Dr. Mary’s Monkey

by Edward T Haslam

  In 1924, at the age of twenty-eight, he returned to the United States. Educated, trained, traveled, and connected, he was prepared to take full advantage of the dawning of the golden age of medicine.7 Before long, he landed a full-time teaching position at the nearby University of Wisconsin. His stay was brief.

  The hand of his uncle’s influence can be seen again, when, in 1927, at the age of thirty-one and after just one year of teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Alton Ochsner was appointed Head of Surgery at Tulane Medical School, replacing Dr. Robert Matas, an internationally-known surgeon who had headed Tulane’s surgery department for years.

  During Ochsner’s get-acquainted visit, Matas invited him to witness a spectacular display of the older physician’s own surgical skill. Even if Ochsner did not accept the position, at least he could return home with a great story about Matas. In Ochsner’s presence, Matas removed a 92-pound tumor from a 182 pound patient. The tumor was so large that it had to be impaled with ice tongs and lifted with a block-and-tack-le pulley system bolted to the ceiling of the operating room. The remaining 90 pounds of patient died the next day from lack of blood. The technology of blood transfusions had not yet made it to New Orleans.8

  The appointment of a young outsider over the heads of several well-qualified, older doctors, who were waiting in the wings to get the position, raised eyebrows and set in motion a camp of anti-Ochsner sentiment in the medical community which followed Alton throughout his career. But Ochsner’s success in New Orleans was so complete that this has been dismissed as jealousy.

  Ochsner soon gained public recognition by stumbling into an incident with the powerful Louisiana Governor Huey Long over the management of the 1,732 bed Charity Hospital which Long had built. Ochsner’s supporters characterized the situation as the competent Ochsner incensed over the appointment of an unqualified upstart. Actually Dr. Vidrine, whom Long appointed as Superintendent of Charity Hospital, was both a graduate of Tulane Medical School and a Rhodes Scholar. Both men were young. Vidrine was twenty-eight, and Ochsner was thirty-one. And both had their own agendas for improving the hospital and advancing their careers.

  Vidrine had the support of the governor and was winning. Ochsner was ready to bail out of New Orleans, and wrote a letter describing his bitterness to a friend. The letter, which Ochsner claimed he never mailed, was lost in the halls of Charity Hospital and wound up in the hands of Huey Long himself. Long, who was battling with Tulane for other reasons, used it as an excuse to throw Tulane Medical School, and Ochsner personally, out of the Charity Hospital. The incident gave Ochsner public notoriety and credibility with the elements of Louisiana which opposed Huey Long’s populist agenda, which was just about everybody with money. This facilitated Ochsner’s successful penetration of the elite social circles of New Orleans.

  During the 1930s and 1940s, Ochsner’s skill as a laboratory researcher grew. Clever and solution-oriented, he prided himself in developing practical medical innovations. As researchers go, Ochsner was a pragmatist, “the type of researcher who wasted no time in the laboratory.”9 He was fascinated by “the idea of serendipity,” which is defined as “a gift for discovering valuable or agreeable things by accident,”10 and it influenced his research. As a result of his research activities, he joined the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, and became an officer in its southern chapter. His biographers flirted with the idea that Ochsner might have even received a Nobel Prize, if he had been able to devote more time to his research efforts, but there is no evidence that the Nobel committee ever considered him for such.

  However, if Ochsner should have received a prize for any of his medical work, his crusade against cigarette smoking would be my candidate. In 1936 he made a serendipitous observation, and became one of the first people to conclude that cigarette smoking was a cause of lung cancer. Noting that lung cancer was virtually non-existent in non-smokers, and that incidences of lung cancer increased with the number of cigarettes smoked per day, he constructed a case that he took to the American Cancer Society. Here we see one of Ochsner’s strengths at work: The clarity and certainty with which he saw medicine was comforting to everyone around him. And he was always willing to take action if he thought he could accomplish something positive. In Ochsner’s words: “Of course, everybody thought I was crazy, but now the evidence is so overwhelming that only the tobacco people disagree.”

