The hysterical image of the vampire-addict that Captain Hobson propagated in the 1930s
was brilliantly refined into a national political issue in the 1960s by Nelson
Rockefeller, who, in projecting this nationwide "reign of terror," had at his
disposal an unprecedented family fortune. The Rockefeller fortune was begun by Nelson's
great grandfather William Avery Rockefeller, a nineteenth-century dealer in drugs who,
like modern narcotics dealers, dressed in extravagant ilk costumes, used aliases, and
never carried less than a thousand dollars in cash on his person. "Big Bill," as
he was commonly called, hawked "herbal remedies" and other bottled medicines
which, if they were like other patent medicines being sold in those days, contained opium
as an active ingredient. Long before opium-the juice from the poppy-became the base of
patent medicine in America, it was used in Asia as a remedy for dysentery and as a general
pain-killer. Because it was a powerful analgesic, hucksters on the American frontier made
quick fortunes selling their various "miracle" preparations.
In any case, Big Bill, who advertised himself as a "Cancer Specialist," was
sufficiently successful in selling drugs to stake his son John Davison Rockefeller to the
initial capital he needed to go into the oil business in Cleveland. Young Rockefeller
found that oil was far more profitable than herbal medicine. He foresaw that concentration
and combination rather than competition were the order of the future. Moreover, he
realized that the leverage for gaining control over the burgeoning oil industry lay in the
hands of the railroads. Since oil was more or less a uniform product, costing the same at
the wellhead and fetching the same price at the market, any refiner who could ship his oil
to market for even a few cents less a barrel than his competitors could eventually drive
them out of business. With this insight Rockefeller played the railroads in Cleveland
against each other until he was given a surreptitious discount, or "rebate," by
the railroads, which provided him a decisive advantage over his competitors. By the turn
of the century Rockefeller's company, Standard Oil Company, refined more than 90 percent
of the oil in the United States and two-thirds of the oil in the world. Rockefeller's
personal fortune was equal to some 2 percent of the GNP of the entire United States.
Rockefeller's only son, John Davison Rockefeller, Jr., used the fortune to launch a
number of crusades of his own, including financing a large part of the movement to
prohibit alcohol in the United States (an effort in which Captain Hobson was then playing
a leading role). Although his crusade against alcohol ultimately failed, he was not
discouraged from public enterprises. He built Rockefeller Center at the height of the
Depression as a monument to the family's enterprise, and encouraged his second-eldest son,
Nelson, to enter public life.
Nelson first learned the techniques of propagating and controlling information when he
was appointed coordinator of inter-American affairs at the age of thirty-two by President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and given the responsibility of running a $150-million
propaganda agency in Latin America. To gain complete control over the media of Latin
America, Rockefeller engineered a ruling from the United States Treasury which exempted
from taxation the cost of advertisements placed by American corporations that were
"cooperating" with Rockefeller in Latin America. This tax-exempt advertising
eventually constituted more than 40 percent of all radio and television revenues in Latin
America. By selectively directing this advertising toward newspapers and radio stations
that accepted "guidance" from his office, he was effectively able to control the
images that the newspapers and radio stations of Latin America projected about America
during World War 11. By 1945 more than 75 percent of the news of the world that reached
Latin America originated from Washington, where it was tightly controlled and shaped by
Rockefeller's office. In developing this mode of psychological warfare, Rockefeller
learned not only the vulnerabilities of the press but the techniques of manipulating news.
By supplying a daily diet of some 30,000 words of "news"-including editorials,
articles, news photographs, and "exclusive features"-to the media of Latin
America, Rockefeller came to appreciate the reality that journalists acted mainly as
messengers of dramatic and titillating stories, rather than as any sort of independent
investigators. As long as Latin Americans were spoon-fed manufactured anecdotes and
dramatic happenings that fell within the generally accepted definition of
"news," they would not question the interest or politics that lay behind the
disclosure of this information to them. This education in the management and manipulation
of news was to prove invaluable to Nelson Rockefeller in his political career after World
War II.
