Corruption within the Nixon administration was not limited to Watergate; his Committee on Health Education ignored and suppressed the opinions of professional health educators. In this history, two education insiders explain why and how the committee was a sham from the beginning. One of the authorsJoy Garrison Cauffmanparticipated on the committee and was threatened by President Nixons representatives for expressing her opinions.
Now Cauffman and her coauthor, Ronald L. Linder, reveal how political insiders took steps to form the bogus committee; how President Nixon and his people quashed the recommendations of educators; how slush funds drive what goes on in Washington, DC; and how bureaucrats continue to distort the issues related to health education.
Several committee members argued against the predetermined outcomes of the committees work, but they were silencedand the price they paid for speaking up is shocking.
The future of health care in America is critically dependent on our ability to educate people on how to establish and maintain their health. But to make that possible, we must learn from the mistakes showcased in A Forty-Year Retrospective of President Nixons Committee on Health Education.
Copyright © 2013 Joy Garrison Cauffman and Ronald L. Linder.
Why Such Threats and Retaliations?
Over the past sixty-one years, Joy Garrison Cauffman has provided leadership throughout the world in health education. She started her teaching career in a junior and senior high school in Ohio, upon completing her BS in education at Ohio State University. During several years of teaching in public and private schools, she completed her MA in physical education and subsequently her PhD in health education and health-care administration at Ohio State University. After several years on the public health faculty at UCLA, she accepted an invitation from USC School of Medicine to join the faculty and the task force during the Watts Riots.
Dr. Cauffman was the first woman to serve as president of the USC Medical Faculty Assembly and receive a full professorship, on the tenure track, in the Department of Family Medicine at USC. In 1995, she was inducted into the State of Ohio Women's Hall of Fame for her extraordinary accomplishments as an international lecturer and advisor to three United States presidents on health education and physical fitness.
Although her dissent on President Nixon's Committee on Health Education created several years of difficult times, in 1999, she was inducted into the College of Education and Human Ecology Hall of Fame at Ohio State University for her lifetime contributions as a national and international model for all others in the field. Her published results in prominent peer-reviewed journals changed physicians' screening advice for colon cancer worldwide.
During her sabbatical from USC in 1993, she conducted a continuing medical education study, Effects of Continuing Medical Education Interventions on Physician Performance and Patient Health Care Outcomes: A Ten-Year International Study of Randomized Controlled Trials with Family Physicians or General Practitioners. The outcomes of this study resulted in invitations from seven countries to present the knowledge base on the effectiveness of continuing education for primary care physicians.
Dr. Cauffman's vision of a coalition became a reality in 1971. She envisioned the benefits and power of collaboration among the various national professional organizations with interest in health education. She was elected a Fellow by four of the eight coalition organizations and received the coalition's Distinguished Service Award in addition to Eta Sigma Gamma's Distinguished Writer's Award for her monograph, A History of the Coalition of National Health Education Organizations: Its First Ten Years and Future Directions in 1984.
As an honors student, Ronald L. Linder graduated with BA and MS degrees in health education from the University of Washington, an EdD in health education from the University of Oregon, and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in research at Stanford University. He started his teaching career at Alaska Methodist University at twenty-three years of age.
He was a fellow of the American School Health Association at twenty-six. After chairing the Teaching Credential and Graduate Programs in health education at San Francisco State University for four years, he joined Dr. Joy Cauffman on the SEARCH: A Link to Services project at USC School of Medicine in 1974. He later coordinated the National Science Foundation's Biomedical Interdisciplinary Curriculum Project for four years, prior to his administrative and faculty positions in public health, medicine, and education at UCLA in 1978. His background in psychoactive drug abuse research led to coauthoring the first book on PCP abuse; PCP: The Devil's Dust—Recognition, Management, and Prevention of Phencyclidine Abuse was published in 1981. He has written articles in professional journals, monographs, and was awarded a million-dollar grant to train twelve thousand human service providers on PCP abuse throughout the state of California. He served as expert witness on many homicide and DUI cases related to PCP abuse during the past thirty years.
