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. 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. There's no evidence that he's a charlatan.