After serving briefly in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, Nelson Rockefeller
decided in 1958 to run for elective office as governor of New York State. As the former
coordinator of information in Latin America he had little difficulty in mobilizing support
for himself in the media, and he succeeded in projecting an image of himself as a liberal,
or, at least, as an enlightened Republican. Appealing to both the liberal constituency in
New York City and the Republican constituency in the upstate areas, Rockefeller was easily
elected governor. His more expansive ambition of being elected president, however,
presented a much more difficult problem in image management. The highly sophisticated
polls of public opinion that Rockefeller commissioned in the early 1960s (and George
Gallup, of the Gallup Poll, had worked for him in Latin America) indicated that a
Republican candidate could not win in a national election without attracting large numbers
of the more liberal-leaning independent voters-and this would require maintaining a
liberal-Republican image. Yet, Rockefeller was also aware that to win the Republican
nomination and the support of the more conservative stalwarts of the Republican party
required a hard-line and even anti-liberal image. As a result, the more Rockefeller tried
to amass support in the media, and among independent voters.. by projecting a liberal
image, the more he lost support among more conservative Republicans. Unable to resolve
this dilemma of conflicting images, Rockefeller was decisively rejected by delegates at
the 1964 Republican convention, who instead enthusiastically endorsed Senator Barry
Goldwater, who went on to lose the general election by a disastrous proportion of the
vote.
After his 1964 defeat, Rockefeller ingeniously developed an issue which seemed to
resolve the political dilemma by appealing to both the hard-line element in the Republican
party and the liberal-to-moderate element among the independent voters-the drug issue. By
proposing measures for oppressing drug users that were more draconian than anything ever
proposed by Senator Goldwater or by his most hard-line followers, Rockefeller hoped to
placate the law-and-order Republicans by toughening his image. At the same time, analysis
of public opinion showed that the more liberal independents and modern Republican voters
would not object to measures that enhanced their personal safety. As Rockefeller
subsequently pointed out, in 1973, in a speech to the New York State legislature,
"Every poll of public concern documents that the number one growing concern of the
American people is crime and drugs-coupled with an all-pervasive fear for the safety of
their person and property." To exploit this well-researched "all-pervasive
fear" and turn it into a national political issue, Rockefeller worked to establish in
the popular imagination a connection between violent crimes and drugs. He argued that even
if drugs did not in themselves induce violent behavior, the user, physiologically
dependent on the drug, felt compelled to steal in order to pay for his habit. Rockefeller
correctly foresaw that this more sophisticated "dependency theory" could be used
to inspire another wave of fear in the public (as well as among intellectuals) that heroin
addicts were jeopardizing the lives and property of citizens, and therefore drastic action
was necessary.
* Of course, one could apply a similar "dependency theory" to other disabled
groups-alcoholics, cripples, blind people, or even divorced women with two
children-arguing that since their disability prevents them from easily obtaining
employment. they need money to compensate for their disability, and they will be compelled
to steal.
Masterfully employing the tactics of psychological warfare that he and his staff
developed in Latin America during World War II, Rockefeller first began expanding the drug
issue during his gubernatorial reelection campaign in 1966. Depicting heroin as an
infectious disease that, like the common flu, could be spread to unwilling victims in both
the ghetto and the suburbs, Rockefeller boldly declared that the epidemic of addiction in
New York State had reached the proportions of a plague and was threatening the lives of
innocent middle-class children. Demanding "an all-out war on drugs and
addiction," he rushed a law through the legislature providing for the involuntary
confinement of drug addicts for up to live years for "treatment," even if they
were not convicted of any crime. Although the courts had consistently ruled that addiction
itself is not a crime, this new procedure, known euphemistically as "civil
commitment," permitted officials to lock up addicts in "rehabilitation
centers," even if they were not convicted of a crime.
