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December 23, 2001
Who Brought Bernadine Healy Down?
By Deborah Sontag
The vast, empty foyer of the American Red Cross’s stately headquarters in Washington seemed as
remote from ground zero as white marble from rubble. That was my inescapable, if facile, thought
as I glided up the Tara­like central staircase one morning in early November. The holy hush was
misleading, though. It gave no hint of the passionate, even viperous intrigue that was playing out
behind closed doors. At a moment when the Red Cross was supposed to be absorbed with
ministering to a nation in crisis, it was confronting an internal crisis of its own making.
It had been just over a week since Dr. Bernadine Healy, 57, had announced her resignation under
pressure as Red Cross president. I sat waiting for her in the president’s office wing, which was still
her domain but increasingly provided her little sanctuary. Healy, baldly showcasing her
impatience toward Red Cross sanctities about tradition, had long displayed a saying attributed to
Clara Barton above the mantle: ”It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. . . . I
defy the tyranny of precedent.”
Sweeping into the room, Healy sank into a cranberry­colored chair and exhaled. Healy is a fine­
boned, exquisitely tailored woman who, with her crisp blond coif and colorful blazers, looked more
like the Republican senator she once aspired to be than a cardiologist who ran a humanitarian
organization. That day, she was showing the jittery strain of the previous two months, in which
she first commanded a huge disaster­relief effort and then suffered the humiliation of rejection by
the Red Cross’s 50­member board of governors. Under her severance agreement, Healy was
supposed to stay on through year’s end while the general counsel, Harold J. Decker, took over as
acting C.E.O. But it was already getting pretty uncomfortable.
”I can’t believe it,” she said, a great sigh collapsing her small frame. ”They’ve just fired my chief of
staff. Poor Kate. They gave her a few hours to pack up and be gone. They want to get rid of us that
badly?” Over the next couple of hours, there were many knocks at the door and sniffles outside it
as Healy’s assistants were reassigned, a first step toward their eventual firing. Healy, who had
spent the previous day at a grueling Congressional subcommittee hearing, was agitated. She
believed that the Red Cross might be seeking to deflect criticism ­­ and avoid self­criticism ­­ by
scapegoating her. She could feel it coming, she said. The board was going to reverse course and
blame unpopular decisions on her. Healy decided that day to pack up her office and return to her
Ohio home as soon as possible.
It was a terribly intimate moment to observe, and Healy later said that she regretted I had been
there. Her eyes watery, Healy had stared at a portrait of Barton, her heroine, who founded the
American Red Cross in 1881. ”Y ou know Clara Barton was fired, too,” she said, coughing up a dry
laugh. ”The difference is, she lasted 20 some years and I only lasted two. They got her on a
trumped­up charge that she used lumber left over from a disaster recovery program in her home.
It tarnished her reputation, although history ultimately redeemed her.” Healy paused, hearing
herself. ”Not that I’m Clara Barton.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes. ”Far from it.”
The Red Cross has come a long way since Barton established it ”to afford ready succor and
assistance to sufferers in time of national or widespread calamities.” It now generates about $3
billion in revenues a year as a quasi­governmental bureaucracy with a split personality. On the
one hand, it is what Barton intended, a nonprofit disaster­relief organization, and that chapter­
based service side gives the Red Cross its identity as an icon of volunteerism. But the Red Cross is
also a blood business, which after a history of indebtedness and regulatory troubles has come to
operate like a centralized corporation. Tensions between the two sides are echoed in other turf
battles: between the 1,034 local chapters and the national headquarters, between veterans who
believe their ”mission” is good deeds and newcomers who believe theirs is good management and
between the president and a board so big that Decker said his first impression was ”politburo.”
In a confidential memo to the board in late October, Healy bitterly described how the
organization’s internecine dynamic was summed up for her by another executive when she
arrived in September 1999: ”Red Crossers will give you the shirt off their back, but will as easily
put a knife in your back.”
All this makes the Red Cross a difficult, unwieldy institution to head. Since 1989, there have been
three leaders and four interim leaders, counting Decker. Healy succeeded Elizabeth Dole, the first
female president since Clara Barton. Dole spent much of the 1990’s at the helm, taking a year off
when her husband ran for president, then returning and eventually leaving to prepare her own
presidential bid. The Red Cross board chairman, David T. McLaughlin, said that Dole’s departure
was ”not terribly dissimilar” from Healy’s. Dole ”got out ahead of the game and stepped down,” he
said, ”but she, too, left under some pressure,” the result of combustible internal politics. Unlike
Dole, McLaughlin said, Healy ”more than brought on” her own departure, but both women were
”fighting a culture, a culture that had grown up over a long period of time.”
