PORTRAIT OF A DRUG CZAR

Gen. Barry McCaffrey drives his government office like a lockstep battalion,
but some contend his ruthless schedule and egomanical ways are only hurting
his effort to bring sanity to America's drug policy.

Aug. 30, 2000 | It was 10 p.m. on a Friday that had started at 6 a.m. and
drug czar Barry McCaffrey, two aides, two federal marshals and a D.C. cop
were hurrying through Washington's National Airport to a lounge where
McCaffrey could sit comfortably for a radio interview.

As they swung around security to enter the lounge, rent-a-cops ordered
McCaffrey's assistant, who was carrying the drug czar's briefing materials
as well as his own bag, to go back through the metal detectors. At precisely
that moment, "McCaffrey looks up," recalled one person present at the scene,
"and says, 'Hey, how about some coffee?'"

As it turned out, McCaffrey may not even have been addressing the assistant
with his request, but the many 70-hour weeks the assistant had put in at the
drug czar's side had taken their toll. The assistant snapped. He dropped
McCaffrey's bag, went back through security, down the escalator and caught a
cab home. The following Monday, he told McCaffrey he wanted out.

Barry McCaffrey is the country's most-decorated general, its longest-serving
drug czar and, now, an architect of a U.S.-backed counterinsurgency campaign
that on Wednesday took him and President Clinton to Colombia. He's also a
fiercely meticulous employer who has always taken it hard when subordinates
leave his service.

"His attitude is, 'The cause is the ultimate.

I am the cause.

You have betrayed me; therefore, you're a traitor,'" says one former
intimate. Nevertheless, subordinates do leave -- in droves.

Since McCaffrey took over the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy in 1996, two-thirds of his staff has quit, according to a June report
from the General Accounting Office or GAO, Congress' investigative arm.

And the aide in the National Airport incident -- an active-duty lieutenant
colonel who had been McCaffrey's Sancho Panza for four years -- did not
escape what some former associates describe as McCaffrey's vengeful spirit.

On the aide's next evaluation, McCaffrey mentioned the airport incident --
thereby insuring the man would never make full colonel and essentially
ending his military career.

An Army major who took the job next got similar treatment after making a
personal decision that displeased McCaffrey. The major, who previously had
taught political science at West Point, lost out on a Pentagon job when
McCaffrey blackballed him, according to two sources.

He now teaches ROTC cadets in Louisiana.

To be sure, some who have served under McCaffrey have gone on to bigger and
better things with his blessing -- among them Chuck Blanchard, the former
legal counsel, now general counsel for the U.S. Army. Some members of
McCaffrey's staff attribute grousing about the general to the strains of
working the long hours under high stress that a White House job demands.

But interviews with nine former drug office staffers yielded a persistent
portrait of McCaffrey as an unnecessarily tough boss. "You're either with
Barry or against him," says one former official in the office, who like most
of the others spoke on the condition he not be identified. "Once he thinks
you're against him, he writes you off. You're toast." Adds another: "As
competent and smart and ambitious as he is, McCaffrey's really somewhat
childish in the way that he can be personally insulted by other people's
decisions." Adds a third: "I got tired of his egomaniacal, abusive style of
leadership." Robert Housman, who is in charge of strategic planning, said
McCaffrey was not available for comment.

The Colombia campaign brings McCaffrey full circle from 1996, when President
Clinton, in need of political cover on the drug issue, brought the general
up from Panama, where he'd led the hot war against drug smugglers as
commander of the U.S. military's Southern Command. During dozens of trips to
Colombia as a soldier, McCaffrey had seen firsthand that spraying crops and
arresting hoodlums, however noble and even necessary, "has little impact on
the heroin market in Baltimore," as he said at the time. Entering office, he
delighted drug policy reformers by emphasizing treatment, condemning harsh
sentencing guidelines that disproportionately hurt minorities and casting
aside the term "drug war." He preferred to call drug abuse a "malignancy"
whose cure would require a balanced and sustained attack.

