Retired Adm. Daniel J. Murphy, chief of staff to Vice President George Bush from 1981 to 1985 and an architect of the Reagan administration’s efforts to halt drug traffic from Central America, has died. He was 79.
The career naval officer died last Friday in Rockville, Md., of a stomach aneurysm.
Adm. Murphy, a former commander of the Navy’s 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean, was the first to become a four-star admiral without graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md. He was also the chief deputy when Bush was director of the CIA.
Born in New York, Adm. Murphy attended St. John’s University in New York and graduated from the University of Maryland.
He was sometimes described by detractors as “a political admiral, not a combat admiral.” He worked for Republican and Democratic secretaries of defense–Melvin Laird, Elliot Richardson and Harold Brown–as well as Bush. When he was named to head the vice president’s staff soon after the 1980 election, he described himself as “purely apolitical” and said Bush’s staff would have to “look for political wisdom someplace else.”
In 1984, Adm. Murphy served Reagan as well as Bush as director of the White House Drug Policy Task Force. It launched an all-out interdiction effort against boats and planes ferrying illicit drugs into the United States.
Adm. Murphy left the Bush camp in 1985 as it began gearing for the presidential run, and he became an international business consultant.
He was without official portfolio in 1987 when he made two controversial visits to Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, later convicted on drug-related charges.
Adm. Murphy was accompanied on one trip by South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park, a central figure in a congressional bribery scandal in the late 1970s. The admiral said they were representing businesses interested in stabilizing the Panamanian economy.
In 1992, Adm. Murphy testified in Noriega’s trial on narcotics and money-laundering charges linked to the shipment of marijuana and cocaine into the United States. He said Noriega and Panama had “cooperated in all of our requests to board Panamanian vessels on the high seas” during the U.S. effort to block drug shipments.
