After an uneven first year in office, President Bush's only black Cabinet member has lately leapt into headlines as the nation's No. 1 health crusader, taking up the mantle of departed Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. The day after Sullivan's bitter attack, RJR scrapped plans to market Uptown—but not happily. Sullivan, says RJR spokeswoman Maura Payne, "tried to turn [the ad campaign] into a racial issue and not a brand-selection issue, which is what it was." Unfazed, Sullivan next ripped into RJR's reported marketing plan for Dakota, a cigarette initially aimed at young, white, blue-collar women, then blasted tobacco industry sponsorship of athletic events like the Virginia Slims tennis tour, calling on sporting associations to shun such "blood money." On another front, Sullivan this month announced plans for mandatory nutritional labeling on nearly all packaged foods.
Remarkably, in barely two months the nation's top health boss appears to have resuscitated a faltering public-service career. As president of Atlanta's Morehouse School of Medicine, Sullivan was unfamiliar with Washington's political quicksand when Bush tapped him for the Cabinet post in December 1988. Before his confirmation, Sullivan "misspoke," as he put it, telling a newspaper that he privately favored abortion rights. Outrage from antiabortionists and congressional conservatives led him to recant. Once he was in office, his comments favoring needle exchanges for drug addicts to prevent AIDS drew more fire, and he lapsed into a long public silence. Now, however, says Joseph Califano Jr., Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Jimmy Carter, "Sullivan is using the HHS post as a bully pulpit, which is just what he should be doing."
Growing up under Jim Crow laws in the southwestern Georgia town of Blakely, Sullivan and his brother, Walter, were raised with a sense of mission. Their mother, Lubirda, a schoolteacher, and their father, Walter Sr., an undertaker, founded the local chapter of the NAACP. Dedicated to education, the elder Sullivans sent Louis and Walter to live with friends in Atlanta so the boys could attend better schools. Louis graduated magna cum laude in 1954 from primarily black Morehouse College and won a scholarship to Boston University Medical School, where he was the only black in his class. He went on to teach at Harvard and was professor of medicine and physiology at BU when, in 1975, he left to help found a new medical school at Morehouse. As the school's president, he invited then-Vice President George Bush to speak in 1982, beginning an association that would lead to his HHS post.
The Secretary says he tried smoking once as a boy and was "never so sick in my life." He rises at 5:30 each morning for a three-mile "power walk" with wife Ginger, a nonpracticing attorney. The couple has three children: Paul, 33, a doctor in Atlanta; Shanta, 27, an art historian with the National Endowment for the Arts; and Halsted, 22, a recent University of Virginia graduate who is applying to law school. "Louis has a huge ego," says his college friend and fellow physician Donald Moore, "and that ego has gotten him where he is. He hasn't learned the ways of Washington yet, and it's still kicking him in the butt sometimes." These days, finally, Sullivan is getting in a few kicks of his own.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
