DAVID SATCHER, the United States surgeon general, has another ten months to serve in his term, and President Bush has said he’ll let this particular Clinton appointee — by all accounts a competent and inoffensive public servant — run out the clock. Even so, all of Washington has been buzzing lately with names of his possible successor.
Maybe that’s overstating things. “Buzzing” is too strong a word. And it’s not all of Washington, just a tiny bit of it. And in fact there’s only one name: Kenneth H. Cooper, M.D., of North Dallas, Texas, founder and head of the Cooper Aerobics Center, the Cooper Institute, the Cooper Fitness Center, Cooper Ventures, Inc., the Cooper Wellness Program, the Cooper Clinic, and Cooper Concepts, Inc., and developer and chief salesman of the Cooper Complete Joint Maintenance Formula and Cooper Complete Multivitamins, as well as author of Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper’s Antioxidant Revolution and more than fifteen other books, some of which do not have his name in the title.
Even if other possible candidates surface before next year, when a formal nomination of Satcher’s replacement will have to be made, Dr. Cooper must be judged the man to beat by the many medical professionals who would claw and hump and cat-scratch their way into the nation’s most prestigious public-health office. For more than a decade Dr. Cooper has served as personal physician to George W. Bush, who has been a regular visitor to the doctor’s various eponymous centers and clinics. Cooper coined the term “aerobics” more than thirty years ago, and since then he has grown fabulously successful as a “fitness guru,” which turns out to be a lucrative line of work. He moves with ease among the wealthy and powerful in Texas, and he really, really wants the job. Even now, almost a year before a possible vacancy, there is a Cooper campaign under way. White House aides are amused at the large number of well-connected Texans who have petitioned the administration to install their man at the earliest opportunity, presumably at the instigation of the man himself. And earlier this month, Cooper made his own visit to the White House to make his case.
Kenneth Cooper as surgeon general is an idea plump with possibilities — horrifying and fascinating all at once. The position was originally conceived, not long after the Civil War, as a real job, with administrative responsibilities for the Marine Hospital System and later the Public Health Service. The office retains some of those duties, but since the release in 1964 of the famous report on the dangers of smoking, its occupants have more often acted as Nag to the Nation, Society’s Scold, a government-sanctioned Ralph Nader without the light touch. It offers an unequaled soapbox. Surgeon generals get to dress up in a suit vaguely and unaccountably reminiscent of an admiral’s. Then they tour the country giving speeches, tape public-service ads for TV, issue alarming findings about this and that, and generally ride their hobby horses until the poor things foam at the mouth and buckle from exhaustion. The effects can be for good or ill. Luther Terry’s 1964 report on smoking probably kept many people from getting sick, for example, but Joycelyn Elders’s unfortunate obsession with sex education gave her a reputation as an advocate of onanism. Like onanism needed an advocate.
Dr. Cooper already has an entire stable of hobby horses and is already a scold — one whose influence has been enormous. His first book, Aerobics, came out in 1968 and settled at the top of the bestseller list for many months, just as health enthusiasts, anti-smoking activists, teetotalers, nutritionists, therapists, and other baby-boom reformers were placing Americans on their forced march to human perfection. Before the book, exercise-for-exercise’s-sake was commonly considered an eccentricity. And now — well, the eccentrics are the people who decline to don tank tops, short-shorts, and $ 250 sneakers and hyperventilate in front of strangers. The shower of flop sweat that hit you as you passed a wheezing jogger at lunch hour is directly traceable to the “fitness revolution” that Dr. Cooper spawned.
There’s no evidence that he’s a charlatan. Over thirty years he’s amassed a vast storehouse of data through his clinics, and as a serious researcher he trims and alters his message as the findings change. He once counseled against weight training, and is now one of its greatest advocates. Originally a booster of unlimited exercise, he now worries that some training regimes can lead to cancer and other unpleasantness. Once indifferent to vitamins, he now does everything short of stuffing them into his patients. (And of course he sells them now, too.)
He’s not a charlatan but he is a fanatic, with a peculiar ability to instill his fanaticism in others. Though the details change, his message is unvarying: No matter how much you’re doing to become reasonably healthy, it’s not enough. Having got everybody exercising, he’s still not satisfied. His favored medium of communication is fear. If you aren’t worried about your health now, you will be after reading one of his books. “Revealing the Dark Side of Oxygen,” reads a typical subhead in Antioxidant Revolution. Oxygen has a dark side? His theme here is “THE ENEMY WITHIN: You can’t see them. You can’t feel them. . . . But make no mistake: Your heart, your lungs, your blood vessels — all your organs and tissues — are under constant attack by wide-ranging teams of biological renegades. Even as you hold this book in your hands, no part of your body is sheltered from the destructive assaults of these molecular outlaws.”
The way to wage war (the military metaphor recurs) against all these assaults from all these chemical SWAT teams is not only through almost constant exercise but also through the ceaseless monitoring of every physiological process that scientific instruments can trace. Resting heart rates, active heart rates, “good” cholesterol counts, “bad” cholesterol counts, blood pressure levels, waist-to-hip ratios, anti-oxidant and free-radical levels, basal metabolic rates, body mass indices — once you’ve measured them all in sequence, it’s time to start measuring them all over again. A typical Cooper Clinic exam takes several hours and sometimes extends for days.
In the pre-Cooper era, before exercise and robust good health became marks of personal virtue, this sort of thing would have suggested a rather too-great attention to oneself, an unseemly obsession bordering on narcissism, and likewise an unwillingness to recognize that no matter how precise one’s scientific instruments and how innovative and relentless one’s exercise, one is, after all, going to die anyway. I’m not sure it would be terribly pleasant to live in a country with an overabundance of such persons. It’s disconcerting enough to consider that our president may be one of them.
Of course, we’re halfway there already. Do-it-yourself blood pressure machines have become so ubiquitous you can’t duck into a drugstore to buy a pack of smokes without tripping over one. Dr. Cooper, a man of considerable charm and force of personality, is poised to take us the rest of the way there, and probably will, if given the surgeon general’s soapbox — and the sailor suit too. The harangues will be fierce, the guilt-tripping ferocious. Will there be anyone left, any dissident non-healthist, who will have the nerve to raise a shaky hand and ask, “Can we bring back the masturbation lady, please?”
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
