Word: generality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...name it, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has an opinion, which he will give you with great certainty at high speed. There has never been a Surgeon General like him, not even Luther Terry, who slapped warnings on cigarette packs 24 years ago. It's a fair guess that Terry was never air-kissed by Elizabeth Taylor, the butt of jokes in Johnny Carson's monologue, was never a visitor to the set of Golden Girls, and never lectured Hollywood producers about showing safe sex in their programs. Antismoking is a small part of Koop's crusade; AIDS, child abuse...
...13th Surgeon General, whose second term runs through the end of the year, almost never got a chance to don a uniform. When Koop, a retired pediatric surgeon, and his wife Betty moved to Georgetown in early 1981 to await his confirmation, they became proof of the old saw that if you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog. The process, expected to take a few days, turned into nine nightmarish months of name-calling and personal attacks, as liberals stalled his confirmation. He was called a right-wing crank, a prolife nut, a religious zealot, inexperienced, Dr. Unqualified...
Koop was expected to be a figurehead like most Surgeons General, with little authority and few staff or duties, but he quickly shook things up. He insisted that the commissioned corps of public-health officers wear uniforms. Then the 6-ft. 1-in., 210-lb. doctor, whose taste for red meat and martinis keeps him from losing his paunch, pronounced the U.S. a country of fatsoes who would have to give up cholesterol in favor of fiber. When Koop found out that the tobacco companies had fought hardest over the years against the Government's calling nicotine addictive, he stated...
...above gimmicks. Pushing his slogan "A Smoke-Free Society by the Year 2000," he adopted a kindergarten class whose students pledged not to start smoking ("Like Communists," he says, "you have to get them when they're young"), and everywhere he goes he hands out buttons saying THE SURGEON GENERAL PERSONALLY ASKED ME TO QUIT...
...Koop might have remained just another bureaucrat if it had not been for AIDS. As the disease grew to near epidemic proportions, the Administration had to do something. Conservatives breathed a sigh of relief when in 1986 the President handed the job to the Fundamentalist Christian Surgeon General...