In the eye of the storm: Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders challenges the status quo

Ebony, Feb, 1994 by Laura B. Randolph

FROM the outset, it was ugly. In fact. it was one of the nastiest political battles in recent memory. It started in July when President Clinton nominated Joycelyn Elders as the surgeon general of the United States. Soon after, staunch conservatives called her with an ominous warning.

"They told me, |We are going to fight your nomination to the death,'" recalls Elders, whose outspoken statements about anti-abortionists ("They love little babies as long as they're in somebody else's uterus rather than caring about children after they're born") and sex education ("We teach teenagers what to do in the front seat of cars, and now should teach them what to do in the backseats") have made her a frequent target of conservative groups.

And fight her nomination they did. A vocal supporter of sex education as early as kindergarten and contraceptive distribution in schools, this "absolutely pro-choice" physician says she expected the intense verbal abuse from her opponents. But not the personal attacks. Not the death threats.

"I anticipated the |condom queen' and |mass murderer' name-calling," says Elders who, while surgeon general, holds the rank of three-star admiral. "But I felt they knew they could not win on those points. So they attacked my personal integrity and, what I felt was most unfair, my family."

No aspect of her life went unexamined. She was castigated for the family's failure until recently to pay $15,000 in Social Security taxes for the home care nurse of her 97-year-old mother-in-law who has Alzheimer's disease (She left the management of her mother-in-law's affairs to her husband) to her private-sector role as a member of an Arkansas bank board of directors which was reprimanded for failure to properly supervise bank management (no criminal conduct was found).

When it became clear such attacks weren't going to derail her nomination, Elders says the down-and-dirty tactics of her opponents turned dangerous. Before the Senate confirmed her in September, America's first Black surgeon general was warned if she accepted the post as the nation's top doctor she would pay with her life. Suddenly, the 60-year-old pediatrician found herself traveling with police protection.

"It was terrible," she recalls of her early days in Washington. "I couldn't mix with crowds, I couldn't visit friends. And so I told them I just couldn't stand it anymore." That's when she traded her bodyguards for less visible, though, she believes, more inviolable security.

"I always say my God will take care of me." says Elders from her 7th floor office in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "If it's my time I'll go, and if it's not I won't. I feel that He really has a lot of important things for me to do. And he's going to make sure that I'm here to do them."

Joycelyn Elders' whole life has been about important things. Conceiving them. Believing them. Doing whatever she had to do in order to achieve them, even when it means stepping on powerful toes and ruffling prominent feathers.

Three months into her term as surgeon general, she set off sparks when, speaking about violence as a public health issue, she told a National Press Club luncheon, "I do feel we'd markedly reduce our crime rate if drugs were legalized. I don't know all the ramification, but I do feel we need to do some studies."

It wasn't the first time Elders comments have put her in the eye of the storm -- or the first time President Clinton has stood behind her when he disagreed with her opinion. In Arkansas, where she was the state's health director for six years, she made headlines -- ana enemies -- trying to awaken the state to its teen pregnancy crisis by advocating sex education ana birth control counseling in the schools.

Though it happened more than six years ago, she members her first press appearance with then-Governor Clinton as if it were yesterday. A reporter asked if her goal of cutting the state's teen pregnancy rate in half meant school-based clinics would dispense contraceptives. "We're not going to put condoms on their lunch trays," she replied, "but yes."

It was a stunning moment -- for the reporter, for Arkansas, and, most of all, for Clinton. "He turned beet red," Elders recalls. "But when the reporter asked him how he felt about what I'd said, he swallowed hard and said, |Dr. Elders told me what she was about before I appointed her health director so I support Dr. Elders.'"

She told him again when he asked her to be surgeon general "I said, |Sir,' when you asked me to be your director of health, you didn't know what you were getting,'" she remembers. "|But you know what you're getting now.'"

How well he knew. This is, after all, the woman who got his attention -- and her job as health director -- by writing him "A very long, very critical letter" about his health department policies during his first term as governor.

When, in 1987, he asked her to leave the University of Arkansas Medical Center where she had been a professor in pediatrics for twenty years to head the department she had so sharply criticized, even Elders was stunned. "I said, |Governor, when I made those recommendations, I didn't mean I was the one to implement them,'" she recalls.