F. Edward Hebert-A Credit to His Race
Rapoport, Daniel
F. Edward HebrtA Credit to His Race by Daniel Rapoport Elliot Richardson, then Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, had sent over the draft of a veto message. So had Caspar...
...So overwhelming was the sentiment against the idea, so numerous, ideologically varied and potent were its opponents, that for 24 years virtually no one in Congress took it seriously except Hebert...
...Weeks went into months and no board of regents had been named...
...When, in early 1972, the Senate Armed Services Committee held hearings on the proposal, it discovered that the Administration was split on the merits of the medical school...
...Two weeks later Nixon signed the bill...
...The friend had managed to swing the Louisiana chapter of the AMA behind Hebert’s bill, the only state chapter in the association to back it...
...the AMA was against socialized medicine...
...At ten o’clock the following morning, Ehrlichman called Hebert to inform him that “the tracks were all clear” on the regents...
...Scholarship aid and funds for new construction were one thing, but operating an entire medical school was unthinkable...
...That generated much ho-hoing, with Nixon throwing up his hands as Hebert left the room and declaring, “I knew I shouldn’t have asked you...
...And Hebert responded, “I’ll make you a proposition you can’t turn down...
...In contrast to the tender deference once shown the AMA at congressional hearings, the tone of the Hebert hearings was all-out bear-baiting of organized medicine, a sport in which conservatives, liberals, and middle-of-theroaders all took part...
...H. R. Gross, that perennial nay-sayer, inquired about the medical school’s costs and questioned its need...
...Two events in 1970 abruptly reversed the odds in favor of the school...
...The change so mollified the critics, that when the @ scholarship legislation reached the floor it passed by voice vote, without a word of debate...
...Hebert has known Nixon since they served together on the old House Un-American Activities Committee during its 1948 investigation...
...Nor was there any meaningful opposition on the floor...
...The events that day, September, 21, 1972, went largely unnoticed by the press...
...Dominick referred to a denunciation of the plan by the National Academy of Sciences and noted that such liberals as Edward Kennedy and Jacob Javits were opposed to going ahead on the school without further study...
...After the signing of the bill, came the real action,” he told me...
...Instead, the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee went to the next ranking Democrat, Hebert . Laird Sees the Light Soon afterwards, the Pentagon had a sudden change of heart about the medical academy...
...It would be a cheaper and faster way to solve the problem...
...F. Edward Hebert, its principal sponsor...
...AMA) was of course still adamantly opposed to the idea, as were the spokesmen for the nation’s medical schools...
...They all said they’d carry the message...
...The other was the surprising Democratic primary defeat of Massachusetts congressman Philip Philbin, who would have been Rivers’ successor...
...Although Hebert has received increasing attention from the press recently, the medical school, his most audacious achievement and the one he is most proud of, has drawn scant attention in Washington...
...There’s no tacit approval about it...
...And F. Edward Hebert of Louisiana is a powerful committee chairman, as in “the powerful chairman of the House Armed Services Committee,” which he has been since 197 1. Although the 72-year-old Hebert has been in the committee-chairman business for a relatively short time and has been forced to prove his mettle during an era when reforms have cut down House chairmen a few notches, he has racked up enough accomplishments and displayed enough audacity to climb to the pinnacle of his profession...
...Fortunately, I had other means of access...
...Hebert also alluded to what he, in turn, was withholding, namely the procurement bill...
...Routinely the Defense Department was asked for its comments and just as routinely the Department sent back a short answer: the school wasn’t necessary...
...Yet as Hebert was to find out, even more formidable obstacles lay ahead...
...The Senate confirmed all nine by June 15, 1973...
...I told them that if the regents were not appointed I would not put in the procurement bill...
...They did...
...Les Aspin persuaded the House to lop off $1 billion from a $21-billion weapons bill-Hebert gets his way in the end...
...The discovery apparently entranced Hebert, and it has stayed in his mind ever since...
...In reality, things were moving precisely according to plan...
...I pay no attention to them...
...But the ritual continued...
...The Office of Management and Budget objected to the cost, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare felt that if there had to be a federal medical school it ought to be run by the department charged with managing government health activities...
...A West Point for Doctors Hebert had been pushing the medical school since 1947, when as a junior member of the Armed Services Committee he wondered aloud at a hearing one day why it was that military men had “spent billions of dollars to train men to kill and have spent nothing to train men to save lives...