In two years on the job, the biggest disasters under Healy’s watch as Red Cross president were
Hurricane Floyd and Tropical Storm Allison. On Sept. 11, she stood outside on the headquarters’
marble steps as snipers positioned themselves on the White House roof and, in the distance, smoke
rose in blankets from the Pentagon. She knew in her gut that the day would have serious
consequences for the organization that she commanded and for her personally.
McLaughlin would say later that Healy, the first physician­president of the organization, went at
the initial Sept. 11 response ”very clinically, and I have to say not emotionally. She was totally in
action, on point.” That intensity of focus, however, was not a quality of Healy’s that was roundly
admired within the Red Cross. Some thought her too driven and steely for an organization that
they considered an affair of the heart. The previous Red Cross president, they say, had more of a
politician’s human touch. ”Elizabeth Dole would notice the pin you were wearing, and Dr. Healy
would notice the stain on your jacket,” the director of one chapter said. ”Dr. Healy was not people­
oriented, and the Red Cross is all about people.”
That day, however, the Red Cross had to be all about performance. And Healy found what she
considered a serious wrinkle in an operation otherwise shifting into high gear efficiently. At noon,
Healy’s office received a call from the Pentagon: ”Where the hell are you guys? Where’s the Red
Cross?” The Pentagon requested ”water, food and other things we typically provide,” according to
an internal memo. Charles DeVita, the organization’s security chief, placed a puzzled call of
inquiry on Healy’s behalf to the Disaster Operations Center, a corporate­style bunker known as the
DOC, which is the Virginia­based command center for all disasters. The DOC was run by two
women with 60 years of experience between them. They resented DeVita’s phone call, a colleague
of theirs told me: DeVita was a former assistant Secret Service director whom Healy had recruited
just last year. What did the two of them know about activating the DOC?
That evening, Healy, believing the problem resolved, took a police escort to the site. She arrived at
a scene of breathtaking devastation, with an army of firefighters ”doing everything possible” to
battle the blazing building. She saw ”the Sallies,” as the Salvation Army is called in charity circles,
out in full force. But, to echo the caller from the Pentagon, where the hell was the Red Cross?
Healy expected to find the specialized teams usually dispatched by the DOC after plane crashes.
Instead she found only four volunteers from the small, local Arlington County chapter ­­ bless
their hearts” ­­ earnestly trying to provide assistance to hundreds of emergency workers. There
was no E.R.V., or emergency response vehicle, because Arlington’s was in the shop. They didn’t
have any cots, so some firefighters were stretched out on the ground. Stunned, Healy punched out
the phone number of a senior administrator who oversaw the two women at the DOC. She
suggested the administrator report immediately to the scene, ”get down on his knees and pray to
God for forgiveness that we’re not here.”
Over the next week, Healy also stumbled on other serious problems that originated in the DOC ­­
a failure to dispatch chaplains to the Pennsylvania crash site and a failure to realize that a
confidential database of hospitalized victims existed. And by the professional standards of Healy
and her executive team, the problems demanded a swift, sure response: the two women had to go.
Although it was not Healy who actually fired the women, she was held responsible by many for
what was seen as a coldhearted, ill­timed attack on two women who meant well. Adding a touch
of melodrama, one of the women collapsed after she was dismissed and ended up in an intensive­
care unit. All told, the incidents served to accelerate opposition to Healy.
Some of the reaction was anxiety. ”We’re all afraid for our jobs,” one senior official at the DOC
wrote in an e­mail message that ended up circulating widely through the Red Cross’s quite gossipy
e­mail system. Some of it was resentment. ”We have been silent up to now, but the deeply
disturbing news of Dr. Healy firing two of our top people in Disaster Services is just too much,” one
couple, former co­chairpeople of the volunteer system, wrote in another e­mail message.
Referring to themselves as previous victims of Healy’s, they asked: ”Why isn’t the board of
governors doing something about her?”
