...Monthly Review Press, $16...
...The new string to play on was fear for personal safety...
...Nixon discovered early the political hay to be made by playing on the public’s fears...
...Michael Eddowes...
...the new targets were judges and government officials soft on crime...
...Lexington Boaks, $14.50...
...The Oswald File...
...Heroin was the answer the White House developed for the joint problem of dramatizing the President as a crime-buster and creating an investigative agency to curb the bureaucracy...
...Terrorism...
...The Equity Funding Papers: The Anatomy of a Fraud...
...Lexington Books, $13...
...Robert Shogan...
...Michael E. Tigar, Madeleine R. Levy...
...It’s No Sin To Be Rich: A Defense of Capitalism...
...Univ...
...Basic, $1 1 SO...
...Ralph Miliband...
...They responded like puppets: Name of the Game, Hawaii Five-0, The FBI, Mod Squad, Marcus Welby, M. D., and Room 222 rushed to do episodes dealing with heroin...
...Guernica...
...American Journal: The Events of 1976...
...William Davis...
...B. Bruce-Briggs...
...A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda, and History...
...Contemporary Books, $8.95...
...Law and the Rise of Capitalism...
...One day in 1971, a Volkswagen camper, a snorkel projecting from its roof, patrolled the streets of Marseilles to the wonderment of the citizens...
...White House Watch: The Ford Years...
...VII: Continuing Education and the Unfinished Business of American Society, 1957-61...
...Margaret Canovan...
...June Goodfield...
...Anthony Cave Brown, ed...
...Leon Mandel...
...Kenneth Keniston...
...James Brough...
...Playing God: Genetic Engineering and the Manipulation of Lif...
...Wiley, $14.95...
...Walter Jphnson, ed...
...Top Secret: National Security and the Right to Know...
...Random House, $12.95...
...The operation succeeded in charting on a street map the restaurants of Marseilles...
...One L. Scott Turow...
...Driven by an American narcotics agent, the VW carried equipment designed to sniff out laboratories using acetic acid to extract heroin from morphine...
...Planning Without Prices...
...William C. Ronco...
...Daniel Green...
...Calling his opponents soft on communism won him election to Congress, but his defeat in 1960 persuaded Nixon that the communist menace had lost its potency...
...of California Press, $19.95...
...Six Men...
...Elizabeth Drew...
...Useful proposals to reform the abuses of the public’s right to know that have become customary under the excuse of national security...
...Little, Brown, $22.50...
...Clarkson N. Potter, $10...
...Television producers were called to Washington, ushered into Nixon’s presence, and enlisted in the crusade...
...Joseph Churba...
...Len O’Connor...
...It had the authority to request wiretaps and noknock warrants, and to submit targets to the IRS...
...Nixon had seen Nelson Rockefeller cynically and successfblly exploit that rationale in New York...
...Little, Brown, $15...
...The link between heroin and crime was the dubious theory that a substantial portion of crime is committed by addicts who rob and mug to feed their habit...
...If,” writes Epstein, “the Watergate burglars had not been arrested and connected to the White House, the Drug Enforcement Agency (ODALE’s expanded successor) might have served as the strong investigative arm for domestic surveillance that President Nixon had long sought...
...Alistair Cooke...
...NO~~QII, $18,95/$3.95...
...With the 1972 election only 18 months away, the White House contrived to transform a small addiction problem into Doomsday...
...On June 13, 1971, with the emergency on the launching pad, The New York Times decided to publish the Pentagon Papers...
...The Plumbers, set up as an ad hoc unit to get Daniel Ellsberg, donor of the Pentagon Pa ers, was succeeded in January 1972 by the Okce of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement...
...Guemica...
...A Term to Remember...
...To Colonize Eden: Land and Jeffersonian Democracy...
...Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time...
...Univ...
...As the bureaucratic fiefdoms struck back, a flood of leaks linking the burglars to the White House washed out of government the men slated for key posts in the “reorganization...
...William R. Corson...
...Requiem: The Decline and Demise of Mayor Daley and His Era...
...Doubleday, $8.95...
...Random House ,. $8.95 .I Politics of Defeat: America’s Decline in the Middle East...
...Crowell, $8.95...
...ODALE dramatically set up a heroin hotline in an abandoned mine shaft, leased 20 toll-free telephone lines, and, in a hyped-up television campaign, invited tips on heroin pushers: 33,000 calls came in, resulting in four arrests and the seizure of two grams of adulterated heroin with an estimated street value of $2...
...A very readable account of the author’s first year at Harvard Law...
...Les Femmes, $4.95...
...Lee J. Seidler, Frederick Andrews, Marc Epstein...
...Press of New England, $10...
...Knopf, $8.99...
...Dial, $1 1.95...
...Driven: The American Four-wheeled Love Affair...
...Four Women: Living the Revolution-An oral History of Contemporary Cuba...
...Beacon, $9.95/$3.95...
...Morrow, $10.95...
...Turning East, Harvey Cox, Simon & Schuster, $7.85...
...Michael Hudson...
...Morton Halperin, Daniel Hoffman...
...Univ...
...New Republic Books, $1 1.95...
...Leonard Reed All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure...
...G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist...
...Herbert R. Southworth...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $10.95...
...News was leaked that American ambassadors to various countries were being recalled over the issue of drug traffic...
...Dial, $10.95...
...Thomas Nelson, $8.95...
...John Osborne...
...Rays of Hope, The Transition to the PostPetroleum World...
...The ensuing furor upstaged the heroin crisis...
...Global Fracture: The New International Economic Order...
...The Ford Dynasty: An American Story...
...But the bureaucrats-and this is a great point in their favor-were strong enough to destroy Nixon in the end...
...Denis Hayes...
...But the White House’s appetite for a special police force had been whetted...
...Bernard Siegan...
...The Inflation Swindle...
...Univ...
...The process of bringing the investigative agencies under White House subservience abruptly ended with the Watergate arrests...
...Nixon tried to counteract the bureaucracy’s power, Epstein hypothesizes, by creating a special investigative unit to maintain clandestine surveillance over government officials and newsmen...
...Harper & Row, $10...
...Anne Morgan...
...Bobbs-Merrill, $8.95, Promises to Keep: Carter’s First Hundred Days...
...Whether or not he has quite proven the calculated intent, he has convincingly portrayed the dynamics at work within the executive branch: the tension between the raw power of the presidency and the resilience of the bureaucracyan aspect of the system of checks and balances the Founding Fathers never envisioned...
...ODALE, created by executive decree, soon had strike forces in 33 cities, which consisted of local police and feds requisitioned from the various drug-interested government agencies...
...A boring behind-the-scenes account of the impeachment hearings by a member of the House Judiciary Cgmmittee...
...Atheneum, $14.95...
...Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, $9.95...
...C. H. S. Jaywardene...
...Unfortunately, salad oil caused the same beeps as acetic acid...
...Douglas Kinnard...
...Ernest J. Oppenheimer . Prentice-Hall, $8.95...
...Short on analysis but good in its description of what is wrong with legal education, it shauld scare away at least some of the vast numbers of students who go to law school for the wrong reasons and find themselves miserable when they get there...
...Lexington Books, $16.50...
...Ed Mezvinsky...
Vol. 9 • September 1977 • No. 7
