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Saturday, Nov 21, 2009
Gen. Barry McCaffrey drives his government office like a lockstep battalion, but some contend his ruthless schedule and egomaniacal 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."