Even the former staffers most furious at McCaffrey believe he has injected
more intelligence, energy and justice into the drug issue than any
predecessor. Despite his image as a hardcore drug buster, he has helped get
addicts easier access to methadone, pushed for drug courts that sentence
addicts to treatment instead of hard time and is seen as a friend by
treatment programs.

Bob Wiener, McCaffrey's press secretary, says that McCaffrey's advocacy of
treatment has been "like Nixon going to China. Who would have expected it of
a four-star general used to smashing up coke labs in the Andes?"

But like Nixon, these former staffers believe, McCaffrey has a tendency to
let his personality get in the way of policy.

They believe an overbearing arrogance has, to some extent, undermined the
humane and effective vision for drug policy that McCaffrey intended to bring
to the job.

For all McCaffrey's stated goals, the basic outlines of the drug war --
imprisonment, interdiction, zero tolerance and militarized counter-narcotics
in the Andes and Mexico -- haven't fundamentally changed since 1996. Law
enforcement still gets two-thirds of the anti-drug budget.

And for his signature effort, McCaffrey chose a federally funded $1 billion
media campaign, largely addressed to teenagers. Critics believe this hunk of
cash -- some of it used essentially to insert anti-drug propaganda into TV
and movie scripts -- could have been better put to use in treating the 5
million chronic drug users who cause the bulk of the crime and misery
attributed to drugs, and many of whom still can't find effective treatment
when they seek it. And in the end, McCaffrey will probably be most
remembered for the $1.3 billion aid package for Colombia, which even
supporters admit may just end up pushing the illicit drug industry's
production and distribution to areas outside Colombia's borders.

It's true that McCaffrey can't take all the blame -- or praise -- for
current drug policy. "He faced a Congress that was especially bad,"
acknowledges Kevin Zeese of Common Sense For Drug Policy, a leading
McCaffrey critic.

But the former staffers and outsiders who agreed with McCaffrey's assertion
that treatment, not punishment, should be at the center of our drug policy
believe that he failed his promise. As a hero of two wars, McCaffrey was the
real thing in a city full of posers. He could not have entered the drug
office with more prestige and clout.

His inability to separate the mission from the needs of his own inflated
ego, these former aides contend, weakened the mission.

"The number of things he got intellectually, his willingness to be
challenged, to read, to understand, was remarkable," says Carol A. Bergman,
who was McCaffrey's legislative aide for two years and now works the other
side of the fence, for a George Soros-funded lobbying group that focuses on
drugs and criminal justice. "But he has surrounded himself with yes men.
He's remarkably thin-skinned. I look at Barry McCaffrey as a lost
opportunity."

Barry McCaffrey was the military's youngest and most decorated four-star
general when he left the Army to join the White House in 1996. The son of a
famous general, he had shunned rear echelon positions to lead small units
into battle in Vietnam, where he was wounded three times and nearly died. In
the decade after the war ended, McCaffrey was among the rising mid-level
officers who rebuilt the Army, creating a much cleaner, professional force
that took care of its families, boosted racial and gender equality and
protected its soldiers in battle.

The Gulf War, with its ridiculously low allied casualty rates, reflected
that commitment. McCaffrey was Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's favorite division
commander during the war.

"In peacetime McCaffrey was "hell on his staff," as James Kitfield wrote in
the 1995 book "Prodigal Soldiers." But his messianic ways and withered left
arm, nearly lost in a 1969 gun battle with North Vietnamese soldiers, were
an inspiration to his troops in the desert during the Gulf War. The arm was
a symbol of McCaffrey's sacrifice and will power -- but it also had a
humanizing effect.

In person, McCaffrey can appear almost vulnerable -- slim and diminutive,
with his shy smile and panda-bear halo of eyebrows and white hair, his voice
uncannily reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart. Whatever one says about McCaffrey's
ego, it's undeniable that he and his family are throwbacks to an earlier
generation of public service.

His wife, Jill, was for several years the unpaid chairwoman of the armed
services branch of the Red Cross. His three children include an Army major,
a schoolteacher and a nurse.

Conservatives have always been surprised that McCaffrey, an admirer of
former President George Bush, has stayed so long with Clinton. But the two
jogging partners each got something from the relationship. McCaffrey,
obviously, bolstered Clinton's credibility on the subject of drugs.