Well before Sept. 11, some Red Cross governors were growing uncomfortable with what they told
Healy in her July evaluation was her hard­charging style. She had been encountering mounting
resistance from the chapters too. The chapters had always operated pretty autonomously. They did
not like it when Healy, who was aghast to learn how much of their financial reporting to
headquarters was voluntary, sought to oversee them more closely. Although the Red Cross is
effectively a public trust, it has never been a particularly transparent organization, not even
internally.
Some chapter directors opposed her oversight for philosophical reasons; they feared that it
represented the first steps toward centralization in an organization that should belong to the grass
roots. Others didn’t want Big Brother peering into their affairs. Or streamlining the chapter system
in a way that would reduce their power or cut jobs. And then there were those with something to
hide, like the administrator in Jersey City.
Healy thinks that her downfall probably began, improbably, right there in Jersey City when all
these tensions exploded. An audit of the small, poor Hudson County, N.J., chapter had uncovered
irregularities, suggesting embezzlement by the director; he was a longtime Red Crosser who
apparently had treated his fief as a personal charity ward. Healy was horrified, suspended the man
and his bookkeeper without pay and hired an outside firm to do a forensic audit. The auditors
found what appeared to be significant theft, and the Red Cross turned the matter over to the local
prosecutor’s office. In mid­December, a grand jury handed up indictments of Joseph Lecowich,
the director, and Catalina Escoto, the bookkeeper, on charges of stealing $1 million in Red Cross
funds.
The fact that Healy’s suspicions were proved right in the end did not matter. Several board
members and veteran administrators thought that she should have suspended the employees with
pay, and they objected to involving external auditors. During her July evaluation, some members
criticized her for being ”too fast and too tough” in Jersey City. She asked them, ”What should I
have been, too soft and too slow?” And they said, ”See, you’re too defensive.”
When the Red Cross board hired Healy, a Harvard Medical School graduate and mother of two
daughters, ages 15 and 22, it understood exactly whom it was getting. From her stints as the first
female director of the National Institutes of Health and as dean of the Ohio State University
medical school, she had an established track record. A blunt­talking New Y orker born and bred in
working­class Queens, she was not known as a diplomat. Rather, she was known as a driven
professional who ruffled feathers but made things happen.
Dimon R. McFerson, then the C.E.O. of Nationwide, was the Red Cross governor who oversaw
the 1999 search. He said that Healy was selected because she was the best candidate and that he
would make the same choice again now. The board was unconcerned about Healy’s ”head­on
style,” he said, although in retrospect it seems inevitable that the board and Healy would end up
on a collision course. ”We hired a change agent for a culture resistant to change,” one board
member said.
Under the Red Cross’s Congressionally established charter, seven of its 50 board members are
senior government officials, like cabinet secretaries, who almost never participate. Another 12 are
corporate, business and academic leaders who are not Red Cross lifers. Neither is McLaughlin; he
is a former chairman of CBS, president of Dartmouth College and president of the Aspen Institute
who, like his predecessors, was appointed Red Cross chairman by the president of the United
States.
The remaining 30 governors, who are selected by local Red Cross chapters through a competitive
nomination process, really control the organization. They tend to be lifelong Red Crossers who
have worked their way up from local to national prominence within the organization; they also
tend to be protective of traditions ­­ and of veteran employees with whom they have longstanding
relationships. Not all of them, McLaughlin said, straining to be diplomatic, ”possess strong
governmental or financial or programmatic experience on top of their incredible loyalty to the Red
Cross.” But because they are willing to give so much of their time, many of them end up presiding
over the board’s internal committees ­­ for as long as six years ­­ and those committee chairmen
dominate the executive committee whose decisions tend to be rubber­stamped by the full board.
During the year that Dole took a sabbatical, the executive committee started playing a more
hands­on role, and quickly took to it. When Dole returned, according to many Red Crossers, she
did not exercise the same strong leadership she had previously. (Dole did not return several calls to
her Washington office.) Then, during the year between Dole and Healy, there was another interim
president. And so by the time Healy arrived, the board was acting like a hydra­headed C.E.O.,
”overstepping its role and authority,” McLaughlin, who took over last May, said.
”I tried to pull them back,” he added. ”I tried to help her.”