...With Laird safely in the fold, Hebert got the ball rolling...
...He wrote a reply, thanking Nixon for his kind words and then bringing up the medical school...
...F. Edward HebrtA Credit to His Race by Daniel Rapoport Elliot Richardson, then Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, had sent over the draft of a veto message...
...When former Army Surgeon General Leonard Heaton appeared, the lawmakers greeted him as if he were their retired family practitioner, which in a sense he was...
...asked Nixon in mock exasperation...
...If the services wanted to develop their own supply of doctors, why not pay existing medical schools to do the job, giving them money to expand their facilities to handle increased enrollment...
...He called hearings, at which the military witnesses, as well as many members of the committee, took their cue and heaped praise on the legislation...
...So had Caspar Weinberger, from the Office of Management and Budget...
...The AMA and the Association of American Medical Colleges played the heavies at the hearings, reciting their Answers to Mav puzzle familiar objections...
...It had better be, the President Daniel Rapoport is a Washington writer and author of a forthcoming book on the House of Representatives...
...Can he read and write...
...I am 65 years old...
...One was the unexpected death of Armed Services Chairman Mendel Rivers...
...Even if Laird hadn’t been in Congress for 16 years, he would have been able to figure out that continued House support for the Administration’s military programs and Vietnam policy might be jeopardized by attacking the pet project of the new Armed Services Committee chairman...
...They felt that the concept had been studied long enough, and they insisted on going ahead with it now...
...Tacit appro Val ! ” exploded Hebert...
...But what did the AMA do...
...Conservatives saw the whole thing as a “boondoggle” and an unwarranted intrusion of the federal government into an area that always had been managed by the states and private institutions...
...A phone call or a letter was ruled out because it would be “screened” by John Ehrlichman or H. R. Haldeman, then in their last days of White House glory...
...The Armed Services chairman also expects the school to focus on such military-related medical problems as treating battlefield wounds and tropical diseases...
...Back in 1971 Rep...
...Hebert is a staunch defender of the man and his policies...
...Without Pentagon backing, Armed Services Committee chairmen, first Carl Vinson and then Mendel Rivers, saw no point in pushing the proposal...
...With the ransom paid, the hostage was released...
...That meant that absolutely nothing could be done until they had been sworn in...
...He has backed the President during the Watergate revelations, blaming any acts of wrongdoing on aides and associates who shielded the President from what was going on...
...And with the board of regents in place, Defense officials plunged into the planning and organizing of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences...
...Only Rep...
...But now they are beginning to get around to that side because they are benefiting by it...
...More important, Laird allowed Hebert to merge his medical school bill with an important piece of Defense legislation, the medical scholarship plan...
...IS this a good bill...
...By the time the hearings were over, such stalwart conservatives as Senators Peter Dominick and Harry Byrd were lined up against Hebert’s “West Point for Doctors...
...They came along and found out this was really a great pool down there they could dip into, so now they are for it-a little here, a little there...
...But it didn’t take long for me to figure out what was going on over there with Ehrlichman and Haldeman...
...Medicine was medicine, the AMA argued, and every doctor ought to receive the same basic training, instead of starting out in a course tailored to specific and limited medical needs...
...It was no surprise when the commitee approved the legislation...
...Critics consider the school unnecessary at best and at worst detrimental to the taxpayer, the military, and medicine...
...You don’t appoint a board and there’s no procuremen t bill...
...On another level, the AMA and the Association of American Medical Colleges felt that establishing a medical school, designed to serve just one segment of the population, would run counter to the generally accepted principles of medical training...
...As they used to say about Joe Louis, he’s a credit to his race...
...After the signing, Hebert, who enjoys a long-time, bantering friendship with Nixon, said there was one more thing he needed from the President...
...On July 18 the House Armed Services Committee approved the Defense procurement bill...
...One of them was a reception Nixon gave in late February, 1973, for supporters of his Vietnam policy (which Hebert described as “a little party for the Vietnam white hats...
...Around midafternoon Nixon called to see if everything was okay...
...On rare occasions when he doesn’t-like the time nettlesome Rep...
...I don’t know...
...I am against it now...
...On the face of it, Hebert had suffered a setback...
