Good evening. This is the first time since taking the oath of office that I felt an issue

was so important, so threatening, that it warranted talking directly with you, the American

people. All of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs.

It was September 5, 1989, and President George H. W. Bush was giving his first nationally

televised speech from the Oval Office, rallying the public behind a major new offensive in

the drug war. And to hammer home his message, the President's speech writers came up with

a dramatic touch that nobody was expecting. Little more than a minute into that speech,

Bush suddenly reached under his desk and pulled out a plastic bag with a white chunky substance,

clutching it as he displayed it for the cameras.

This is crack cocaine. Seize the few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just across

the street from the White House. It could easily have been heroin or PCP. It's as innocent

looking as candy, but it's turning our cities into battle zones and it's murdering our children.

Let there be no mistake. This stuff is poison.

That bag of crack certainly got attention, but not in the way the President or his speech

writers had expected. White House officials had at first claimed that this crack had been seized

in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House as part of an undercover drug buy.

But 17 days after the speech, the Washington Post revealed that the whole thing was a setup.

The President's speech writers had come up with the idea, thinking that holding up a bag of

crack was the perfect prop to illustrate that the drug problem was spreading everywhere across

America right up to the doorsteps of the White House. But as the Post reported, there hadn't been

any crack dealing in Lafayette Park. So to match the words crafted by the speech writers,

federal drug agents were forced to lure a suspected teenage drug dealer from northeast

...