John Walters and His Critics
EDITORIAL John Walters and His Critics Every student of American politics is familiar with the life-cycle biology of "borking," that process by which nominees for high national office are nowadays...
...Keith Stroup calls convicted cocaine dealers "political prisoners...
...You can crunch the numbers any which way you please, in percentage terms or in simple raw dollars—it makes no difference...
...So Massing is eager to portray Walters as a chest-thumping, Wild West avenger, a man "captivated by the glamour and romance" of a Peruvian-jungle drug war while contemptuous of all those lily-livered doctors and teachers here at home...
...As will the Senate as a whole...
...When they meet John Walters, they will find that he shares those views in every important respect...
...And soon enough a giant moth of falsity has flown across the Washington sky, descended on our would-be public servant, and swallowed his reputation whole...
...Some of them know it, too, and simply don't care...
...Knowledge of which allegations McCaffrey falsely denied to investigators from the General Accounting Office when they first questioned him about the matter...
...And it might profit Keith Stroup . . . well, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws is pretty much beyond recovery, isn't he...
...It might profit the New York Times editorial page to look into this...
...McCaffrey, of course, was federal drug czar for the final five years of the Clinton presidency...
...John Walters is the best qualified man in America for the job...
...John Walters happens to be someone who disagrees with Massing about the value and enforcement of our narcotics laws...
...On the other hand, money isn't everything...
...Odd coming from him, don't you think, given the budget numbers we've reviewed above...
...We can spare you the trouble: Though he is careful never to say so explicitly, Massing favors a drastic relaxation of existing criminal penalties against the wholesale trafficking and retail sale of mind-altering substances...
...And they agreed about things vastly more often than not...
...Maybe, for instance, Gen...
...Perhaps he has me confused with someone else...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...For proof, Massing urges us to study Walters's previous stint at the White House drug office—as chief of staff and deputy director under William Bennett during the first Bush administration...
...And everything they complain he is not...
...I rather doubt that I was given in those days to boasting about my daring feats on secret missions as a Navy SEAL...
...Not to mention McCaffrey's initial (also false) denial that one of the ad campaign's outside publicity consultants— on a $10 million per annum taxpayer retainer— had given him some on-the-house damage-control assistance when the New Yorker published an incendiary story about the general's battlefield conduct during the Persian Gulf War...
...In its larval stage, this cartoon begins a worm-crawl through the news pages—reported, altogether without verification, as what "critics say...
...His criticism of Walters is highly unusual, after all...
...Especially his insinuation that Bush administration drug policy, which Walters did more than anyone to craft and implement on a day-to-day basis, consciously and deliberately neglected federal support for medical treatment of addicts...
...Which is the situation retired general Barry McCaffrey may soon find himself in if he isn't careful...
...If I'm not mistaken, and surviving documentary evidence should confirm the fact, the man John Walters hired as his top drug-office aide in 1989 was me...
...When Biden was Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee during the first Bush administration, the two men worked together closely and cooperatively and productively...
...There are people who now wish such a fate on John IP Walters, announced last Thursday as President Bush's choice to lead the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy...
...These men and women, too, have carefully considered views on the subject...
...In the service of which goal, he has consistently derided any who disagree with him as insensitive to the tragedy of addiction and stingy about providing medical treatment to its victims...
...McCaffrey would welcome national attention to the fact that the Justice Department is still reviewing serious allegations of billing fraud concerning the billion-dollar campaign of anti-drug television ads he designed and oversaw...
...Nobody takes Keith Stroup seriously...
...No man who thinks militarized law enforcement is the solution should be next up for Barry McCaffrey's old job...
...Or maybe, having already created plenty of mess for John Walters to clean up, it would be better for Barry McCaffrey simply to leave the stage...
...maybe there is some better lens through which we should view the general's tenure as drug czar...
...It is an attempted borking of truly unsurpassed audacity—not so much a clever distortion of Walters's views and record as an outright upending of the truth about him...
...Back then, according to Massing's hatchet-job profile of the soon-to-be czar in the May 6 Washington Post, Walters went so far as to hire for his "top aide" a "former Navy SEAL who loved to boast about his daring feats on secret missions...
...I doubt it because I can't recall ever being a Navy SEAL at all...
...Which study revealed that our outgoing drug czar had let wither his agency's drug-treatment division, never bothering to hire a permanent director, while assigning an astonishing 17 full-time staffers to the management of his media bookings and speechmaking schedule...