After several years teaching, administrating postgraduate medical education, consulting, and acting as the principal investigator on several UCLA training grants; he became director of education at the Hospital Satellite Network and subsequently was president of American Medical Productions, winner of Telly Awards for medical television. Dr. Linder became Regional Liaison Officer, Veterans Health Administration Western Region for the Ambulatory Care and Education Initiative for five years. He created the Ambulatory Care Consultation and Education Support Services (ACCESS) program used to evaluate and transition selected inpatient to outpatient care.
In 1999, he coauthored Home Health Telecommunications. A few years later, he established two substance abuse treatment programs for the underserved in Los Angeles. Dr. Linder has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including a Medical Aspects of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War symposium in 1981, which contributed to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1985.
Shortly after moving into a townhouse east of Los Angeles in 1988, I learned that Dr. Ron Linder's in-laws were my next-door neighbors. What were the chances of that happening within a surrounding population of millions of people? Ultimately, I didn't believe it was just chance; it was meant to be. Ron worked for me thirty-seven years ago on the SEARCH project, which was during my dissent on President Nixon's Committee on Health Education. My dissent identified the activities of a bogus presidential committee that was used to promote legislation that maintained the powers that be in America's health-care system.
Ron and I spent several months documenting daily events and retaliations against me as a result of my dissent as a member of President Nixon's committee. Since we were ultimately discovered documenting everything and possibly sharing it with others as a diary, it didn't take long for Ron to also be threatened. When he and his fiancée were at a taping of a television show in December 1974, his car, parked in a metered space on the street, was crushed from both ends, like an accordion.
When the police arrived, they asked, What are you doing? This is usually related to organized crime.
Ron called a close friend in law enforcement. His friend said, Stop what you are doing and get out of Los Angeles.
We learned several years later that Nixon's Plumbers were in Los Angeles for the Ellsberg break-in during the time of Ron's car incident. I doubt we will ever know for sure.
Also, my husband, Charles E. Cauffman, a Naval Academy Graduate, Blue Angel pilot, test pilot, and astronaut, upon retirement was encouraged to apply for director of Los Angeles International Airport. Although he was told that the position would definitely be his, it didn't happen. In retrospect, I now believe it was quite possible that I triggered his being ultimately turned down, since his application for the job was after my dissent. We also discovered that our home telephones were being tapped.
Although I continued documenting, Ron immediately stopped and quickly moved out of Los Angeles to coordinate a National Science Foundation (NSF) project at the University of California at Berkeley. We have discovered that the late Samuel Sherman, MD, director of the Regional Medical Program (changed to The Health Systems Management Corporation in 1976), under which the NSF project was funded, was instrumental in getting Ron out of Los Angeles.
Dr. Sherman, past president of the California Medical Association, was also responsible in moving Ron back to Los Angeles as associate director of health sciences, UCLA Extension and on faculty in the Schools of Public Health, Medicine, and Education at the completion of the NSF project.
The late Dr. Martin Schickman, who hired Ron at UCLA, claimed that the letter of recommendation from Dr. Sherman was the most impressive he had ever seen. Dr. Sherman, close to the leaders of the President's Committee, was appointed to the board of directors of the National Center for Health Education, the major recommendation of the President's Committee on Health Education. Ron now believes he was being rewarded for leaving town and no longer communicating with me.
Over the past twenty-three years of living here, I have waved to Ron from my home on several occasions when he was visiting his in-laws. During the past thirty-seven years, we have never talked about those days of documenting my dissent, out of fear of retaliation.
Given current federal commitments to initiate national health-care reform and the related reasons for my dissent, a current democratic president, the death of half of the members of the committee, and the need to share with others the impact of my dissent on all of our lives, Ron called me and requested a meeting to consider returning to where we left off nearly forty years earlier. Over the years, we have not been able to close this door due to fear. After what we have been through, it is time to share the reasons for my dissent to promote the commitment of others to preserve our democracy through the freedom of speech without retaliation. My wish at eighty-six years, having spent the balance of my life trying to regain my identity, is that others who know my story will become advocates of the right to dissent and protect those who do. It is a critical part of our freedom, democracy, and survival, in addition to the future of the coalition, which I created, of national health-education organizations.