The aide, John Ehrlichman, detailed how Nixon's anti-drug crusade was really used to target the president's two big enemies in the 1968 campaign, according to the New York Daily News.
"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," Ehrlichman said, according to the News. "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."
Ehrlichman was Nixon's domestic policy chief. He gave the interview for a book on the drug wars by author Dan Baum, the News said.
Baum said he didn't include the comments in his book because they didn't fit, according to the Daily News. The quotes resurfaced Tuesday after Baum wrote about them for a cover story in the April issue of Harper's.
Nixon labeled drug abuse as "Public Enemy No. 1" in 1971 and launched a major effort against it with tough new laws and the formation of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Two years later, about 300,000 people were being arrested annually under the new laws. The majority of them were African-American, according to the News.
Every president since Nixon has continued the drug war in ways.
Ehrlichman died in 1999. He served 18 months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal.
Nixon resigned before he could be impeached and was later pardoned by his successor, President Gerald Ford.
The Ehrlichman interview actually first surfaced in 2012, but received little attention at the time, according to the News.
The Rev. Al Sharpton told the News that Ehrlichman's comments were confirmation of what many black people have feared for years.
"That this was a real attempt by government to demonize and criminalize a race of people," he said. "And when we would raise the questions over that targeting, we were accused of all kind of things, from harboring criminality to being un-American and trying to politicize a legitimate concern."
Insiders have speculated that Ehrlichman made the revelations because was angry over not being pardoned himself, according to the News.