As for Clinton: "He's good on the policy.

He's a kind person, a smart person, a good dad and he doesn't like these
drugs," McCaffrey told the National Review last year. That said, McCaffrey
didn't stand in the way when a senior aide, James McDonough, decided to
publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 1998 that trashed Clinton for
dallying with Monica while talking on the phone to congressmen about Bosnia.
McDonough subsequently left to become Florida's drug czar, under Gov. Jeb
Bush.

McCaffrey always said the drug issue was nonpartisan, and he put his
nonpartisan, military skills to use when he took over the drug office. He
quickly ramped up the staff from 40 to 150 -- including 30 commissioned and
noncommissioned military detailees whose services he demanded as a condition
of taking the job. McCaffrey's troops had experience in planning and were
accustomed to working the insane hours McCaffrey demanded. "They gave a very
different tempo and discipline to what was essentially a dispirited,
undermanned, confused group of civilians," McCaffrey said in an interview
published in June in Retired Officer magazine.

The 14 drug policy goals set by McCaffrey's predecessor, former New York
police chief Lee Brown, were narrowed to five, then broken into 31
subsidiary objectives. Performance measures were set up.

But while the military officers "entered the office thrilled at the chance
to be used and abused by a four-star general," as one longtime staffer said,
many of them left just as unhappy as their civilian counterparts. McCaffrey
had them over a barrel.

Being detailed to his office meant a pause in their careers.

If McCaffrey gave them bad marks, their careers were shot. And while they
were highly skilled, few had experience in drug policy, and that rubbed
their civilian office mates the wrong way.

"They'd just show up and I had to find something for them to do," one former
drug official said. "If they'd spent the previous year in a missile silo,
they weren't necessarily that good at human engineering."

What most irked the officers and their civilian counterparts was the
enormous resources that went into the planning and delivery of the office's
main weapon: McCaffrey himself.

McCaffrey's operation generated blizzards of paperwork, an onslaught of
memos, schedules and logistical planning, the bureaucratic equivalent of a
mechanized assault.

A lot of the busyness had to do with McCaffrey's personal schedule and, on
occasion, McCaffrey's personal beefs.

The resources dedicated to McCaffrey's schedule were enormous. "We had trip
planning meetings, trip tracking meetings, media meetings, meetings about
meetings," says one former staffer. Each event McCaffrey attended was
planned down to the minute. "There would be 20 people at these meetings
talking about when he was going to the bathroom, when they'd hand him what,
where he'd be seated to make sure he wasn't a potted palm," says one former
staffer. "These were all senior people, Ph.D.'s, GS-15s earning $75,000 a
year. The amount of time and money spent to set up these staged events was
incredible."

According to the GAO report, which was carried out by
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 17 full-time staffers are engaged in planning and
executing McCaffrey's personal schedule -- more than the number of staff
working on drug treatment and prevention. The GAO report was ordered by Rep.
Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., whose appropriations subcommittee oversees the drug
czar's office and has frequently clashed with McCaffrey. Their conflicts
have ranged from substantive issues such as his media campaign and
management style, to more personal issues involving McCaffrey's
high-handedness. The audit found that while the drug office "has a clearly
defined external mission," the difficulty of working for McCaffrey had led
to a brain drain that threatened the continuity of the effort after
McCaffrey's departure.

McCaffrey argued in his response to the GAO that his schedule was key to
making the drug office a "bully pulpit" in the fight against drug abuse. But
some aides said McCaffrey became so obsessed with his image that he lost
sight of long-term objectives. McCaffrey's job has never been never easy.
Larger, more powerful bureaucracies -- Pentagon, Justice, Health and Human
Services -- control most of the money for the drug fight.

Gradually, some of his aides say, he gave up the battles that might really
have transformed drug policy -- and grew increasingly obsessed with watching
his political flanks.

