Bush Honors Slain Drug Agent, Warns Traffickers

President Bush paid tribute Thursday to an undercover federal narcotics agent slain last week during a drug investigation in a desolate stretch of Staten Island and delivered “some news to the bad guys: Hunting season is over.”

Bush, using the sort of get-tough language that was a foundation of his presidential campaign last year, said in a meeting with the slain agents’ colleagues in the Drug Enforcement Administration: “Drug dealers need to understand a simple fact: You shoot a cop and you’re going to be severely punished--fast. And, if I had my way, I’d say with your life.”

Day of Defeat

However, on the day in which the President suffered the first serious political defeat of his young Administration--the rejection of his nomination of John Tower to be defense secretary--the journey to New York offered but a reprise of the symbolism of the political campaign.

Bush addressed a United Negro College Fund dinner also. In his remarks to the fund’s 45th anniversary dinner, he made no reference to a controversy this week involving Lee Atwater, one of his closest campaign advisers, and students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., one of the beneficiaries of the fund.

Atwater resigned Tuesday from the university’s board of trustees after students occupied a campus building to protest his recent appointment. Atwater, Bush’s campaign director, was seen by the students as an architect of the campaign’s emphasis on crime and what critics viewed as an undertone of racism.

The trip to New York was intended to be the centerpiece in a week in which Bush sought to turn the public spotlight on the scourge of drugs in the United States and the Administration’s efforts to attack the problem.

But a speech he delivered Monday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which he introduced the subject, drew little attention. Then, a trip to Pennsylvania and Delaware, during which the focus also was to have been on drugs, was canceled because of a snowstorm.

Today, the President plans to meet with Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, who has just completed a visit to Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. Thornburgh met with leaders there on efforts to eradicate cocaine crops.

On the day that the President delivered his anti-drug message here, Robert M. Morgenthau, the longtime Manhattan district attorney and a Democrat, complained in a column published in one of the city’s newspapers that “this ‘scourge’ will not stop until we match our rhetoric with resources.”

Bush said in his speech to the drug agents that the budget he sent to Congress on Feb. 9 seeks a $1-billion increase in federal funding for anti-drug efforts.

But, Morgenthau wrote in the New York Times, the budget seeks “only $150 million for state and local narcotics law enforcement--that is, $75 million less than it did in 1986.”

Met Agent’s Widow

During his visit to the DEA’s New York headquarters in Manhattan, Bush met with Mary Jane Hatcher. Her husband, agent Everett Hatcher, was shot to death on Feb. 28 after he had radioed to other agents that he was on his way to meet a drug dealer.

The President told the drug agents and other law enforcement personnel that “drug traffickers used to know” they would be given the death penalty if they shot a police officer.

“But it’s been over 25 years since anyone has faced the death penalty in this state, and they may have gotten a little forgetful,” he said.