The Public Policy: Bill's Four-Star General
York, Byron
"The Public Policy: Bill's Four-Star General" by Byron York Bill's Four-Star General It was just another incident in the chaotic first months of the Clinton administration. A three-star army general, a decorated veteran of...
...I don't talk to the military," the staffer said...
...Use of marijuana, LSD, cocaine, and heroin, particularly by young people, began to rise sharply—an increase that almost eerily coincided with Clinton's inauguration...
...He had poor relations with Capitol Hill, little clout with the drug-fighting agencies, and, on top of that, spent much of his time in aimless travels around the globe...
...The Pentagon's involvement in the drug war has always been an issue of some debate in Washington, especially on Capitol Hill...
...Remember the Democrats' worries that under a Republican president the drug office would be dominated by soldiers...
...In the last three years we have tried to take many concrete steps to protect our children and their future," Clinton said...
...When Republicans ran the drug office, they spent more than 6o percent of their money on supply-reduction—mostly interdiction...
...State & Local Affairs gets one colonel and two lieutenant colonels...
...Between Brown's fecklessness and Elders' musings, the Clinton drug war, if it ever existed at all, was in shambles...
...In addition to the eighty new hires, Clinton okayed a plan to bring thirty military officers over from the Pentagon to help McCaffrey get going...
...After mentioning the importance of treating addicts who are in prison, he added, "It seems to me that our No...
...On the one hand, they were outraged at the hypocrisy of a president who could nearly destroy the drug war and then turn around to embrace it in an election year...
...i responsibility is to youth, and that means drug prevention...
...The Office of Supply Reduction will have three lieutenant colonels, a captain, and a commander...
...In fact, in his remarks at McCaffrey's swearing-in, the president sounded quite happy with the job he's done...
...Things might have gotten worse had McCaffrey not smoothed things over by saying it had all been blown out of proportion, that relations between the Clinton administration and the military leadership were really quite good...
...Brown emphasized a program of treatment for the nation's hard-core drug users...
...And he wants to be able to say he hired a can-do general to lead the fight...
...The American Spectator • May 1996 43...
...But has Clinton's policy really changed?Sure, he wants to be able to say he beefed up the drug office...
...Offended, the general told some friends what had happened, and the story got out...
...Now, with Bill Clinton running for re-election, the office has virtually been transformed into an arm of the Pentagon...
...In McCaffrey, Clinton may have picked the one general who can give the White House political cover while keeping up the same old Clinton drug strategy...
...Then the president decided to give the general an army to command...
...We could never have gotten away with this...
...Seated in an honored position in the president's box was none other than...General Barry McCaffrey, now sporting a fourth star to go along with the rows of battle ribbons on his chest...
...It was widely rumored that a midlevel administration official summoned Lee Brown to the White House and gave him a dressing down for not making the drug war a higher profile, politically profitable effort...
...We're bringing drug prevention to our schools by teaching our children that drugs are wrong, illegal, and dangerous...
...Now, despite an early announcement that he would visit Mexico in an effort to stop the flow of drugs into the U.S., McCaffrey seems to be toeing the Clinton/Brown/ Elders demand-reduction line...
...And when Brown did go, to return to his hometown of Houston, the drug office was left without any direction whatsoever...
...And statistics on drug use started going up, along with the president's political vulnerability...
...Thus, the Republican drug office welcomed military participation in the drug war, and congressional Republicans supported the Bush drug warriors when they wanted to be in on all the latest top-secret intelligence supplied by the vast Pentagon surveillance machinery...
...Fast-forward to January 1996, the night of the State of the Union address...
...He proposed virtually no new initiatives...
...Recently he told the New York Times that while law enforcement is important, "that's not how we're going to solve the problem...
...The Director's office gets one colonel and two lieutenant colonels...
...With lives at stake, they certainly can't say they hope it fails, and so in public they're left to offer tepid endorsements...
...Rumors of Brown's departure began to circulate...
...the general plans to put officers in virtually every nook and cranny of the place...
...Those kind of stories," he said, "they're just made up out of whole cloth...
...The Strategic Planning office will have one colonel and three lieutenant colonels...
...Word of the incident did nothing to raise Brown's morale...
...We've put more police on the street...
...draft reorganization chart obtained by TAS shows just how military McCaffrey's drug office will be...
...The whole thing disappeared, supplanted by dozens of other dust-ups, major and minor, over the next three years...
...Things changed dramatically when the Democrats won the White House...
...They would ask, 'How many military guys do you have?' They were leery of the military's involvement, because they felt it would be overly supply reduction driven...
...There were articles portraying the incident as symbolic of the new administration's open disdain for the military...
...I remember when we did our briefings on the Hill," says one former drug office staffer...
...We're working to get hard-core users off the street, to make sure they can't commit crimes, and to get them into treatment...
...considerable consternation in the White House, is the president's choice to be the nation's new drug czar...
...The Chief of Staff's office gets one colonel, two lieutenant colonels, and a captain...
...his policy remains unchanged...