While the phrases "treatment" and "rehabilitation center" were
shrewdly designed to imply a medical model dealing with drug addiction, and thus appealed
to Rockefeller's liberal constituency, there was in 1966 no program of medical treatment
for addiction in New York State. There was not even a concept or an operational definition
of what addiction was or how it could be treated. If, for example, addiction were defined
as being the physical dependence on a drug, then coffee and tobacco would fall in the same
category as heroin under the "civil commitment" law. On the other hand, if
addiction were defined as being a permanent metabolic change in the nervous system-one
that was irreversible-then the various programs of detoxification, or gradual withdrawal
from heroin, being used in "rehabilitation centers" would not treat the disease
any more than withdrawing patients from insulin would treat diabetes. Indeed, at the time
of the passage of the 1966 law, doctors could not even agree whether addiction was
produced by the chemical agent heroin or by the environmental depravity in which the
addict lived. Rockefeller shrewdly perceived, however, that he did not have to concern
himself with these medical problems and confusions. Demanding the imprisonment of some
25,000 addicts in New York (the number he was giving in those days) without time-consuming
trials, Rockefeller realized that he could bait his liberal opponents in the
election-Frank D. O'Connor, the Democratic candidate and a former prosecutor, and Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, Jr., the Liberal party candidate-into opposing this new and hastily
conceived law. When in the heat of the campaign O'Connor did in fact criticize
Rockefeller's rehabilitation program as "an election-year stunt" and
"medically unsound," Rockefeller was finally in a position fully to exploit the
drug issue. In speech after speech he asserted, as he did in a rally in Brooklyn on
November 1, 1966:
Frank O'Connor's election would mean narcotic addicts would continue to be free to roam
the street- to mug, snatch purses, to steal, even to murder, or to spread the deadly
infection that afflicts them possibly to your own son or daughter. Half the crime in New
York City is committed by narcotic addicts. My program-the program that Frank O'Connor
pledges to scrap-will get addicts off the street for Lip to three years of treatment,
aftercare, and rehabilitation....
(Rockefeller never gave a source for his assertion that half the crime in New York was
caused by drug addicts; nor did he give sources for most of the other statistics he used.)
Fully resurrecting the vampire imagery of an earlier time, Rockefeller brilliantly
exploited the fear that New York citizens would lose their lives and children to murderous
addicts. Since Rockefeller lost few votes among the addicts he was threatening to
quarantine in prison, he easily won reelection. As a Democratic leader explained on CBS
television, O'Connor underestimated the fear of people about rampant crime: "Parents
are scared that their kids might get hooked and turn into addicts themselves; people want
the addicts off the streets, they don't care how you get them off."
Through the instrument of this generalized fear, Rockefeller was able not only to
harden his law-and-order image to meet the political requisites of his own party (and to
win elections) but also to project a new nationwide menace which he alone among the
nation's politicians had the "experience" to solve. His newly created Narcotics
Addiction Control Commission (NACC), which supposedly supervised the involuntary
rehabilitation of addicts under the 1966 law, had on its staff many more public-relations
specialists than medical specialists. Turning to the modus operandi that Rockefeller
developed in Latin America, the commission published its own nationally circulated
newspaper, Attack, as well as newsletters, pamphlets, and background briefings for
journalists interested in writing on the new reign of terror." This new agency was
thus able systematically to coordinate and cultivate a highly dramatic image of the heroin
addict as a drug slave who ineluctably is compelled to steal and ravage by his heroin
habit-a disease which can be "treated" only by quarantining the addict. If
Rockefeller had not succeeded in establishing a quasimedical vocabulary for heroin
addiction, this proposal might have been recognized as a repressive form of pretrial
detention for suspected criminals.
The size of the addict population in New York proved to be conveniently flexible over
the years 1966-1973. When it was necessary to demonstrate the need for greater police
measures or more judges,* Rockefeller and his staff expanded the number of putative
addicts from 25,000 in 1966 to 150,000 in 1972 to 200,000 in 1973. For other audiences,
and especially when Rockefeller wanted to show the efficacy of his program, the army of
addicts was conveniently contracted in public speeches to under 100,000. (if the addict
population had really increased from 25,000 to 200,000 between 1966 and 1973, as can be
inferred from Rockefeller's various claims, this 800-percent increase would hardly
demonstrate success in his extraordinary war against addicts.) Rockefeller suggested in
one of his tracts against heroin that "addiction appears to spread
exponentially." The image of an uncontrollable epidemic of heroin addiction being
responsible for most crime in America appealed not only to police officials around the
country, who could use this fear to justify the need for more men and money, but also to
doctors and hospital administrators who were eager to expand their treatment facilities
and rehabilitation staffs. Thus, little resistance was offered to the dubious medical
claims put forth by Rockefeller's public-relations men. By December, 1971, the alleged
army of addicts in New York had been hyped to such proportions that Rockefeller could
seriously write in the New York Law Journal:
How can we defeat drug abuse before it destroys America? I believe the answer lies in
summoning the total commitment America has always demonstrated in times of national
crisis.... Drug addiction represents a threat akin to war in its capacity to kill, enslave
and imperil the nation's future: akin to cancer in spreading a deadly disease among us and
equal to any other challenge we face in deserving all the brain power, man power, and
resources necessary to overcome it.
