It’s difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, America’s most celebrated doctor after Spock, Seuss, and School, went from being the country’s foremost healthcare authority to its foremost health-care commodity.
It may have come shortly after his retirement in 1989, when a spokesman explained, from a perch at the William Morris agency, that Koop would not, like so many others, be shamelessly capitalizing on his nine years of public service. Or it may have come when Koop became a $ 25,000-per-outing lecturer at health insurance conventions, a supermarket-poster pitchman for the egg industry, or when he was paid $ 750,000 for a few minutes worth of face-time in a 30-volume Time/Life video series.
Whenever the moment came, it likely took even Koop by surprise, since he wrote in his 1991 Random House memoir (the six-figure contract for which he finalized two months before he left office): “Like many Americans, I was disgusted with the way retired politicians — even presidents — cashed in on their celebrity status. . . . I was not about to sell or rent my integrity and the public trust.” There was no time. There were too many boards to sit on, too many Exorcist III sequels to make cameo appearances in, too many 71-line-long Who’s Who In America entries to compose (Henry Kissinger, another healthy ego in the “K” volume, mustered only 34 lines worth of achievement).
But if it is impossible to date the genesis of the transformation, it surely culminated in mid-June. That’s when Dr. Koop (the man) watched KOOP (the stock symbol) shoot as high as $ 20.25 per share, the day after the $ 9 per share initial public offering of drkoop.com (the eponymous health-care Web site — not to be confused with Koopfoundation.org, the Web site for the Koop Foundation, or koop.dartmouth.edu, the site for the Koop Institute, Koop’s monument to himself at Dartmouth, where he is not only the founder but the sole senior scholar).
It has become a cliche among envious bystanders in the Internet gold rush: After watching some still-living-in-momma’s-basement techie take his no-name company public and become a millionaire dot-commissar, who hasn’t joked that he should just quit his day job, add a “dot com” to his name, and issue stock? But who has actually done so? Only C. Everett Koop, onetime surgeon general of the United States and now a brand name, the Colonel Sanders of health advice on the Web. And turning yourself into a dot-com brand name, it turns out, does work. Koop’s 11 percent of drkoop.com’s stock made him worth about $ 60 million on paper at the stock’s peak (it’s since dropped by half).
But Koop, for his part, is remaining cool. He says he’s not keeping up with the daily fluctuations in drkoop.com stock — he’s not in this for the money (as an insider, he can’t sell for several months anyway, and meantime he’s getting a percentage of the revenues). Rather, he is in it to fulfill his “lifelong mission” of “empowering patients.” It’s a bookend of sorts for a life spent accumulating medical knowledge — starting during a curious childhood, when Koop anesthetized neighbors’ cats in trash cans full of ether to hone his surgical chops, continuing through his years as a pioneering pediatric surgeon and self-dramatizing surgeon general, and now climaxing in his reign as virtual doctor to millions of patients. Well, not exactly patients, as Internet doctors aren’t allowed to treat patients online. But millions of “eyes,” as the dot-commissars say, click on drkoop.com each month to get “empowered” on every malady from impotence to incontinence.
A veritable playground of empowerment, drkoop.com promotes itself as the most heavily visited health-care Web site of the 20,000 or so in the field. Here, you can pick up a primer on chat-room lingo (“boggle” means “you boggle at the concept”) before heading for the discussions on topics ranging from the mysterious and undefined “Black Rage Syndrome” to “Positive Thinking” and “Stress Management.” Though the site has partnered with anti-scare-science outfits like the American Council on Science and Health, you can still read Reuters dispatches on late-breaking alarmist trends (fecal coliform bacteria lurk in our washing machines, according to a study funded by the manufacturers of Clorox bleach). You can plug in your medications to see what kind of adverse reaction to expect. (As an experiment, I entered: Viagra, Propecia, Phen-fen, Percodan, codeine, alcohol, and cocaine topical. Verdict: a “mild” reaction.) One section is given over to “Tackling Tobacco,” brought to you by the good folks at Nicorette gum, who have taken to heart Koop’s admonition as surgeon general to work for a “smokeless society by the year 2000.” You can get your prescriptions filled by one of the many online pharmacy partners (Dr. Koop, the man, gets 2 percent of drkoop, the dot-com’s, e-commerce transactions, in case his $ 135,000 annual salary, or his newly minted millions in equity don’t get the job done). Most important, you can get an up-to-the-quarter-hour stock quote (121/8, as I write) which may or may not help with the stress management, depending on when you bought your shares.