...whatever his problems, he was a cabinet member, and being dissed by a White House aide did not sit well...
...Good morning," the general said...
...And then there was Joycelyn Elders...
...If someone had asked him, McCaffrey would have claimed to be a Kennedy liberal," Kitfield writes of McCaffrey in the '6o's...
...Brown, who seemed qualified by virtue of a lifetime in police work, had virtually no influence within the government...
...But missing from Clinton's pronouncements was any indication that he wants to make fundamental changes in his drug policy...
...And to do it without making any substantial changes in the policy itself...
...Widely praised for his work fighting drug trafficking as head of the Army's Southern Command in Panama, McCaffrey's new mission, as the 1996 election approaches, is to save Bill Clinton from the political consequences of a disastrous drug policy...
...Clinton added the predictable coda that "we have to do more," but he had nothing more to talk about...
...While neither side argued for the complete exclusion of the other, it has generally been true that Republicans favored supply reduction and Democrats favored demand reduction...
...Republican critics have been left sputtering...
...Meanwhile, most reliable indices showed drug use beginning to rise (after having fallen significantly through the Reagan and Bush years...
...Over the years, some lawmakers have emphasized what is called "demand reduction," which emphaA phony drug war acquires a new layer of sham...
...Others have supported "supply reduction," which focuses on interdiction and law enforcement...
...He also cut it out of the loop, appointing the almost preternaturally ineffective Lee Brown to the job of drug czar...
...But Brown's greatest problem was that he simply had no support from the president...
...People here are prepared to keep an open mind...
...A drug fighter in uniform (at least figuratively—McCaffrey retired after his State of the Union photo-op) would give Clinton instant credibility in an area where he had none...
...They don't care about whatever policy positions they've taken in the past...
...Programs & Budget will have one colonel, three lieutenant colonels, and one commander...
...It certainly shows that they see this as a potential political problem, that they've moved into complete PR mode," says John Walters, a former acting drug czar under George Bush...
...With the 1996 campaign underway, and the president vulnerable to charges of ignoring the drug problem, something had to be done...
...But the larger effect of Clinton's about-face was to paint Republicans into a corner...
...It is by now widely known that Clinton, whose credibility on the drug issue took a near-fatal hit with the "didn't inhale" fiasco of the '92 campaign, cut the Office of National Drug Control Policy from a staff of 46 to 25 (see "Clinton's Phony Drug War," TAS, February 1994...
...The former surgeon general's most important contribution to solving the drug problem was a suggestion that perhaps drugsought to be legalized (the statement came shortly before her son's arrest on drug charges...
...He just didn't seem to care...
...He didn't push any old initiatives...
...The future general was always sensitive to social issues—he was an early and controversial advocate of bringing women into the active-duty armed forces—and stayed that way throughout his career...
...Clinton made virtually no public pronouncements on the drug issue...
...We need treatment, prevention...
...Demand reduction was in...
...America must never send its troops into battle without adequate resources to get the job done," Clinton said at McCaffrey's swearing-in, announcing that he had asked Congress for $3.4 million to hire eighty more people for the drug office—the very positions he had eliminated back in 1993...
...He even went on a much-publicized jog with the president a few days later...
...It may turn out that the much-heralded arrival of a drug-fighting general will mean nothing more than the continuation of Clinton's old, failed policy...
...That work, they argued, requires assets—like the Army and the Coast Guard—that only the federal government has, while demand reduction is best done at the state and local levels...
...THE PUBLIC POLICY by Byron York Bill's Four-Star General It was just another incident in the chaotic first months of the Clinton administration...
...Morale in the office plunged...
...But the general, Barry McCaffrey, confirmed the incident in an interview with the Washington Post...
...In the Democrats' eyes, he says, the ideal Republican drug war would be all soldiers and cops, with maybe a boot camp or two thrown in to satisfy treatment advocates...
...Typical was a Hill staffer who said, "General McCaffrey's appointment is a very positive step...
...Interdiction efforts slowly sank on the priority scale...
...The military emphasis left Democrats in Congress suspicious...
...There were signs late last year that Clinton was becoming uneasy with his record on drugs...
...The general, once the cause of BYRON YORK is a writer and television producer in Washington...
...So Clinton turned to the Pentagon for help...
...As profiled in James Kiffield's recent book on the Vietnam officer generation, Prodigal Soldiers, McCaffrey appears to be the perfect man for the job: he is both a war hero and a liberal...
...But on the other hand, Republicans had little choice but to express hope that it works...
...And so on...
...The new president reacted angrily, calling the story an "abject lie...
...42 May 1996 • The American Spectator sizes treatment and prevention programs...
...Those developments weren't lost on Republicans, who began to make political hay out of Clinton's failed drug efforts...
...A three-star army general, a decorated veteran of Vietnam serving as Pentagon liaison to the White House, passed a new Clinton staffer in the hall early one day in March 1993...
...The answer was audacious, even by this administration's standards: Bill Clinton turned to the military for salvation...
...It's a military coup," says one former drug office official, marveling at Clinton's dexterity...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 5