Continuing, he rhetorically asked, "Are the sons and daughters of a generation
that survived a great depression and rebuilt a prosperous nation, that defeated Nazism and
Fascism and preserved the free world, to be vanquished by a powder, needles, and
pills?"
* One by-product of this putative "reign of terror" was that Rockefeller was
able to gain authority in 1973 to appoint one hundred "narcotic judges" in New
York State, and since judgeships are one of the most prized rewards of New York State
politics, Rockefeller also gained a measure of influence for himself.
In the next few years Rockefeller used statistical legerdemain with unprecedented skill
to convert heroin into a multibillion-dollar issue.
Since the police generally assumed that many addicts were criminals who had shoplifted,
burglarized abandoned buildings, "boosted" merchandise from parked trucks,
forged welfare checks, and committed other forms of petty larceny, Rockefeller and his
staff decided that by simply multiplying the total number of estimated addicts by what
they assumed each addict's habit cost him to maintain, they could ascertain, as one of his
advisors put it, an impressive "billion-dollar figure." For example, if they
assumed, as they did in 1970, that there were 100,000 addicts in New York and that each
addict had a habit of $30 a day, they could calculate that the "army of addicts"
was compelled to steal $1,095,000,000 worth of goods to pay for their combined habit. The
estimated numbers were quite elastic, if not totally arbitrary, for political purposes. By
playing with the estimate they could arrive at any figure they believed was necessary to
impress the populace with the danger of addicts.
There was, however, a stumbling block to the billion-dollar estimates. The total amount
of reported theft that was not recovered in New York City in the Rockefeller years was
never more than $100 million a year, and only a fraction of this could be considered
stolen by addicts (since the largest segment, automobiles, was stolen by teenage
joy-riders, and eventually recovered). Governor Rockefeller thus commissioned the Hudson
Institute, a "think tank" with close connections to the Rockefeller family and
institutions, to reanalyze the amount of theft which possibly could be attributed to
addicts. After studying the problem, Hudson Institute reported back to Rockefeller in
1970: "No matter how we generate estimates of total value of property stolen in New
York City, we cannot find any way of getting these estimates above five hundred million
dollars a year-and only a part of this could be conceivably attributed to addicts."
The governor, schooled in the art of controlling information, found it unnecessary to
accept such a statistical defeat. He simply persisted in multiplying the maximum possible
amount of theft in New York City by ten and arrived at a figure of $5 billion, which he
attributed entirely to heroin addicts. Rockefeller's long experience in psychological
warfare had taught him that large, authoritative-sounding numbers-like $5 billion a
year-could be effectively employed in political rhetoric. Thus, in testifying before the
United States Senate in 1975 that addict crime was costing the citizens of New York State
"up to five billion dollars," Rockefeller could be fully confident that no
senator would bother to chip away at his hyperbole.
In May, 1970, Rockefeller's staff, apparently excited by the wave of national publicity
their heroin imagery was gaining for the governor, presented plans to declare a "drug
emergency" and asked President Nixon and Mayor John Lindsay to set up "emergency
camps" to quarantine all of New York City's addicts. In commenting on the plan,
Rayburne Hesse, a member of Rockefeller's NACC, wrote in a private memorandum, "The
press would love the action, the editorialists would denounce the vigilante tactics ...
civil libertarians would be aghast. . ." and for these reasons went on to recommend
the plan. The point, -however, was not to round up addicts but simply to fuel the national
concern. Thus, although the plan was disseminated to the press and aroused much publicity,
it was never put into effect.