  Ochsner went on to become President of the American Cancer Society in 1949 and sat on their Board of Directors with fellow elected-officer William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the celebrated founder and head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (covert warfare and intelligence during World War II, and predecessor to the CIA).11

  As a medical school professor, Ochsner was notorious for his demagogic tactics, the best known of which was “the bullpen.” Here, in an amphitheater full of hundreds of medical students, Ochsner conducted an intimidating hybrid of quiz-show and psychodrama, screaming questions at medical students and berating them over their answers. He justified these tactics by saying medicine was stressful. Diagnosis was a matter of common sense,12 and medical students had to be taught to think under pressure. Many students were humiliated by the experience. One even fainted. When his own son was in the bullpen, Ochsner grabbed him by both lapels, shook him in front of his classmates, and yelled, “You’re not going to treat it any different than I would treat it.”13

  Ochsner carried his philosophy of harsh discipline back into his home. To quote one of his sons: “My father used to beat the hell out of me.” Once he even broke a leather belt during a beating. To quote his official biographers: “In a more tolerant time it might have been considered abuse.” But Ochsner was proud to be considered “the fastest belt in New Orleans.” 14

  During an interview late in his life, Ochsner blamed all of the permissiveness of modern society (all of the drugs, political unrest and promiscuity of the 1960s and 1970s, even abortion) on the ill-conceived advice of Dr. Benjamin Spock, who suggested that physical punishment and negative reinforcement were not effective means of parenting. In Ochsner’s words: “...everything has to be disciplined. Even a dog has to be disciplined. A cat has to be disciplined.... You show me an undisciplined person, and I’ll show you an insecure person and an unhappy person.... We now have a whole generation of insecure, unhappy persons because they don’t know what discipline is, and it’s a direct result of the advice of Dr. Spock.” 15

  In the area of medical ethics, he was more forgiving, and conditionally embraced the concept of euthanasia: “I see no reason for keeping a person alive who otherwise has no chance of recovery.”16 Further: “I think there’s nothing worse than to see a person who is a vegetable, who has no chance of ever being better... If I were in that position, I would want someone to put me out ... And, of course, the horrible thing about such situations is the tremendous cost of prolonging such cases.”17

  The backbone of Ochsner’s medical reputation was his technical mastery in the operating room. He claimed 20,000 operations to his credit during his fifty-year career. Yet he was not perfect. At one point, he openly acknowledged that he had accidentally killed an unidentified patient by clamping off the artery to his lungs.18 The most legendary of his surgical feats was the successful separation of Siamese twins.19 The most dramatic of his operating room innovations was the use of a blowtorch on a patient during a radical mastectomy.20

  Ochsner proposed that Tulane start its own hospital. When Tulane’s board turned down the proposal, Ochsner asked if he could start his own; they did not object. He gathered together five of the department heads at Tulane Medical School and organized a multidisciplinary clinic. Other New Orleans doctors feared the encroachment of a big-business approach to medicine, protested the establishment of the multi-disciplinary clinic which would compete with independent physicians, and appealed to the AMA to stop it. The AMA refused.21 In 1942, the Ochsner Clinic and Foundation Hospital opened its doors in uptown New Orleans. Later it moved to a decommission
ed military base in Jefferson Parish, and then relocated to its current home.

  Today, the enormous medical complex stands like the Emerald City, rising high above the residential rooflines which surround its new home on Jefferson Highway. Across the front of the complex stands a string of flagpoles which welcome the elite of Latin America, flying flags from each of their countries. The idea of a medical facility which catered to the needs of Latin America’s elite was integral to the concept of Ochsner’s clinic,22 and since its inception, Ochsner’s medical facility has served the financial and political elite of Central and South America.

  The Latin American angle was a natural for a medical clinic in New Orleans. And as we noted earlier, New Orleans was America’s commercial pipeline to Latin America, and Tulane’s reputation was golden in the region. For a group of Tulane doctors to form a medical clinic to serve the needs of the Latin elite was great news for those who could step on a plane in their capital city and be in New Orleans quicker than most Americans. To promote his clinic, Ochsner made over a hundred trips to Latin America during his career, and became friends with its rulers.

