| Jan 12, Dear Diary; Stein for Congress returns the fantastic book, The Heart of Power, Health and Politics in the Oval Office, back to the Atlantic County free public library system. The campaign HIGHLY recommends this book. BTW, the unlikeliest of Congressman, Mr. Stein, one, supports and would increase funding for NPR ("we" go on the record and also note that Frank LoBiondo, voted to kill public funding for NPR), and two, if Stein was a County Executive and not a candidate for Congress, he'd cover any 2nd district library budgetary shortfall's originating in Trenton! But enough out of me....
Chapter 2 Harry S. Truman by David Blumenthal and James A. Monroe
p.58
... This chapter tells the story of Truman and his greatest frustration. "I have had some stormy times as president," he wrote in his memoirs. "I have had some bitter disappointments..., but the one that has troubled me the most, in a personal way, has been failure to defeat the organized opposition to a national compulsory, health insurance program." President Truman would come to stand as a hero of the great struggle for health reform.
p.90
The Truman story also introduces the daunting new checklist for bold innovations: coordinate the executive agencies who prepare the reform, gather enough (but not too much) detail from the specialists, overrule the economists who counsel against domestic programs (they are always budget-busters), rouse the public, and negotiate the change through Congress- the "graveyard of health reforms." |
| The Keystone to the Socialist Arch
If the proposal had no chance, no one had told the American Medical Association. The AMA mobilized for this campaign as if Armageddon were at hand.
The association retained Whataker and Baxter, a savvy husband and wife public relations firm that assigned thirty-seven assistants to the national campaign against Trumans's proposal. Their central theme contrasted state compulsion (cue ugly images of bureaucracy, socialism, and degenerate European ways) with the "voluntary American way" (sunny pictures of democracy, free enterprise, and small-town doctors).
... The campaign's arguments filtered deep into the national conscious. We can trace it's reach by following one rhetorical flourish as it rippled into the culture. Whitaker and Baxter published a fifteen-page pamphlet of questions and answers entitled The Voluntary Way is the American Way, which, deep in the Q&A, concocted a quotation from Lenin:
Q: Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of
other phases of American life?
A: Lenin thought so. He declared: Socialized
medicine is the keystone to the arch of the
Socialist State.
((insouciant note from the diarist, G.S. to Frank LoBiondo (Bill O'Reilly, Sean, Mark Levine and others), pay close attention to the following paragraphs. As a former Republican, I am definitely not gonna take your talking points b.s., if I'm the nominee of my party. That's four smiley faces, one to each of you, :) :) :) :)
Senator Murray asked the Library of Congress to track down the quote and, as expected, they found nothing like it- most scholars assume Whitaker and Baxter dreamed it up. But that did not diminish its effect.
The quotation first found its way into newspaper editorials across the nation. An editorial in the Chicago Herald America put it this way: "Lenin- the god of the communists is quoted as saying: 'Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.' "
By March 1951, Lenin's judgment had radiated beyond the usual suspects. Oscar Ewing received a committee report on socialized medicine from New York State Bar....
Deep in the report- on page twelve -the committee noted: "On the highest socialistic authority, socialized medicine is considered a real major step in the direction of the socialist state. Said Lenin: 'socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.'"
The line- and others like it -slipped into the American rhetorical ether, recycled from generation to generation even to our own day. During the the 2000 election campaign, for example, the president of the conservative Association of American Physicians and Surgeons published an essay in the association's publication, The Medical Sentinel, that ends by unwittingly dredging up Whitaker and Baxter's 1949 handiwork: "Lenin once said that 'medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism' and I believe those who are promoting 'universal coverage' via the government run and government controlled medicine know this." |
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