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Bernadine Healy, president of the American Red Cross, knows how to get things done in a crisis. But that steely determination and Lone Ranger leadership have also ruffled feathers.
By PAUL FARHI, Washington Post
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 11, 2001
WASHINGTON -- In the first terrible moments after it all began, Bernadine Healy, the president and chief executive of the American Red Cross, paused briefly to inventory her thoughts. She wondered: about her adult daughter Bartlett, alone somewhere in Washington; about the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; about the vulnerability of the Red Cross' national headquarters, a stately marble temple along the glide path to the White House.
A moment's pause. Then, action.
Healy ran a cardiac intensive care unit for eight years, so she knows crisis. She knows that principled and decisive action banishes panic and confusion. And so her orders and questions began to flow that morning: What was the blood supply inventory? Was the crisis center activated? Were Red Cross relief teams on their way to the affected areas? Conference calls followed conference calls. A few hours later, she walked through the Red Cross' offices, reassuring her rattled staff.
"We knew this is what we had to do," she says. "It's like being in an ER. This is a job that has to be done. So you go and do it."
In the intervening hours, Healy seemed ubiquitous. Her face filled TV screens with taped appeals for blood and money. That first evening, she stood before a flaming Pentagon to supervise relief efforts. On Wednesday, she was at the White House, organizing a blood drive (her daughter volunteered). On Thursday, she rode an Amtrak train carrying supplies to ground zero in New York. On Saturday, she visited the Pennsylvania crash site.
It wasn't long before the criticism started.
When Healy, 57, took the $450,000-a-year presidency of the Red Cross two years ago, succeeding Elizabeth Dole, it was the jewel in a brilliant career.
She has been a feminist medical pioneer most of her adult life, a spiritual descendant of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross. Her resume glistens: a celebrated professor and researcher at Johns Hopkins, former head of the American Heart Association, a White House science adviser under President Ronald Reagan, director of the National Institutes of Health, dean of the Ohio State University medical school.
The Red Cross may be the most revered humanitarian organization in the world. With 37,000 employees and millions of volunteers, it provides almost half of the nation's blood supply. It's usually the first civilian agency on the scene of some 65,000 disasters and tragedies a year: earthquakes and floods, as well as air crashes and house fires. Its assistance, from food to grief counseling, is provided free to all who need it. On Sept. 11, it mobilized about 25,000 staffers and volunteers to feed, house and console.
So what's not to like?
Bernadine Healy, possibly.
The same steely qualities that Healy displayed during the Sept. 11 attacks have left ruffled feelings in the aftermath.
Critics suggest that her organization's fundraising -- it has received $270-million of the $700-million pledged so far -- may be overly aggressive and premature. It's not clear, after all, how much the disaster will cost. And with billions of dollars in federal and state funds pouring in, along with private insurance money and other charitable contributions, the concern is that the Red Cross will sponge up funds that might go to other causes.
"It's a prudent and reasonable thing to catch your breath and then look for an accounting of what the real needs are," says Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, which monitors nonprofit groups. "We shouldn't be squandering our charitable dollars."
The Red Cross, he adds, "needs to honor the intentions of the donors. Donors think the money they're giving is going to emergency relief in this disaster. It may, or it may be used for something else. They need to do a better job of being clear about what the money is going for."
Healy bristles at this. "We have always operated with total transparency," she says. She estimates that the Red Cross will spend about $300-million on the disaster, including a $100-million cash assistance program and about $90-million for immediate relief at the crash scenes. The balance will be devoted to intermediate programs, such as grief counseling, staff training and improved blood storage and supplies.
Others remain rankled by what they see as Healy's go-it-alone style.
She has refused to support efforts to create a shared database among relief organizations to keep track of their contributions to victims' families. The national Red Cross has never participated in such tracking (although local chapters have) and won't because it might violate the recipients' privacy, a spokesman says. But that stand has disappointed New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who has been trying to coordinate the activities of dozens of relief organizations.