The crisis atmosphere that frequently enveloped the drug office was never
more evident than when McCaffrey learned earlier this year that Seymour
Hersh was writing a piece critical of McCaffrey for the New Yorker.
McCaffrey and his staff sent three separate letters to scores of former
McCaffrey associates, warning them that Hersh wasn't reliable. The campaign
doesn't seem to have succeeded, considering the number of three-star
generals and active-duty soldiers quoted by name in the May 22 article, in
which Hersh presented strong evidence that McCaffrey had provoked
unnecessary carnage in the Gulf War by picking a fight with a large column
of retreating Iraqis.

In a seemingly desperate move to clean his image, McCaffrey's office even
wrote to human rights groups like Amnesty International, asking them to help
discredit Hersh's portrayal.

To his credit, McCaffrey had frequently sought input from these activists on
rights abuses in Colombia and Peru. But now, to their chagrin, he was asking
them to publicly portray him as an all-around humanitarian. They
respectfully declined. "There's no way I can comment on what happened during
the Gulf War," said George Vicker of the Washington Office on Latin America.
This week, Newsweek reported that McCaffrey sometimes taped conversations
with journalists without telling them. (For the record, McCaffrey's office
has crossed swords with Salon over Salon stories detailing the drug office's
campaign to offer financial incentives to TV networks and print publications
to spread anti-drug messages.)

McCaffrey's political wariness was also reflected in a growing intolerance
for dissent or input from his staff, former aides said. In the beginning of
his tenure, McCaffrey met with hundreds of drug policy experts, and he
remains a prolific reader and debriefer.

But once he decided on policies, debate was shut off, these aides said. At
meetings, suggestions from experienced staff members were met with a look of
scorn.

"He had this way of totally annihilating you with two or three words," one
staffer says. Expressions like "chewed his head off" and "chewing on people"
come up in discussions of McCaffrey, as if he were a character from a Goya
painting. "They teach you at West Point to be out front leading the troops,"
says a former public affairs official who was generally happy working for
McCaffrey, "but I was also taught to get people more involved.

He'd be more effective if he didn't try to control everything."

Nor, as time went on, did McCaffrey encourage input from activists who he
happened to disagree with. In part, this was just politics. Conservatives in
Congress might have killed him if, for example, he attended the meeting with
George Soros that Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., once attempted to arrange.

But critics of U.S. drug policy were bothered by the verbal and bureaucratic
firepower McCaffrey unleashed on those who opposed his viewpoints.

For instance, McCaffrey has hawkishly opposed the medicinal marijuana
initiatives passed around the country, seeing them as a stalking horse for
legalization of cannabis.

After California passed a compassionate use initiative in 1996, McCaffrey
warned doctors in the state that their privileges to prescribe narcotics
would be stripped by the DEA if they prescribed or recommended marijuana
use. In July 1998, as part of the anti-pot campaign, the drug czar claimed
that Holland, a country with liberal drug laws, had a murder rate double
that of the United States. In fact, although robberies have increased in the
Netherlands since pot was made widely available in the late 1980s, the
country's murder rate is scarcely a quarter of the U.S. rate. McCaffrey
never corrected himself.

When Gary Johnson, New Mexico's maverick Republican governor, spoke in favor
of decriminalization, McCaffrey flew out to the state and claimed that
Johnson had said "heroin is good."

"He had a mantra -- 'Frequently wrong, but never in doubt,'" Bergman
recalls. "He said that all the time."

Although McCaffrey was cordial toward outside critics, he wasn't willing to
openly debate them in a forum that might have encouraged broader thinking
about drug issues. "The guy does not debate.

He's pulled out of TV programs when he heard I would be there," says Ethan
Nadelmann of the Lindesmith Center, a Soros-funded policy institute that
favors drug decriminalization. "He'll never get himself into a situation
where he's debating anyone who knows anything about the subject."

McCaffrey showed a general reluctance to share podiums with other opinions.
Cabinet members typically invite members of Congress to events they are
holding in the member's home district.

Not so McCaffrey, according to a former legislative aide. If the drug czar
was planning a speech in Massachusetts, for example, "I'd say, Senator
Kennedy is going to want to speak at this event, and he'd say, 'I don't
care, it's my event.' So then we'd notify the congressman [or senator] about
the event, but we wouldn't invite them. Occasionally we'd have the heartburn
of someone saying, 'I'd like to be part of the event,' and we'd say, 'Sorry,
it's all set up already -- but the general can meet you for coffee at the
airport.'"