  One event that helped jump-start his acceptance in these elite Latin circles was a phone call to Ochsner from Cordell Hull, the U.S. Secretary of State during World War II. Hull called Ochsner and asked him to take care of Tomas Gabriel Duque, the former President (and dictator) of Panama, who had helped U.S. intelligence organize a coup d’etat against pro-Nazi elements during World War II.23 Connections within these circles grew. Before it was over, Ochsner was the President of the Cordell Hull Foundation.24 It is hard to find information on the Cordell Hull Foundation, but those who spoke to me about it said it was politically very active, sponsoring Latin American students in American universities, and giving scholarships to children of State Department employees.

  Among his friends, Ochsner counted Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua’s former President (and dictator), who was run out of his country by revolutionaries in 1979. This relationship is what you might call a personal one, based on the letters in Ochsner’s personal papers.25 When Senora Somoza visited Tulane Medical School to investigate an exchange program between Tulane and the Nicaraguan government, a larger-than-life painting of Alton Ochsner was hung in the medical school for the occasion.26 And Ochsner and Somoza shared mutual anti-Communist objectives. Somoza’s personal physician, Dr. Henri DeBayle, sat on the Board of Directors of Guy Banister’s infamous Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean.27

  Another patient was Juan Peron, the President (and dictator) of Argentina. Ochsner flew to Buenos Aires to treat Peron for a problem in one of his legs. Peron complimented Ochsner, saying that surgeons were “men of action.”28 Peron was on the mark. Ochsner prided himself in his action orientation, saying: “Once you know what needs to be done, there is no point waiting.”

  Following the lead of these dictators came the oligarchies of Latin American countries which had not developed their own health care systems. By the 1980s over 10,000 patients per year were coming from Latin America to the Ochsner Clinic for treatment. There were so many, that Ochsner built a hotel on the hospital grounds to house the Latin patients’ relatives, and hired a staff of Spanish interpreters to tend to their needs.

  On the American side, Ochsner accumulated many celebrities in his patient portfolio, from golf legend Ben Hogan to movie star Gary Cooper to the mega-wealthy Clint Murchison of the Texas oil family

  Murchison’s involvement with Ochsner seems to me to have been as political as medical. Yes, he was a personal patient of Alton Ochsner and gave him a Cadillac as a “thank you” present, but he also donated $750,000 to the Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation as seed money for Ochsner’s new hospital. Meanwhile, Murchison purchased 30,000 acres of Louisiana swamp land and prepared it for a real estate development now known as New Orleans East, which covers about one-third of the land in the city of New Orleans.29 I have always heard that Murchison bought it from Lady Bird Johnson. When LBJ announced the construction of Interstate 10 through the middle of this newly drained tract of land, plus the construction of NASA’s largest facility on the same site, property values rose as fast as any in American history. Murchison made a fortune.

  Ochsner was personally active in Louisiana politics. He served as campaign manager for INCA board member Dave Treen’s successful bid for the U.S. House of Representatives and Lt. Governor Jimmy Fitzmorris’ unsuccessful bid for Governor. Ochsner was always very close to Congressman F Edward Hebert, with whom he shared an ultra-right, hard-line, anti-Communist sentiment. On the other hand, Ochsner had an of -and-on friendship with liberal Congressman Hale Boggs, whose photo appeared alongside Ochsner’s on the back of INCA’s phonograph album featuring the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald.