In the days immediately following the terrorist attacks, Healy and the Red Cross angered other organizations by continuing to call for blood donations. It wasn't clear that more blood was needed; there were so few survivors that the Department of Health and Human Services recommended that blood banks stop taking donations.
"There was a mixed message, and it confused people," says Jeanne Dariotis, president of America's Blood Centers, which represents independent community blood banks. "I'm not trying to bash them or her. But there has been a reluctance to work with us now and in the past, and quite frankly I don't quite understand it. The public expects us to speak with one message. They'd be appalled that we can't seem to do that."
Healy makes no apologies, and she isn't gentle in reply. The public spiritedness of the moment was an opportunity, not a problem:
"In the best of times, we have a three-day supply of blood in this country. I kept thinking, "You ding-dongs. You had an opportunity to drive the inventory to 10 or 14 days.' What really gets my Irish up is that everyone in America was saying, "What can I do to help?' And the response they were getting was, "Come back later.' "
"What really gets my Irish up." It's a phrase you hear several times from Healy during the course of a conversation. Even her husband, Dr. Floyd Loop, the head of the Cleveland Clinic, uses it to describe her reaction to various run-ins and feuds over the years.
Says Loop: "Most people wilt under pressure, even if they happen to be right about something. That's not Bernie. She does not back down. She's a fighter. I don't have any problem with her, but I could be in the minority."
Growing up in a tough neighborhood in Queens, Healy thought early on about becoming a missionary nun. But that idea evaporated, she once said, when her father told her she'd have to take orders from a priest.
Hers was a no-nonsense household, with few frills. She doesn't, for instance, recall her parents, Michael and Violet, going out to dinner during her childhood. She and her three sisters were expected to concentrate on their studies. Her elder sister, Sue Ellen, landed at MIT on scholarship; Bernadine and her two younger siblings, Michelle and Catherine, went to Vassar, also on scholarships.
From Vassar, she went to Harvard Medical School and then to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where she attained a full professorship.
At Hopkins, she married a faculty member, Gregory Bulkley, and had a daughter. After their divorce, she met Loop, a renowned heart surgeon, while she was working at the White House. Healy soon joined Loop at the Cleveland Clinic, where she headed research. They married, had a daughter and settled down; for years, Healy has spent the week in Washington and the weekend at her home in Cleveland.
Her last tour of Washington, from 1991 to 1993, was stormy as well as remarkable.
As the first woman to head the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md., she quickly gained a reputation for assertiveness. Early on, she drafted a reorganization plan for the institution, an aggressive reform proposal that upset many of NIH's scientists. She also proposed an audacious 10-year, $625-million study of women's health, the largest in history; it was adopted.
Her feuds were semiregular events. Healy clashed publicly and colorfully with Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., when his subcommittee called her to testify in its investigations of scientific fraud. She crossed swords with Nobel laureate James Watson, who brusquely resigned in 1992 as head of the Human Genome Project. He accused Healy of "micromanaging" NIH.
By the time Healy departed in 1993 -- she was "heartbroken" not to be asked by the Clinton administration to stay on -- few of NIH's directors wanted to be associated with her, says Florence Haseltine, a former Healy speechwriter. "At her goodbye party, they wouldn't stand next to her," she says.
In February 1999, corporate recruiter Gerard Roche called with an offer: Dole was leaving the Red Cross to run for president; would Healy be interested in taking it over?
She said no. She liked her job as dean of Ohio State's medical school, which she had taken after an unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination for Ohio's open Senate seat in 1994.
Roche persisted, appealing to Healy's public spirit, her administrative skills, her long background as a healer. She thought back to her days of wanting to be a missionary. She talked to her family. It started to come together.
There was one other consideration. Some months earlier, Healy had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. She had chemotherapy, then surgery. There has been no sign of relapse, but there were still treatments. Was she strong enough to take on something like the Red Cross?
Healy always did like a good fight. She had gone back to work three weeks after brain surgery. The Red Cross job seemed manageable.
"I never woke up and told myself, "This is a dying day,' " she says. "I am an eternal optimist. I would never allow it to defeat me."