Thread by @julianzelizer

One of the precedents for @realDonaldTrump's plan to shut down the southern border comes from, you guessed it, President Richard Nixon. /1

In September 1969, the Nixon administration essentially shutdown the border to stem the flow of marijuana into the country. The plan was called “Operation Intercept.” /2

This was part of President Nixon’s “law and order” campaign to secure the support of the “Silent Majority” who didn’t agree with the counter-cultural direction of the 1960s. /3
c-span.org/video/?c461276…

An administration task force outlined the alleged “crisis” that the nation faced. /4

The plan didn’t work. To be sure, Operation Intercept caused chaos and helped obtain some support from the Mexican government. But the drug flow continued. During the shutdown, drugs entered from other pathways and users turned to different narcotics. /5

Later, the notorious G. Gordon Liddy, who helped devise the plan, called Operation Intercept an "exercise in international extortion." The goal was to pressure Mexican officials into cooperating with the U.S. /6

Here is Liddy: "The Mexicans, using diplomatic language of course, told us to go piss up a rope. The Nixon administration didn't believe in the United States' taking crap from any foreign government. Its reply was Operation Intercept." /7

According to an article in @Harpers, Nixon aide John Ehrlichman had a different memory of why Nixon undertook these efforts. It was about politics: reactionary, right-wing politics. /8
harpers.org/archive/2016/0…

Here is the passage, part 1: "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?" /9

Part 2: "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."/10

Part 3: "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."/11

For original documents about Operation Intercept, see the @NSArchive nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8… /12

Interesting precedent to think about. Whatever the real rationale was, one thing is for sure: Nixon’s War on Drugs was a colossal policy failure, one of the worst in American history. Take a look at this chart, published in @TheAtlantic. /13

What are the odds that historians will be saying the same thing decades from now about how President Trump handled the border? /end

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