Let’s remember Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman, born on this day in 1925 (March 20)
Tacoma-born John Ehrlichman official title when working for President Nixon was “Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs,” but he was one of the most notorious members of the most notorious presidency (pre-Trump, obviously). To Ehrlichman’s credit, he influenced Nixon being one of the better presidents on environmental affairs (the National Environmental Protection Act happened on Nixon’s watch, for example). That’s obviously good, but Ehrlichman was a convicted felon for a reason, and he served a year and a half in prison for obstruction of justice, perjury, and conspiracy.
Along with H.R. Haldeman, his Siamese twin, they were two of the officials who helped enable and hasten Nixon’s paranoia. Ehrlichman was intimately involved in the Watergate cover-up. As indefensible as Watergate was, this quote, from a 2016 Harper’s article is important and telling:
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.
John Ehrlichman turned on Nixon and criticized him as early as 1983, probably to rehabilitate his own image after failing to get a pardon from Nixon. He also had a brief run as a spokesman for Dreyer’s Ice Cream. As Wikipedia explains:
In 1987, Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream hired Ehrlichman to do a television commercial for a light ice cream sold by the company, as part of a series of commercials featuring what the company called “unbelievable spokespeople for an unbelievable product.” After complaints from consumers, the company quickly pulled the ad.
John Ehrlichman died in 1999 from diabetes. He was a broken and pathetic man. Much like his former boss.
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