...I was against it then...
...Hebert is doing for his hometown, New Orleans, what his predecessor, the late Mendel Rivers, did for Charleston , South Carolina-cramming it with military facilities as quickly as the city can absorb them...
...I am opposed to it and I don’t have it now...
...You know, congratulations...
...Many of the congressmen at one time or another had received lavish attention at the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital or at the Navy’s facility in Bethesda...
...One-fifth of these graduates will be allowed to serve civilian agencies such as the Veterans Administration and the Public Health Service...
...By 1982, after spending a paltry $1 50 million to get the school going, the Defense Department hopes to be graduating about 100 men and women a year, most of whom will be then obligated to repay the government for their education by putting in a minimum of seven years as armed forces physicians...
...Now mind you, I hadn’t seen the President or talked to him...
...In this case he called up the Pentagon and instructed officials to go ahead and blacklist Harvard even without congressional sanction...
...For a fraction of the cost, the government could sponsor new training programs and treatment centers in established hospitals...
...Instead, they permitted it to pass by voice vote...
...a smiling Nixon asked a visitor, as he considered the medical school legislation which lay on his desk...
...As Hebert remembers it, he then asked Richardson if he had read or seen The Godfather...
...Paul Fino’s bill to set up a national lotteryquaint notions that were going nowhere...
...A day or two before the reception, Hebert had received a letter from Nixon complimenting him on his unco mpr o mising, stand against amnesty for draft dodgers and deserters...
...Committee consideration of the measure was suspended, and a procession of Administration officials trooped up to Hebert’s office to find out why...
...Richardson, who as HEW Secretary had urged Nixon to veto the legislation, observed that for the President to appoint the regents would constitute tacit approval of the school...
...And reports continued to circulate that White House staff members were unhappy, believing it unseemly for President Nixon to be signing into law a new, unrequested federal spending program at a time when he was vetoing virtually everything Congress sent him that required new funding...
...True to his word, Hebert began to sit on the 1973 bill...
...The senators reluctantly gave in...
...That is hardly surprising...
...Whatever one might think of a medical school for the armed forces, it’s difficult to come up with a more fitting name...
...Richardson said he had done both...
...He mentioned rumors that the White House staff was planning, in effect, to impound the funds authorized for the school by withholding nomination of the regents...
...After awhile he drafted the necessary legislation and started dropping it in the hopperevery Congress...
...Hebert took advantage of the occasion to complain about the regents...
...Liberals, of course, could not get excited about granting more money to the Pentagon, especially money the military didn’t even want...
...But there are ways to overcome this problem other than building a special military medical school...
...But, the House, Stennis continued, was adamant about the medical school...
...I refused to take Medicare...
...In what amounted to the only Senate debate on the legislation, Dominick, Norris Cotton, and a few others railed against it...
...But nothing happened...
...While the AMA’s arguments about medical policy need not always be taken as objective truth, in this case most health experts agreed that a military medical school could set a dangerous precedent for the medical profession at large and might result in a lowering of the standards of treatment for military patients...
...Hebert set an example for the rest of the panel with this endearing welcome to the witnesses from the once-feared AMA: The AMA has been traditionally against anything even before they knew what the proposition was...
...Instead, he carried it with him to the reception and gave it to Nixon on the receiving line...
...An End to the Isolated Presidency The annual military procurement bill, determining as it does which major defense programs will live and which will die, is usually the most important legislation the Pentagon has before Congress...
...Yet no matter how unfamiliar its name, the school provides a clear-cut demonstration of how a congressman can get his way-if he happens to be a committee chairman...
...This concerned Hebert because appointment of the board was far more than a formality...
...Of all the arguments for the school this was the most credible, for the treatment of traumatic injury is one of the areas in which American medicine has long been deficient...
...Steering the measure through the Senate presented a far greater challenge to Hebert, since his influence with the senatorial rank-and-file was nil...
...The response came swiftly...
...It was one of those perfunctory letters...
...And like Rivers, he delivers House majorities in support of Pentagon programs...
...Under the legislation, the nine civilians, to be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, were to conduct “the business of the University...
...Gross and 30 other members-most of them highly conservative -voted against the bill ; 352 voted for it...
...But this one Hebert decided to put to some use...