  One of Ochsner’s disputes with Boggs was the claim that in 1957 Boggs had assisted Ochsner in getting the multi-million dollar Hill-Burton grant from the U.S. government to build his hospital. Ochsner claimed Boggs’ influence was negligible.30 Considering that Boggs was one of the most powerful people in the U.S. House of Representatives at the time, Ochsner must have had some pretty serious connections to think that Boggs’ influence was negligible. Despite all his posturing as a conservative, Ochsner was called “the most aggressive seeker and recipient of so-called federal handouts in the Second District” (Boggs’ district) by a Louisiana State Representative.31

  It is interesting to note the comments of Admiral Stansfield Turner, who testified to Congress as the Director of the CIA about the extent of the CIA’s domestic activities. One of the Congressional questions was whether the CIA conducted its own medical research here inside the United States, and if so, how were they funding it? Turner said that the CIA had funded 159 medical facilities around the country for the purpose of conducting covert medical research. The funding was done in conjunction with Congress’ Hill-Burton Fund. The CIA supplied seed money through blind third parties, and then the facility received matching funds as a Hill-Burton grant. When the facility was completed, the agency had access to a portion of the hospital’s bed space for its purposes.32 It has been suggested to me that the Murchison donation might have been the seed money for the project, and that Congressman Hebert’s influence on the CIA budget may have been the real force that provided the Hill-Burton funding. It is probable that Ochsner’s hospital was one of the 159 covert research centers which the CIA has admitted to setting up.

  The FBI maintained a file on Dr. Alton Ochsner which we now have access to through the Freedom of Information Act. It shows his long relationship with the U.S. military, the FBI and other U.S. government agencies.33 These records show that in 1941 Ochsner received an “excepted appointment” from the Civil Service Commission, and in 1946 he received a citation from the U.S. War Department recognizing the medical research he did for the government.34 In 1955 he became a consultant to the U.S. Army, and in 1957 he became a consultant to the U.S. Air Force. Later, in 1957, the FBI cleared Ochsner for a “Sensitive Position” for the U.S. government, and J. Edgar Hoover personally approved him as an official contact for the Special Agent in Charge of the New Orleans FBI office, for whom Ochsner had already been performing discreet surgery at discounted rates.

  In October of 1959, after two years of working in a “Sensitive Position,” presumably with the FBI, the FBI conducted yet another “Sensitive Position” investigation on Ochsner and forwarded their findings to an unnamed U.S. government agency. Several days later, on October 21, 1959, the FBI formally discontinued Ochsner’s relationship with the FBI, freeing him up to accept an assignment from the other undisclosed agency.

  So what was happening in 1957 and 1959? What was this other agency? Why would they have needed the services of a doctor? And what did they need from this doctor that they could not get from the legions of other doctors already working for the U.S. government in one capacity or another? These are important questions.

  By the late 1950s Alton Ochsner was at the pinnacle of his prestige. His clinic had grown enormously and
was at its third location. His portfolio of celebrity patients and his new hospital made his name a household word. His social status in New Orleans could not have been higher. He had been King of Carnival and had won numerous civic awards.35 In 1956 he stepped down as Tulane’s Chief of Surgery, and in 1961 Tulane’s Board of Directors terminated his teaching position, citing a conflict of interest with his clinic as the reason. If nothing else, it helped distance Tulane from Ochsner’s increasingly covert activities. He was sixty-five years old at the time.

  Having achieved considerable financial success during his career, the Tulane termination meant that Ochsner was now free to devote himself to his personal passion: politics. Basically, Ochsner was an arch-conservative with an antebellum, anti-welfare mentality. A quick glimpse of his political philosophy can be seen in the following quote from a letter he wrote in the early ‘60s to U.S. Senator Allen Ellender: “I sincerely hope that the Civil Rights Bill can also be defeated, because if it were passed, it would certainly mean virtual dictatorship by the President and the Attorney General, a thing I am sure they both want.”36

  One of the major news events of 1959 was Castro’s revolution in Cuba. It threatened to spread to all of Latin America and to displace the nearly-free-labor economic system which American business had profited from for decades. Trade was New Orleans’ biggest business, and seventy-five percent of it was with Latin America.37 The entire New Orleans business community was threatened by this revolutionary trend. The reactionary sentiment in New Orleans centered around civic organizations which promoted trade with Latin America, like International House and the International Trade Mart. Ochsner himself was President of International House,38 and he joined International Trade Mart’s Clay Shaw on the Board of Directors of the Foreign Policy Association of New Orleans, which brought CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell to New Orleans to discuss the Communist threat, a small favor for Congressman Hebert’s district.