What you don’t get much of on drkoop.com is Dr. Koop himself. But why would you expect to? He’s a busy 82-year-old with many balls in the air — 29 exactly, according to his organizational chart. When I call him for an interview, suggesting I visit for a few hours at his home in New Hampshire, he brusquely asserts, “I don’t do anything for over an hour.” Including, it appears, tend to his Web site. Besides lending his ubiquitous name and face, there is little of the famous Dr. Koop voice at the site — that of the Reagan era’s self-important, scolding Mennonite elder, though Koop is a Presbyterian. Sure, he happens by once in awhile (three or four times, so far), most recently for a chatroom appearance with supermodel-supermom-fitness-expert Kathy Ireland.
But that’s not that important for an Internet business. Nor is it important that the two-year-old company last year lost $ 9 million. That’s outmoded thinking, the dot-commissars tell me. What matters now is “empowerment” and “brand,” which Koop has in spades. In fact, he’s so empowering that two years ago, when he co-founded what was originally going to be an online medical records company, Koop and his partners called it Empower Health. Last summer, though, after market-testing Koop’s name and finding out that an astounding 60 percent of the population still knew who he was and 40 percent of them still regarded him as the country’s top health authority even 10 years after he left office, the company wisely changed its name to drkoop.com.
What that means, says Barbara Hansen, who directs the Web site from its headquarters in Austin, Texas, is that “out of the hopper, we have brand. We don’t have to invent it.” And though nearly 80 percent of the 70,000 pages of content comes from third-party content-providers, it all falls under the aegis of Dr. Koop, who Barbara assures is “very, very involved.” It’s like a fried chicken franchise: One might patronize a Roy Rogers or KFC, but one would hardly expect to see the singing cowboy or Kentucky colonel — God rest their souls — standing over the fryer vats. What’s important is that they invented the recipe, or at least tasted it once. And now others can carry on the good work that they began.
Indeed, like Roy Rogers and Colonel Sanders, Koop will carry on in perpetuity. It’s right there in the company’s prospectus, following pages of caveats warning investors of the many ways they could lose their shirts from wagering on such a volatile venture. Koop’s name and likeness, the company informs, “may not be unreasonably withheld” from the site’s health-care products, pending his approval, which, “upon his death,” will “be made by Dr. Koop’s estate.” Koop’s inevitable death, says Hansen, was something that got “brought up quite a bit on our road show” (where the company sells itself to investors). But thanks to the agreement, she says, “he will live on.” Just like Colonel Sanders, who has lately become, posthumously, an animated white-suited squib dancing around a bucket of honey-bbq wings.
Till that fateful day, though, “he’s certainly a presence in our office, though not every day,” says Hansen. “He’s here about once a quarter.” Or maybe not. When I visit Koop at the Koop Institute, he says matter of factly of the Austin headquarters, “I’ve been there once.” When I ask how often he monitors the Web site whose 70,000 pages are beamed out under his imprimature, he says “about once a month.”
He may be 82 years old, but that’s the Koop we remember: cracking honest, like he did when the liberals tried to sandbag him during his confirmation hearing for being a pro-lifer, calling him “Dr. Kook.” Or conversely, enraging conservatives and prophylactic prudes in the Reagan administration, when he pushed for sex education in the third grade to help combat AIDS, thereby paving the way for Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who like Koop, put on the unseasonably hot Captain Crunch uniform, bucked her own administration, and courageously fought to teach schoolchildren how to diddle themselves.
Sure, Koop may be showing signs of wear. When I first meet him, he asks how my colleague “Harry Barnes” is doing (around the magazine, we call him “Fred”). But he still has that undefinable “It”: the “It” of a man who grows a mustacheless beard that thinly traces the jawline before rupturing into a chin bouffant, making him look as if he should be raising barns or hunting white whales; the “It” that gives vision to a visionary, that allows a man to refer to himself in casual conversation as the “health conscience of the nation”; the “It” that bestows on a man something more valuable than integrity, brand.
Having brand means one’s name is greater than the sum of its vowels and consonants. Koop, the columnist Mary McGrory has written, is “the bearded symbol of solicitous integrity.” Shortly before adorning him with the Medal of Freedom, and shortly after Koop shilled for his wife’s health-care plan, President Clinton called Koop “the true face of American heroism.” Or “Koop” could mean what it does in Amsterdam’s Red Light district, where Dutch hookers stand under signs that read “te Koop.” There, it simply translates “for sale.”
Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
