The Invention of Political Consulting : The New Yorker
In the fall of 1944, Warren got a serious kidney infection. This set him thinking about the rising costs of medical care, and the catastrophic effects that sudden illness could have on a family less well provided for than his own. I came to the conclusion that the only way to remedy this situation was to spread the cost through insurance, he wrote in his memoirs. He asked his staff to develop a proposal. We concluded that health insurance should be collected through the Social Security System. After some studies, it was determined that the employers and employees in that system should each contribute one and one half per cent of wages paid by or to them. After conferring with the California Medical Association, he anticipated no objections from doctors. And so, in January of 1945, during his State of the State address, he announced his proposal for comprehensive, compulsory health insurance for the state of California.
Earl Warren began his political career as a conservative and ended it as one of the most hated liberals in American history. What happened to him? One answer is: Whitaker and Baxter.
Retained by the California Medical Association for an annual fee of twenty-five thousand dollars to campaign against the Governors plan, Whitaker and Baxter took a piece of legislation that most people liked and taught them to hate it. You cant beat something with nothing, they liked to say. They launched a drive for Californians to buy their own insurance, privately. Voluntary Health Insurance Week, driven by forty thousand inches of advertising in more than four hundred newspapers, was observed in fifty-three of the states fifty-eight counties. Whitaker and Baxter sent more than nine thousand doctors out with prepared speeches. They coined a slogan: Political medicine is bad medicine.
They lobbied newspaper editors. Whitaker boasted that our people have personally called at more than 500 newspaper offices, to persuade editors to change their positions. Many of these newspapers did a vast amount of advertising business with Campaigns, Inc., and received hundreds of words of free copy, each week, from the California Feature Service. In three years, Whitaker reported, the number of newspapers supporting socialized medicine has dwindled from fifty to about twenty. The number of papers opposing compulsory health insurance has jumped from about 100 to 432.
They invented an enemy. They sent out twenty-seven thousand copies of a pamphlet called The Health Question, which featured a picture of a man, a woman, and a child in the woodsa forest of fearmenaced by skeletons who have in their mouths, instead of teeth, the word BILL. Whitaker and Baxter sent out two and a half million copies of another pamphlet, called Politically-Controlled Medicine. They printed postcards, for voters to stick in the mail:
Dear Senator:
Please vote against all Compulsory Health Insurance Bills pending before the Legislature. We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we dont want to be forced to go to A State doctor, or to pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not. That system was born in Germanyand is part and parcel of what our boys are fighting overseas. Lets not adopt it here.
In 1945, Warrens bill failed to pass by just one vote. As Warrens biographer G. Edward White remarked, The scuttling of his health insurance plan was a confirmation for Warren of the nature of the political process, in which advocates of programs based on humanity and common sense were pitted against selfish, vindictive special interests. Warren reintroduced the bill. And again Whitaker and Baxter defeated it. They stormed the Legislature with their invective, Warren later wrote, and my bill was not even accorded a decent burial. It was the greatest legislative victory at the hands of admen the country had ever seen. It was not, of course, the last.
In 1945, months after Earl Warren proposed compulsory health insurance in California, Harry Truman proposed a national program. The health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility, the President said. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1946, Trumans proposed federal health-insurance program, which, like Warrens, was funded by a payroll tax, stalled. In his State of the Union address in 1948, an election year, Truman urged passage of his plan, which enjoyed widespread popular support. In November, Truman won the election. Days afterward, the American Medical Association called up the San Francisco offices of Campaigns, Inc. The A.M.A. retained Whitaker and Baxter at a fee of a hundred thousand dollars a year, and with an annual budget of more than a million dollars, to thwart Trumans plan. The A.M.A. raised the money by assessing twenty-five dollars a year from every one of its members.
At the beginning of 1949, Whitaker and Baxter, the directors of the A.M.A.s National Education Campaign, entered national politics, setting up headquarters in Chicago, with a staff of thirty-seven. This must be a campaign to arouse and alert the American people in every walk of life, until it generates a great public crusade and a fundamental fight for freedom, their Plan of Campaign began. Any other plan of action, in view of the drift toward socialization and despotism all over the world, would invite disaster. But when Whitaker told the Washington press corps, at a luncheon, that the F.B.I. was terrorizing the A.M.A., the Washington Post offered that maybe the A.M.A., at the hands of Whitaker and Baxter, ought to stop whipping itself into a neurosis and attempting to terrorize the whole American public every time the Administration proposes a Welfare Department or a health program.
