Bartels, John

John Ries Bartels, Jr. (1934–), served as the first administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from October 1973 to May 1975. He had previously served as the Deputy Director of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), which was folded into the DEA upon that agency's creation by President Nixon's signing of the 1973 Reorganization Plan #2.

The son of federal judge John Ries Bartels, Sr., and Anne Wilson, Bartels was born in Brooklyn, New York, educated in prep schools like the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, and attended Harvard University for both his bachelor's degree and his law degree. As a young assistant U.S. Attorney, the mystique of Bartels's fast-rising star (at age 35 he headed the Justice Department's New Jersey organized crime task force) was undercut by his sardonic, self-deprecating sense of humor—he was known to answer his phone with the words, “Fearless leader speaking.” When ODALE was formed in 1972 to coordinate assistance from the federal government to local law enforcement in drug cases, Bartels was transferred from Justice to serve as its deputy director.

Bartels's tenure at ODALE was short-lived, as the agency's director, Myles Ambrose, soon suggested the creation of a single federal drug law enforcement agency, rather than dividing duties among ODALE, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), and other federal offices. The DEA, established a year and a half after ODALE's creation, was soon formed to streamline federal drug enforcement and end a long-running feud between BNDD and the Customs Service. Much of this flurry of bureaucracy-making activity had resulted from the explosion of recreational drug use in the 1960s, the perceived normalization of such drug use, and ambient uncertainty in how to best deal with it and with crimes related to the drug trade. A month after a 1971 Congressional report on heroin addiction among American soldiers in Vietnam, President Nixon declared the first “War on Drugs,” leading to the creation of these agencies. One reason Bartels was given his post first in ODALE and then in the DEA was because of his background in dealing with organized crime. Having reaped the benefits of the demand for illegal alcohol during Prohibition, organized crime groups were well-equipped to exploit and increase the demand for such other drugs as came along. In these early years of the DEA, the agents Bartels oversaw were drawn from the BNDD and ODALE, the CIA, and Customs.

Bartels's goals as the DEA's first administrator were to integrate these agents of disparate backgrounds into a cohesive group, and to restore public faith in the War on Drugs. Neither was an easy task; the BNDD and Customs in particular had taken very different approaches to their law enforcement mandates and had clashed regularly over this. To ease the transition, Bartels filled many administrative positions with Customs agents who would [Page 89]understand, and be respected by, the field agents working under them. Within a few months of the DEA's creation, Bartels oversaw the ceremony honoring the 40 men and women who had graduated from the agency's first Special Agent Basic Training Class. Early DEA achievements were similarly structural: the creation of the El Paso Intelligence Center to gather tactical intelligence near the Mexican border, and the development of the Drug Abuse Warning Network in-house by the agency's Office of Science and Technology.

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