PRESIDENTIAL UNPARDONED

These Days, You Just Can't Hook Up With President George Bush's Hookup.

The single silliest prisoner of President George Bush's War on Drugs now
lives the American Dream—or so it seems, anyway—in a pea-soup-colored
two-story house with white shutters, a foreign car in the driveway, and a
picket—well, chain-link—fence in a close-in Washington suburb.

The house is home to Keith Timothy Jackson.

Jackson hasn't received any visits from former Bush drug czar William
Bennett. But he does get quite a few unsolicited calls from reporters like
myself. And he and members of his family give the Fourth Estate the same
treatment most homeowners give Jehovah's Witnesses selling the Watchtower:
They politely but swiftly shut the door.

The cold shoulder comes thanks to a chapter of Jackson's life that just
won't close. On Sept.1, 1989, Jackson, then 18, got entangled in D.C.'s
second most notorious drug bust. Lured to Lafayette Park, directly across
Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, Jackson unwittingly sold $2,400
worth of crack cocaine to an undercover federal agent.

Four days later, 3 ounces of that crack cocaine ended up in Bush's hands
for a national television audience: "This is crack cocaine seized a few
days ago by Drug Enforcement Administration agents across the street from
the White House," Bush lectured, holding up a plastic bag containing crack
for the cameras.

The Sept. 5, 1989, speech was Bush's most high-profile volley in the
ongoing spectacle known as the War on Drugs. Before that week, according to
the Washington Post, not one drug-related arrest had taken place in
Lafayette Park. Indeed, when the undercover federal agents called Jackson
to persuade him to move the sale to Bush's 'hood, Jackson didn't even know
where or even what the White House was, according to newspaper reports.

Needless to say, the staged arrest did little to address the underlying
causes of drug use: poor education, unemployment, and despair. But the
farce had serious implications for both the Spingarn High School senior and
the city. In the eyes of the American public, the nation's capital—arguably
the most powerful city in the world—had turned into a lawless,
drug-infested cesspool.

Three weeks after the president's address, police arrested Jackson for the
Lafayette Park sale as well as drug sales to federal agents on three prior
occasions. In total, Jackson faced five indictments. After his first trial
ended in a mistrial, he appeared before U.S. District Court Judge Stanley
Sporkin again. The media were camped outside the courthouse, but not for
Jackson: At the same time, D.C. Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr. was also facing a
jury of his peers for an even more infamous crack-cocaine arrest.

Jackson was convicted on three counts—he was acquitted on the White House
count—and received a 121-month sentence. "I still get a couple calls a year
[about Jackson]," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark J. Carroll, who served
as the government prosecutor in U.S. vs. Jackson. "They just want to know
what happened to him."

Like many District inmates in the federal system, Jackson bounced around
from Petersburg, Va., to Ashland, Ky., to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base,
N.C., and finally to Lewisburg, Pa. He was released from Lewisburg on Aug.
5, 1998. Today, no one's saying what he's up to. But it's a pretty safe bet
that he now knows where the White House is.

"If it wasn't for the White House sale, who would have cared?" says
Carroll. "It's just a mid-level dealer, after all."