Groundbreaking ceremony for USU to be built on the grounds of the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, June 10, 1975. Congressman F. Edward Hébert (right) is congratulated by President Gerald Ford.
“Hébert offered the proposal of creating…a training school, and General (soon to be President) Eisenhower said, ‘you don’t understand Congressman, we need doctors today, not in 10 or 15 years,’” says Smith. “Hébert responded that — ‘we’ll solve the problem today but you’re still going to need doctors in 15 years and unless we plan now you’ll have another 15 years to wait when we get around to talking about it then.’”
During the Korean War, the issue continued to plague the military, resulting in the establishment of a draft for doctors that continued through the 1970s.
“Virtually every male graduating physician in the country was obligated for two years of military service,” Smith says. “And very few stayed in for a career. The average doctor stayed one year beyond obligation if they got specialty training.”
In 1970, the Gates Commission determined the draft was not equitable and three years later, it ended, turning the military into an all-volunteer force.
“At this point, Congressman Hébert was the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee,” Smith says. “So he says ‘you’re going to set up my West Point for doctors’ and he puts in a bill in 1971 and everybody is dead set against it. The American Medical Association is against it, the Association of American Medical Colleges is against it, the Pentagon is against it — and much of Congress is against it.”
Smith says essentially Hébert didn’t yet understand the problem was retention and that an academy couldn’t create enough doctors.
He would soon come to realize a graduate school was needed.
The solution
The answer that was needed to solve the problem of losing military physicians was ultimately a three-pronged solution.
In 1972, the Defense health bill called the Uniformed Services Health Professions Revitalization Act was put forward, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Nixon on Sept. 21, 1972.
The act included the Health Professions Scholarship Program (HPSP), which offers military scholarships that can help cover civilian medical school tuition, pro pay, which created professional pay for military doctors who were specialists — and for the creation of a medical school within 25 miles of the District of Columbia.
“HPSP would begin to give you people quickly, pro pay would help you keep people a little longer and — long term, if the university panned out, you’d have a cadre,” Smith says. “So the law was passed in ’72. At that time, the DOD had wanted pro pay and the HPSP program immediately, set both of them up and simply ignored the university portion of the law.”
Smith says three years later, as President Nixon was preparing to leave office, Hébert used his leverage to get the university jump started.
“Hébert says ‘you need to be aware there will be no defense budget next year unless a board of regents for my university is appointed.’ Well, not having a defense budget would be inconvenient — so they immediately began to look for a board.”
The newly-selected board of regents then appointed a site selection committee to choose a location for the medical school, ultimately deciding on 100 acres of land on the grounds of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., three miles from the capital. The new school’s administrative offices sat above a Peoples Drug Store and a bank in downtown Bethesda.
“By the summer of ’76 they had 30-odd students signed up to come,” says Smith.
Meanwhile, Sen. William Proxmire thought the university was a bad idea and needed to be stopped, says Smith. Proxmire wanted the U.S. Government Accountability Office (then known as the General Accounting Office, GAO) to investigate the university’s cost.