Whitaker and Baxter went to Washington and persuaded a hundred congressmen to let them read their constituent mail. At the start of the campaign, Whitaker reported, mail from voters was running four and half to one in favor of Trumans plan. Whitaker and Baxter went to work. Nine months later it was running four to one against.
By then, Campaigns, Inc., had come to seem, at least to a handful of critics, nefarious and mysterious. There isnt any mystery about it, Whitaker insisted. In a brilliant maneuver, Whitaker had A Simplified Blueprint of the Campaign Against Compulsory Health Insurance distributed, by the hundreds of thousands, to reporters and editors, among others, and to every member of Congress.
Meanwhile, inside Campaigns, Inc., a much more detailed Plan of Campaign circulated, in typescript, marked CONFIDENTIAL: NOT FOR PUBLICATION. (It can be found with the firms papers, which are housed at the California State Archives, in Sacramento.) It reads, in part:
1. The immediate objective is the defeat of the compulsory health insurance program pending in Congress. 2. The long-term objective is to put a permanent stop to the agitation for socialized medicine in this country by (a) awakening the people to the danger of a politically-controlled, government-regulated health system; (b) convincing the people, through a Nation wide campaign of education, of the superior advantages of private medicine, as practiced in America, over the State-dominated medical systems of other countries; (c) stimulating the growth of voluntary health insurance systems to take the economic shock out of illness and increase the availability of medical care to the American people.
As Whitaker and Baxter put it, in an earlier version of the plan, Basically, the issue is whether we are to remain a free Nation, in which the individual can work out his own destiny, or whether we are to take one of the final steps toward becoming a Socialist or Communist State. We have to paint the picture, in vivid verbiage that no one can misunderstand, of Germany, Russiaand finally, England. They settled on a slogan: KEEP POLITICS OUT OF MEDICINE. And they settled on a smear, one that they had used against Warrens plan: they called Trumans plan socialized medicine.
In an attempt to educate every doctor, nurse, and druggist in the United States about the dangers of socialized medicine, they went on the road. Whitaker, speaking to two hundred doctors at a meeting of the Council of the New England Medical Societies, said:
Hitler and Stalin and the socialist government of Great Britain all have used the opiate of socialized medicine to deaden the pain of lost liberty and lull the people into non-resistance. Old World contagion of compulsory health insurance, if allowed to spread to our New World, will mark the beginning of the end of free institutions in America. It will only be a question of time until the railroads, the steel mills, the power industry, the banks and the farming industry are nationalized.
Political advertising, he said, was the last best hope of democracy: Were going to put the foes of American medicine on trial before the bar of public opinion, and let the people decide.
To that end, the National Education Campaign sent out millions of pieces of mail. It wasnt always well met. RECEIVED YOUR SCARE LETTER. AND HOW PITYFUL, an angry pharmacist wrote from Stamford, New York. I DO HOPE PRESIDENT TRUMAN HAS HIS WAY. GOOD LUCK TO HIM.
Whitaker and Baxter liked to talk about their work as grass roots campaigning. The fight against socialized medicine was a case in point: The A.M.A. in its campaign is carrying its case to the people of America in a grass roots crusade which we hope, with your help, and the help of tens of thousands of others, will reach every corner of this country. Not everyone was convinced that a lavishly paid advertising agency distributing 7.5 million copies of a pamphlet called The Voluntary Way Is the American Way to doctors offices constituted a grass roots movement. Dear Sirs, one doctor wrote them. Is it 2 ½ or 3 ½ million dollars you have allotted for your grass roots lobby?
Whitaker and Baxters campaign against Harry Trumans national-health-insurance proposal cost the A.M.A. nearly five million dollars, and it took more than three years. But they turned the Presidents sensible, popular, and urgently needed legislative reform into a bogeyman so scary that, even today, millions of Americans are still scared.
Truman was furious. As to what in his plan could possibly be construed as socialized medicine, he told the press in 1952, he didnt know what in the Sam Hill that could be. He had one more thing to say: there was nothing in this bill that came any closer to socialism than the payments the American Medical Association makes to the advertising firm of Whitaker and Baxter to misrepresent my health program.`