...And we expect they will approve him...
...Given twice as much time in office, succeeding Clinton administrations barely managed to cough up half as much new drug treatment money...
...Says Barry McCaffrey...
...It is his opponents who reflect the "growing recognition" of mainstream drug-abuse experts, a Times lead editorial has lately suggested, and it is John Walters who represents the "discredited" past...
...But even what limited success Walters's antagonists will have achieved along the way represents a distressing commentary on the intelligence and decency of contemporary American discourse...
...If Michael Massing imagines that panel's Democrats to be his natural allies, he misjudges and insults them...
...And perhaps it is a lie what Massing says about my friend's adherence to the "'kingpin' theory of drug enforcement," a Justice Department strategy Walters actually never placed much faith in...
...For as this magazine is unusually well-positioned to attest—many of the staff are friends of his and more than one of us are his former colleagues, too—John Walters is exactly nothing that his critics contend he is...
...And that is that...
...McCaffrey would welcome national attention to a little noticed Price Waterhouse Coopers study of his White House office released last June...
...And it will most probably remain so, throughout and beyond a pending Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Walters's nomination...
...During his time [in the drug czar's office], federal spending on treatment did increase some," Massing allows, "but not nearly enough to meet the demand...
...It might profit certain "free market conservatives" we know, before next they sneer at John Walters's resistance to drug legalization, to have another peek at their Wealth of Nations—where they will discover that the unregulated production and consumption of deadly poison isn't quite what Adam Smith had in mind...
...The United States Senate declares the nominee's carcass unsuitable for government employment...
...Then consider that the mud-slinging of these ought-to-be-marginal figures has somehow won endorsement by no less than the New York Times...
...He knows John Walters very well...
...I don't remember it that way—and here it is necessary to set aside our magazine's customary institutional voice and speak in the first person...
...They will not get their way—we're confident that a large, bipartisan majority of the Senate will instead enthusiastically confirm Walters to the post, for a series of excellent reasons we will come back to in a moment...
...Maybe, on closer inspection, it really will prove to be the case that Barry McCaffrey has done more to reduce American demand for dangerous drugs—rather than just "lock people up"—than this John Walters character could hope to achieve in a million years...
...EDITORIAL John Walters and His Critics Every student of American politics is familiar with the life-cycle biology of "borking," that process by which nominees for high national office are nowadays targeted for career-destroying character assassination...
...Every other Democrat now serving on the Judiciary Committee also serves on a Senate appropriations panel with major responsibility for some aspect of federal drug policy...
...Joseph Biden, for example, has worked as long on drug policy, and understands the issue as comprehensively, as any other current senator...
...Polemicist Michael Massing, for example...
...McCaffrey is also the fellow who's been most prominent these past few weeks, in newspaper interviews and on national television, expressing Michael Massing-like "worries" that John Walters just doesn't get it about drug treatment...
...Perhaps it is a lie what Massing says about Walters's responsibility for the Peruvian air force's shoot-down policy, which was not instituted, in real-world history, until the Clinton administration...
...From fiscal years 1989 through 1993, the Bush administration drug budgets John Walters supervised produced the greatest expansion of federal support for treatment services ever...
...Keith Stroup is a man in his late 50s who still believes that smoking pot can be good for you...
...Consider who these people are, just for starters: a small handful of doctrinaire journalectuals, a smaller handful of misguided libertarians, an even smaller handful of professional dope smokers—and one other man, John Walters's highly self-interested immediate predecessor in the White House drug czar's office...
...This is worse than ignorance...
...Thus endowed with the requisite credibility as a public "controversy," the slander dujour next forms itself into a pupa of talking points and "fact" sheets, available for cultivation by those members of Congress who do not belong to the nominating president's political party...
...First there comes the insect's egg: a cartoon account, hatched by some ideological enemy, of his intended prey's mind and work...
...Federal drug policy has traditionally been a thoroughly bipartisan and relatively uncontentious enterprise...
...That's rich...
...Did increase some...
...Perhaps much of what Michael Massing says about John Walters is a lie...
...Massing has been writing about federal drug policy for more than a decade, during which he has masterfully disguised a deep and stubborn bias on the subject beneath mountains of leaden prose and "research...
...Keith Stroup says it is John Walters who is—get this—"extreme" and "out of touch with the attitudes of the American public...
...Or maybe Gen...
Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 34
