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 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."

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