Bill Clinton: “No, the Freeh memo, as I said, it was a memo by Mr.-- Louis Freeh to me arguing that the country had never…”

“No, the Freeh memo, as I said, it was a memo by Mr.-- Louis Freeh to me arguing that the country had never organized--the Federal Government had never been properly organized in terms of who had jurisdiction to do what in the drug war. And that's basically what it's about. And he argues for a reallocation of--he argued for a reallocation of authority, and I thought argued quite persuasively that we needed a way to coordinate this. The Vice President reviewed this as part of our reinventing Government review, particularly as it related to the drug czar. And one of the reasons I wanted a general who had worked on drug interdiction in as drug czar is to try to--to create a greater sense of coordination between what the domestic law enforcement agencies, the military, and all the people involved on the prevention and treatment side do together. And this is a problem that's been noted for--the first evidence we had goes back to President Johnson. And we're doing--we're trying to get all the people involved in it now to work together more closely than ever before. And I think General McCaffrey is in a unique position to get that done because of his--what he was doing before he became the drug czar. He was the head of the Southern Command, which meant he had responsibility for working with all these countries' military to try to stop drugs from coming into our country in the first place. But this has been--this issue has been debated literally going back to the Johnson administration. I've seen documents on it going back to then. And I believe what we're doing now will get us better results than we've had before. And I think that we have to try to do this in a way that recognizes that all these agencies have other legitimate and conflicting interests. So it's very difficult to have, for example, all the domestic and all the foreign issues related to drugs under one particular agency, but it is important to have them all coordinating and working together instead of at cross purposes, which is something people have complained about from the inside of this, literally going, I know, back to the Johnson administration. So we're trying to work it out, and we've tried to respond appropriately.”