said biographer John McWilliams—and he brought to the new job a Puritanical conviction that alcohol  prohibition could have succeeded.  It failed, he maintained, not because it was a bad idea, but because law enforcement wasn’t tough enough. Anslinger himself beat the drum for years trying to get more draconian penalties—not just for sellers but for drinkers as well—and they wouldn’t listen.  Now he would get a chance to test his theories in the field of narcotics, and the country would be transformed in the process.

Anslinger’s first problem was to clean up the rampant corruption among the agents he inherited from Levi Nutt, but he was sandbagged almost immediately by a couple of fresh scandals in the New York office.  Once again, agents were fronting for dealers and protecting mobsters—this time, “Legs” Diamond.  Then came the Democratic Landslide of 1932, and suddenly Harry Anslinger began to look like a temporary employee. At this delicate moment, he almost cut his own throat.  In a memo to the field offices, Anslinger warned his men to be on the lookout for an informant he described as “a ginger-colored nigger.”^[21]  The White House exploded and even the Senator from Anslinger’s home State demanded his resignation. Any other third level bureaucrat would have been on the next train out of Union Station, but somehow Anslinger survived.  How was this possible?

There’s no doubt the man could be charming and persuasive. Even his fiercest detractors give him that.  And he was macho in the gunslinger style that has always appealed to Washington insiders.  But it turns out the secret to his longevity was actually buried in the text of the law that set up the Bureau.  Before Anslinger, if you wanted to market narcotic painkillers, you had to take your case to a Cabinet-level tribunal consisting of the Secretary of State, Secretary of Treasury, and the Secretary of Commerce.  But when Congress created the Bureau of Narcotics, they eliminated this board and gave the job, whole and entire, to the new Bureau’s Commissioner —Harry J. Anslinger.^[22]  So if, say, you wanted to manufacture narcotic pharmaceuticals,