For this and more mundane reasons, McCaffrey tinkered endlessly with his
schedule. "It's a joke," another former staffer said. "His trip itineraries
were redone a dozen times a day. Reprinted each time. Six times a day he'd
change his 10-month personal calendar.

Each time it was photocopied and handed out. The minor point here is the
amount of trees butchered.

The bigger point is the inordinate time, talent, energy and resources that
went to making him comfortable." Sometimes staffers would be called in
Saturdays to do logistics for one of the innumerable military events
McCaffrey attended, annual reunions of retired 82nd Airborne officers and
the like. Although McCaffrey's staff passed out drug office literature at
these events, they really had nothing to do with drug policy, and much to do
with promoting McCaffrey's image.

"It's all for the mission but not for McCaffrey of course," one former
military man said with a shrug. "It happens that McCaffrey is the messiah,
carrying the banner forward.

And he believes that. He could take a lie detector test on it. And he may be
right -- at least some of the time."

Over the past years the drug office, at taxpayer expense, has distributed
thousands of copies of a letter exchange between McCaffrey and Daniel
Garcia, who served as a platoon leader under McCaffrey in Vietnam and went
on to become a Warner Bros. executive.

The letters, which originally ran in Army magazine, contain raw and
terrifying accounts of battles the two men fought together.

But they have nothing to do with drugs.

Rob Housman, one of McCaffrey's senior aides, says such handouts help create
"a branding effect -- creating name recognition for the anti-drug effort."
The letters "establish McCaffrey as a role model.

Kids these days are looking for heroes, and when they see what this man has
done in his life, their eyes light up. He's not a manufactured hero, he's
someone who really stands for something. And that has impact on the
substance of the message he's trying to get across."

But the letters seem equally important in allowing McCaffrey to extol
himself. Garcia's letter is a paean to McCaffrey's bravery and
determination, his skill and devotion to human life amid a sea of slaughter.
When he refused McCaffrey's offer of promotion to lieutenant, "You said you
understood," Garcia writes. "I remember seeing your pain, your isolation,
the humanity in your eyes and in the expression on your face ... From you I
learned that leadership, particularly in times of great crisis, is a
demanding and isolating experience."

It may be this sense of duty and isolation, at once paternal and
charismatic, that has allowed McCaffrey to connect solidly with one his most
weighty political constituencies -- former drug addicts and the people who
minister to them. In writing this story I spoke with six drug treatment
activists.

While some grumbled about inadequate funding, and McCaffrey's opposition to
federal needle exchange programs, they were nearly unanimous in their
appreciation of McCaffrey himself.

"I think he's a great guy," says Peter Kerr, a former New York Times
reporter who works for Phoenix House, the country's largest residential drug
treatment operator. "I've taken him to our facilities when there are no
reporters around and he watches and listens and asks questions. He talks
straight here."

McCaffrey has spoken cogently and movingly on the need to treat addiction as
an illness rather than a moral failing.

And he seems to understand that "treatment," as former Nixon administration
drug aide Jerome Jaffe said, "is the lubrication that keeps the wheels of
justice from grinding so excessively on the citizenry."

Under McCaffrey, treatment money -- including research -- grew by $733
million from 1996 through fiscal year 2001, an average of $197 million per
year. It was significant growth, though slower than under the Bush
administration -- when it increased $305 million per year. In the meantime,
the number of drug addicts has stayed about the same, as has the gap between
those who want and can get treatment.

Some of McCaffrey's decisions sit uneasily with his stress on the public
health aspects of drug abuse.

In 1997, as President Clinton, under the urging of Donna Shalala, was about
to approve federal support for needle exchanges, McCaffrey squashed the
idea. Although dirty needles are responsible for half the new AIDS cases in
America each year, McCaffrey was not convinced needle exchanges were an
effective way to stop AIDS, Housman says, though he "supports funding for
needle exchanges if local communities want to fund them."

The biggest increase in treatment under McCaffrey has been carried out
through the justice system.