...That in itself is ironic since the new university will be located on 150 grassy acres in nearby Bethesda, Maryland, near the Naval Medical Center...
...I not only had a hand in it [the blacklisting] ,” he told an interviewer, “I was the leader...
...Hebert assured him it certainly was and commended the President for being “a man of action...
...Hebert and other supporters see this school graduating a small, but steady, stream of career military doctors who will serve as the nucleus of each armed service’s medical corps...
...It was getting blocked...
...Liberals couldn’t care less about the measure, and had astraight up or down vote been possible, the Senate would have opposed it...
...Specialization could come later...
...went on, and he showed Hebert the two suggested veto messages which had accompanied the bill to his office...
...Ashton Thomas, an old friend of Hebert’s from New Orleans...
...I voted against it...
...Hebert’s bill to set up what he termed “the West Point for Doctors” seemed destined to achieve the status of such perennial offerings as former Rep...
...asked Nixon...
...What do you want now...
...The principal reason Hebert’s bill was going nowhere was that a lot of people thought it was a dumb idea...
...And when the Senate causes problems, as it did when it rejected his demand that the Defense Department be prohibited from sending officers to take courses at universities that had dropped ROTC, Hebert abandons the legislative route in favor of more direct techniques...
...To do otherwise, Byrd told his colleagues the day the conference report was brought to the floor, would jeopardize passage of the important scholarship program...
...These doctors will, of course, be joined by civilian-trained physicians who are lured into the military by government scholarships that paid for their education and who are kept there by a variety of bonuses which boost a 28-year-old captain’s income to more than $35,000 a year...
...He went to Whittier,” retorted Hebert...
...Hebert did not mail the letter, which would have sent it through the White House chain of command...
...Hebert decided his only chance of breaking the deadlock and saving the medical school would be to see Nixon in person...
...The Pentagon, the bill’s only beneficiary, was nominally in favor of it, but probably would have been content to do without the legislation...
...Otis Pike, one of the least reverent members of the Armed Services Committee, suggested, half jokingly, that the institution ought to be called the F. Edward Hebert School of Military Medicine...
...Hebert is not in the least embarrassed or shy about these exploits...
...A lot of crap...
...In January, 1973, Elliot Richardson, newly designated as Secretary of Defense, flew to New Orleans to present his credentials to the Armed Services chairman...
...It’s the law...
...Not surprisingly, the committee served up only cream-puff questions to witnesses testifying in behalf of the medical academy...
...Detractors asked why, from a practical point of view, it was necessary to build a separate medical school for the military...
...But with the 92nd Congress approaching the adjournment crush and everyone anxious to see the scholarship program launched, opponents decided not to challenge the conference report...
...Of course it’s a good bill,” answered Rep...
...It’s fair to say that if a vote had been taken that day on the medical school alone, a majority of the Senate would have voted against it...
...Hebert States His Terms Hebert saw the trouble brewing in the Senate and met with Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Stennis, a backer of the medical school, to try to get the measure around the roadblock...
...After a suitable interval, Stennis returned to the Senate and reported that the House negotiators had agreed to alter the scholarship program to meet most of the Senate’s objections...
...With Stennis’ blessing, the committee knocked the medical school authorization out of the bill, replacing it with vague language calling only for a study of the school’s feasibility...
...Officially, the President had proclaimed the birth of something called the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, a name so uninspired, so ungainly, so resistant to acronym that to this day many congressional backers of the ins ti tution are unable to come up with the correct name if pressed...
...In place of the usual two-line rejection slip, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird warmly embraced the proposal...
...What Hebert wanted was a presidential appointment for a physician fkiend from his hometown of New Orleans to the medical school’s board of regents...
...The bill went to conference to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate versions...
...With that, Nixon sat down at his desk, pushed aside the veto drafts, and signed H.k 2, a bill authorizing establishment of the first medical school in the United States totally financed and operated by the federal government, a medical school whose primary function would be to produce doctors for the armed forces...
...In conference with senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, meetings from which Aspin and other military critics on the House committee were excluded, Hebert recouped the $1 billion and scored what he enjoys describing as “another one of Hebert’s conference triumphs...
...Not long afterwards, Nixon sent to the Senate the first six regent nominations (among whom was Dr...
...Ideologically, Hebert’s plan had even less going for it...
Vol. 6 • June 1974 • No. 4