Rockefeller's crusade against addicts reached its zenith in 1973, when the governor
declared that a reign of terror existed with "whole neighborhoods ... as effectively
destroyed by addicts as by an invading army." The elements of fear in his heroin
story had already been articulated and established by the various publications and
briefings of his narcotics commission. Again in the century, addicts had taken the place
of medieval vampires-infecting innocent children with their disease, murdering citizens at
large, causing all crime and disorder. Rockefeller thus had little difficulty in 1973 in
pressing through the legislature laws which totally bypassed the discretion of both the
court and the prosecutors, and made it mandatory that anyone convicted of selling or
possessing more than a fraction of an ounce of heroin (or even amphetamines or LSD) would
be imprisoned for life. This new "Attila the Hun Law," as It was called in the
state legislature, extended the mandatory life sentence to sixteen year-old children, who
heretofore had been protected by the youthful offender law. For information leading to the
arrest of drug possessors or sellers, thousand-dollar bounties would be paid. And in
another legal innovation the bill provided a mandatory-life-imprisonment sentence for the
novel crime of ingesting a "hard" drug before committing any number of
prescribed crimes including criminal mischief, sodomy, burglary, assault, and arson. Under
this new law a person would be presumed to be guilty of ingestion if he took any of these
drugs within twenty-four hours of committing any of these crimes. Since addicts by
definition continually took these drugs, they could be rounded up and mandatorily
sentenced to concentration camps for life for committing any of a number of petty crimes,
for which judges previously would have hesitated before putting them in prison at all. As
Rockefeller shrewdly anticipated, the passage of such extraordinary laws (which were only
slightly modified by the state legislature) created an instant furor in the nation's
press. Rockefeller thus strengthened his reputation among the hard-line element of the
Republican party without losing much support elsewhere, since few people in America were
concerned with the fate of drug addicts. Rockefeller later justified the law by explaining
in his Senate testimony that "about 135,000 addicts were robbing, mugging, murdering,
day in and day out for their money to fix their habit....." Though this depiction of
a huge army of addicts carrying out daily mayhem against the citizens of New York no doubt
further excited popular fears, it hardly fit the police statistics at Rockefeller's
disposal. If 135,000 addicts maintained their "day-in, day-out" schedule, they
would have had to commit something on the order of 49,275,000 robberies, muggings, and
murders a year, which would mean that the average resident of New York would be robbed,
mugged, and murdered approximately seven times a year. In fact, there were only about
110,000 such crimes reported in New York City in 1973, or only 1/445th the number of
crimes that Rockefeller claimed were being committed solely by addicts. Even here, as
Rockefeller was well aware, virtually all analyses showed that the addicts were
responsible for only a minute fraction of the violent crimes he attributed to them in his
constant rhetoric. Most murders and manslaughters were the result of intrafamily disputes,
not addiction. Most muggings were the work of juveniles, not hardened addicts. Indeed, the
Hudson Institute concluded, in the aforementioned study commissioned by Rockefeller, that
less than 2 percent of addicts in New York financed their habit by either robbery or
muggings (and they also concluded that there was only a fraction of the number of hardened
addicts that Rockefeller claimed there were). Moreover, in 1972, another analysis by the
New York City police department concluded, "Both the volume and seriousness of addict
crime are exaggerated." Only 4.4 percent of those arrested in the city for felonies
against person-which include murders, muggings, and robberies-were confirmed drug users
(and only a small percentage of these could possibly be classified as addicts). Addicts
generally refrain from such crimes against persons, according to most views of addict
behavior, because it involves too high a risk of being caught, imprisoned, and withdrawn
from their drug. Petty crimes against property, however, such as burglarizing abandoned
houses, involve much fewer risks and potentially much higher profits. The proposals for
putting addicts in concentration camps for life, thus, if actually carried would have an
infinitesimal effect on decreasing violent crimes against persons. The "Attila the
Hun Law" was never enforced with any great enthusiasm against addicts-or even against
pushers. The purpose was to provide Rockefeller with a law-and-order image that would
satisfy even the most retrograde member of the Republican party. And Rockefeller played
the politics of fear so adroitly in the national media that President Nixon borrowed from
him many rhetorical images and the statistical hyperbole linking heroin and crime in the
public's mind. In his brilliant coordination of information and misinformation about
addicts, Rockefeller succeeded in making the heroin vampire a national issue and himself
vice-president, even if in the next two years the laws themselves proved unworkable.