Rise of the Warrior Cop (16 page)
Read Rise of the Warrior Cop Online
Authors: Radley Balko
. . . in 1968: 63 percent
. . . in 1969: 75 percent
Percentage of Americans in 1968 who disapproved of interracial marriage: 75 percent
. . . of Nixon supporters: 63 percent
. . . of Wallace supporters: 71 percent
. . . of Humphrey supporters: 44 percent
85
Drug people are the very vermin of humanity. They are dangerous. Occasionally we must adopt their dress and tactics.
—MYLES AMBROSE, HEAD OF NIXON’S OFFICE OF DRUG ABUSE AND LAW ENFORCEMENT
S
am Ervin was an unlikely civil liberties hero. Known for his bushy, high-arching eyebrows, the avuncular senator from Morgantown, North Carolina, was the prototype backwoods bumpkin who passed himself off as “just a simple country lawyer”—right before unleashing the devastating argument that crushed his opponents and won the day. In a thick, jowly drawl, he’d dispense folksy anecdotes, Bible verses, and righteous indignation—and in the next breath drop quotes from Shakespeare, Aristotle, Kipling, or Thomas Wolfe.
Born in 1896, Ervin was a decorated World War I veteran who earned a Silver Star, two Purple Hearts, and a Distinguished Service Cross during his commission as an infantryman in France. When he returned home, the whip-smart veteran quickly ascended
the ranks of North Carolina politics. When Democratic senator Clyde Hoey died in 1954, Ervin was sitting on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Gov. William Umstead asked him to fill the vacant seat, and he accepted. Sam Ervin would remain a US senator for twenty years.
What many would come to see as contradictions or surprises in Ervin as a public figure were in fact his way of balancing a collection of values drawn from his faith, his Constitution, his heritage, the mores and traditions of his region, and his scholarship. Though a deeply religious man, for example, Ervin successfully led an effort in the North Carolina legislature to defeat a law that would have prohibited teaching evolution in the state’s schools. Ervin found the law embarrassing.
1
Though Ervin was a Democrat, he and Nixon were often on the same side of the 1960s culture wars. Ervin largely supported Nixon’s efforts in Vietnam. He also opposed
Brown v. Board of Education
(though he’d later change his mind) and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He was a signatory of “The Southern Manifesto,” which accused the US Supreme Court of overstepping its authority on integration and breeching state sovereignty. Ervin even reversed course on integration at about the time the Nixon administration made desegregating public schools a Justice Department priority.
Indeed, by the time Nixon ran for president in 1968, Ervin appeared to be precisely the sort of God-and-country, law-and-order Southern Democrat Nixon was hoping to court with his campaign. The two also shared a contempt for the Warren Court. In the 1957 case
Mallory v. United States,
the Court ruled as inadmissible the confession of a subject who had been interrogated for seven hours before he was notified of his rights or given a preliminary hearing.
2
In response, Ervin took to the floor of the US Senate to defend the integrity of law enforcement officers. Ervin complained that the courts had perversely decided that criminals need protection from law enforcement more than society needs protection from criminals.
3
It was a speech that Nixon himself might have given on the campaign trail ten years later.
The Nixonites, then, would be struck dumb when Sam Ervin emerged in the early 1970s not only as Nixon’s most formidable Watergate nemesis on Capitol Hill, but also as the angriest, loudest, and most powerful critic of Nixon’s crime policy. Even more surprising, he would beat them. Thanks to Ervin, the Castle Doctrine stayed afloat for about another decade before being submerged by the 1980s war on drugs.
A
TTORNEY
G
ENERAL
J
OHN
M
ITCHELL AND HIS SUBORDINATES
began their big legislative crime push in the summer of 1969. They found plenty of willing help on Capitol Hill. In both chambers, Nixon administration allies and crime hawks introduced a flurry of bills containing sweeping new provisions. When Stanford law professor and criminologist Herbert Packer asked the Justice Department just how many crime bills there were, one official replied in a letter, “I leave it to you to make the count.” In an October 1970 essay for the
New York Review of Books,
he tried. Packer counted twelve bills that came directly from the White House plan and eight more introduced independently that the White House supported. Packer counted at least four Senate and five House committees claiming jurisdiction over some version of a crime bill—and that wasn’t counting the appropriations committee in each chamber.
4
And because the two bodies wouldn’t pass identical versions of any bill, there would also be a slew of conference committees to sort out all the differences. It seems unlikely that all of this overlapping legislative activity was planned, but it had the benefit of making any organized opposition to the bills rather difficult.
The no-knock raid came up in two bills. The first was the Omnibus Crime Control Act, which authorized no-knock raids, preventive detention, expanded wiretapping, night raids, and other powers in federal investigations. That bill was also split up. The portion including preventive detention hit the House Judiciary Committee in October 1969, while another version headed to the same committee in the Senate, chaired by Ervin.
When the bill hit Ervin’s desk, he couldn’t believe what he saw. The senator fired an early shot across the president’s bow when he called the preventive detention proposals “facile and desperate” and “tyrannical” and added that the very idea of eliminating bail “repudiates our traditional concept of liberty.”
5
The Nixon administration was gobsmacked. Ervin had supported the Republicans’ election-year crime package just a year earlier. He was an influential voice in the Senate, especially given his position on the Judiciary Committee. They were counting on his support, and he had just lashed out at the centerpiece of their crime strategy.