WASHINGTON -- A week after Mike Espy was sworn in as the nation's first African-American and first Southern agriculture secretary, he was on a plane to the Pacific Northwest, which was reeling from a deadly outbreak of food poisoning from fast-food hamburgers.
He met with the families of children who had died, called for reforms of the meat-inspection system and, in a political culture that is fast to anoint heroes and villains, was quickly pegged as a rising star of the Clinton Cabinet.
A year and a half later, with the early raves diluted by some disenchantment, the soft-spoken former Mississippi congressman is struggling to hold onto his standing, his integrity, perhaps even his job, as an independent counsel is about to investigate him for cozying up to companies his department oversees.
The independent counsel, to be appointed by the same judicial panel that recently named a new Whitewater prosecutor, will examine whether Mr. Espy improperly accepted sports tickets, travel and lodging from companies such as Tyson Foods Inc., an Arkansas firm that has become the world's largest poultry processor and has close ties to President Clinton.
The probe, along with an investigation by the Office of Government Ethics requested by the White House, will also examine whether Mr. Espy's relationship with Tyson led to less-stringent regulation of the poultry industry.
Mr. Espy, at 40 the youngest member of the Cabinet, has said he reimbursed Tyson for all gifts and denies suggestions that he was lenient on the chicken industry.
"All of this can be explained," he said this week. "I have done nothing wrong. I'm sure I'll be cleared."
But the ethics cloud has been disturbing for a man who brazenly lobbied President-elect Clinton for the Cabinet post, a man who stood before TV cameras on Christmas Eve in 1992 and dedicated his appointment to his late father, who had worked as a "Negro" county extension agent in the then-segregated Agriculture Department.
Aside from tarnishing his own image, the allegations have embarrassed an administration already besieged by one independent counsel and several ethical missteps.
"I'd be less than honest with you to say I'm not troubled by it," Mr. Espy said on his way to a conference earlier in the week.
Until recently, criticism of Mr. Espy has been gentle.
A low-key, likable guy, a post civil rights-era politician who was Mississippi's first black congressman since Reconstruction, he has proved a popular figure on the cattle ranches and cornfields and in poor rural areas.
Unlike previous secretaries, who have been mostly devoted to agribusiness, Mr. Espy, who hails from a prominent Delta family, has won the praise of small-time farmers, consumer and nutrition advocates.
'Most farmer-friendly'
"He is the most farmer-friendly, pro-active secretary we've had in a couple decades," says Larry Mitchell, a lobbyist for the National Farmers Union, pointing to the secretary's ban on farm home foreclosures and promotion of international markets.
Farm officials say his swift response to the E. coli outbreak in the Northwest, which killed four children, restored public confidence meat inspections and prevented consumption from declining.
But Mr. Espy, a lawyer and moderate Democrat who spent six years on Capitol Hill, has come under increasing attacks for failing to see his initiatives through. His department contains the nation's fourth-largest bureaucracy, overseeing everything from farms to forestry to food stamps.
"Most of his accomplishments have been in press releases," says James C. Webster, an assistant agriculture secretary in the Carter administration who now publishes an industry newsletter.
rTC Mr. Espy is given highest marks for increasing funds for the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, for a cost-saving plan to reorganize his department of 110,000 people and, unlike his predecessors, for putting food safety and nutrition at the top of his agenda.
But the reorganization is stalled in Congress, and some activists say the department's food-safety advocacy has been mostly lip service.
'Not accomplished much'
"I give him high marks for effort," says Carol Tucker Foreman, president of the Safe Food Coalition and a USDA assistant secretary under President Jimmy Carter. "But he has not done very well in getting his department organized and getting the right people in to make changes happen. So far, they have labored mightily and not accomplished much."
The most controversial food-safety issue -- the one at the heart of the impending investigations -- is meat and poultry inspection.
After the E. coli outbreak in January 1993, Mr. Espy immediately issued orders to hire 500 meat inspectors, to conduct surprise inspections of slaughterhouses, to put safe-handling labels on products and to tighten bacterial standards for beef.
Although he says the tighter regulations have cut down on contaminated beef, meat industry officials contend that the regulations have made no difference and fall short of the bold reforms that are needed.
Mr. Espy says now that his plan was to enforce the beef-inspection standards, in light of the hamburger-related deaths, and then create similar standards for the poultry industry, which had no such regulations.
But new poultry regulations did not emerge until last month -- months after allegations were publicized in newspapers that Mr. Espy had dropped plans for the standards at the urging of Tyson Foods President Don Tyson.
Wilson Horne, the recently retired deputy administrator for inspections, has said that Mr. Espy's former chief of staff, Ronald Blackley, told USDA inspection officials in March 1993 to halt work on poultry standards and to erase the computer records of it.
'Absolutely untrue'
"Absolutely untrue," Mr. Espy says of the suggestion that the poultry initiatives were stopped or slowed. "We have not slowed anything down. We have not delayed, we have not hindered, we have not stopped anything."
Then there are the alleged gifts Mr. Espy accepted from Mr. Tyson and only later reimbursed him for:
In May 1993, he and his companion, Patricia Dempsey (who has not paid back the favors), received a stay at a lakeside cottage and a plane ride from Arkansas to Washington.
In January this year, the couple received skybox tickets at a football playoff game.
The Tyson company has long been noted for its close ties -- and largess -- to Mr. Clinton, and its ability to win favorable regulatory treatment.
Environmentalists claim Mr. Clinton as governor allowed the poultry industry to dump its waste and thus pollute streams and a drinking-water supply.
Not only has Mr. Tyson been a Clinton patron, but the company's top lawyer, James Blair, turned $1,000 into $100,000 through commodities trades for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the late 1970s.
Ms. Foreman says the current ethical questions highlight the inherent conflict in a department that both promotes America's agricultural products and protects the public health.
She says Mr. Espy may have thought he was expected to hang out with industry titans like Mr. Tyson.
"Every morning, Mike Espy has to get out of bed, look himself in the mirror and say, 'Am I going to be the secretary in charge of selling chickens or the secretary in charge of protecting the public health?' In my mind, you can't do both things the right way. Espy's not a bad guy. He's in a basically impossible situation."
But Mr. Webster, who, as a Carter USDA official turned down a trip to Bimini that Mr. Tyson had offered him, says Mr. Espy's acceptance of gifts from a company the department oversees -- a possible violation of the Meat Inspection Act of 1907 -- suggests "a great depth of naivete."
The White House has been mildly supportive of Mr. Espy, saying it will reserve judgment until all the facts are known. On Thursday it banned political employees from accepting gifts from companies they regulate.
The harshest shots have come from Rod Leonard of the Community Nutrition Institute, a consumer advocacy group, who says: "He has to resign. He can't stay there having set that kind of example. Every inspector in a poultry plant will feel that, 'If the boss can do it, I can do it.' "