Federal prisons currently provide more than 10,000 inmates with residential
drug treatment -- compared to 1,135 treated behind bars in 1992. Attorney
General Janet Reno, with McCaffrey's support, has funded more than 500 drug
courts, which have successfully lowered recidivism by giving arrested
addicts the choice of treatment or jail. Still, only a fraction of the
estimated 1.2 million people behind bars with drug problems are offered
treatment. And while treatment advocates believe the drug courts are a good
way of breaking the cycle of arrest, prison time and drug abuse, some
consider it odd that for a poor addict seeking treatment today, committing a
crime may be the quickest way to get into a clinic.

"There aren't nearly enough beds on the outside, especially for adolescents
or women with children.

Once you get into the system, people care about doing something because
you're a 'threat to society' who will 'cost society money,'" says Linda Wolf
Jones of Therapeutic Communities of America. "They don't stop to think that
if you can stop someone before they enter prison, it will cost society even
less."

One can hardly blame McCaffrey for all of this. From the start, aides say,
he could see that shifting the drug war's focus to treatment was a
non-starter in the Gingrich-Hatch-Delay Congress. Instead, he decided to
focus hardest on prevention -- the other prong of the "demand" side of
drugs.

That's what led to the youth media campaign, with its offers of lucrative ad
space and time to media companies that run politically correct drug abuse
images.

Unlike the other parts of the drug war, the media campaign is run directly
out of McCaffrey's office.

Many of McCaffrey's anti-drug messages are awfully similar to the ones
broadcast under GOP administrations. Instead of, "This is your brain, this
is your brain on drugs," with eggs sizzling in a skillet, there's a
self-referential replacement that depicts a young woman taking a skillet --
representing heroin -- to a raw egg, representing the brain, and a room full
of dishes -- representing your family, job, future, etc. Other ads reinforce
the idea that parents worried about drug use need to spend time with their
kids -- a wholesome and truthful enough concept, but not one that a drug
czar can back up with funding.

Last year, in a front-page USA Today headline and elsewhere, McCaffrey
trumpeted a 13 percent reduction in teenage drug use in 1998. Statistics to
be released Thursday are expected to show a continued decline in drug use.
But it takes a real optimist -- or an opportunist -- to attribute all of
this to McCaffrey's media campaign.

Although youth drug use did fall from 1997 to 1998, according to federal
surveys, it was still higher than it had been in 1996. According to data in
the most recent strategy report put out by McCaffrey's office, in 1996 7.1
percent of teenagers had smoked dope in the past 30 days. In 1998, the
figure jumped to 8.3 percent.

In cocaine use the rise was even more dramatic, with the percentage rising
from .6 in 1996 to .8 in 1998. Meanwhile, attitude surveys showed that while
more eighth graders than four years ago regarded drug-taking as risky, fewer
12th graders believed that.

Does this mean that the media campaign's targeting of middle-schoolers has
been effective, as McCaffrey argues -- or that 12th graders are more
sophisticated consumers of media?

Or that drug abuse, which has always had cyclical trends, has simply leveled
off? In some drug categories, the leveling off of use began even before
McCaffrey took office. In others, such as methedrine and ecstasy, use is
still increasing.

Once, McCaffrey hoped that the drug office would be a steppingstone for him
to become someone's vice presidential candidate.

More recently, he looked into running for Senate from Virginia, but was
turned off by the fundraising, according to one former intimate.

This same person believes McCaffrey would stay in the drug office if Al Gore
offered him the job. The two are said to get along OK, although Gore,
notably, did not mention progress against drug abuse in his acceptance
speech last week.

"Life without sergeants," McCaffrey told Retired Officer magazine, "is
brutish and mean. That's my strongest impression of being a civilian."

Jerome Jaffe, whose federal treatment program was chronicled in Michael
Massing's recent book "The Fix," was running a small methadone program in
Illinois when President Nixon made him the country's first drug czar in
1971. Jaffe, recently retired, has a good impression of McCaffrey. But he
recalls with a laugh that when he was the czar, "I use to make my own
schedules. But then again, I was an assistant professor from Chicago, not
a four-star general. My expectations were somewhat lower. I carried my own
bag."

Perhaps the next drug czar won't have as much baggage.