"Police State: Can It Happen Here?", Jules Archer
An extension of the Nixon years... I just happen to be reading this part of an out-of-print book (which is also not available in most libraries, oddly enough):
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"A large number of Americans, both in the general populace and at the highest levels of government, are behaving as if we already had a police state in America," worried Senator Weicker in May 1973.
"What we are witnessing is the development of a style of repression that is new to us, the establishment in this country of conditions -- technological, psychological and legal -- making government by police state possible through an apparatus of total surveillance that seldom would need the reinforcement of a political trial."
Wayne Morse of Oregon also warned his countrymen, "What you are faced with is the steady erosion of the Constitutional safeguards of the American people. The result is that we are fast approaching a police state; we are getting ominously close to where the German people stood just before Hitler's Third Reich."
At first, many Americans refused to believe the truth about President Nixon and his aides, who indignantly denied any involvement. In private, however, they held frantic conferences seeking to cover up everything they had done to suppress the truth. The acting director of the FBI was ordered to destroy crucial evidence.
These attempts at cover-up were thwarted when the Senate decided to hold public hearings. Alarmed, Nixon ordered all his aides and bureau chiefs to refuse to testify... on the grounds of "national security". Such testimony, he argued, would reveal secret information which would be harmful to our interests...
-- Police State: Can it Happen Here, Jules Archer |