The board hired Healy at the hefty salary of $400,000, twice what Dole made, because that was
Healy’s value in the marketplace. According to McFerson, the board was attracted to Healy’s
medical background and the fact that she ”knew blood,” since ”blood was the area that needed the
most attention.” The board’s sole concern was that Healy was coming off ”a medical challenge,” as
McFerson put it. She had just recovered from a brain tumor.
When the tumor was diagnosed, Healy told me, she had, in true medical­drama style, been given
three months to live. Her unexpected recovery played a role in her decision to take the Red Cross
job. In her grateful, post­illness state of mind, she was drawn to the chance to ”do good.” And in a
way, some Red Cross veterans were a bit taken aback by Healy’s insta­passion about the Red
Cross itself. She was an outsider with the zeal of an insider; she came on so strong and fast with
designs for the organization’s ”greatness” that some grew suspicious that Healy, who had waged a
failed campaign for the United States Senate in Ohio, was motivated more by personal ambition.
It wasn’t long after Healy moved to Washington from her home in Ohio, where her husband, Dr.
Floyd Loop, runs the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, that she realized she would be butting heads
with the board.
”She was an entrepreneur, and entrepreneurs don’t like boards or controls,” McLaughlin said. ”She
kept getting out ahead of the board, and the board was chasing after her. In hindsight, her
decisions were right. But her personal style was uneven.”
Healy, in turn, did not like what she found organizationally. In a confidential memo that she sent
the board shortly before her resignation, Healy laid out a withering analysis of the Red Cross that
she had inherited. She described ”a corporate culture steeped in silos, turf battles, gossip and very
little teamwork. Management structure was almost militaristic . . . [but] unlike the military, there
were few commonly understood performance measures, and almost no system of reward or
consequences for performance.”
On the ”Blood Side” of the Red Cross, which outsiders know so little about, such a corporate
culture was not only costly but also potentially dangerous. The Red Cross began ”sticking” people
on a large scale during World War II, when it was called on to provide blood for soldiers. Now, the
Red Cross collects blood donations at thousands of sites, tests and processes the blood at its
regional plants and then sells the blood products ­­ red blood cells, platelets and plasma ­­ to
hospitals. It is an almost $2 billion a year industry. But for years, Red Cross officials say, they
underpriced their blood, thinking of themselves as a charity. With that mind­set, they went deeper
and deeper into debt, underpaying employees and ignoring infrastructure and quality controls.
Food and Drug Administration inspectors found egregious problems: some Red Cross blood
centers would keep testing blood until the tests delivered the desired results; for instance, blood
that tested borderline­positive for a given virus would be retested five or six times until the
numbers came out negative. ”That was a huge issue,” said Dr. Jerry E. Squires, the chief scientific
officer of the Red Cross.
In 1993, after eight years of listening to the Red Cross promise to reform, the F.D.A. obtained a
court­supervised consent decree, forcing the organization to improve its practices to ensure the
safety of the national blood supply ­­ 45 percent of which is provided by the Red Cross.
Dole oversaw an administrative and financial ”divorce” of blood from the chapters and centralized
it so that it would operate more like a business. It was such a radical overhaul that the Red Cross
was ”declaring victory long before we should have,” McLaughlin said. Even though the Atlanta
blood center had just been cited for multiple violations, the violations did not seem to Red Cross
executives as ”critical or dangerous” as the ones from previous years, a senior official said. So
when Healy took over, the board told her that the organization’s battle with the F.D.A. was
nearing resolution and that Atlanta was an isolated case.
After Healy had been on the job five months, however, F.D.A. inspectors paid an unexpected visit
to national headquarters. They stayed almost two months. In the end, they delivered a 21­page
notice listing all the violations at headquarters itself. These included inadequate ”tracking of
inventory”: pints of blood that were supposed to be quarantined because of their donors’ medical
histories ended up released for distribution. There were also labeling problems: blood testing
positive for cytomegalovirus (CMV), for instance, was labeled negative.
Healy was ”stunned,” she told a senior F.D.A. official. Subsequently, in a meeting with F.D.A.
officials, Healy candidly acknowledged widespread ”infrastructure, quality and auditor problems,”
including a headquarters computer system that periodically ”lost functionality,” according to an
affidavit in the court file. Healy also said that some Red Cross staff members treated the F.D.A.’s
demands with a ”willful lack of urgency.”
In her meeting with the F.D.A., Healy said she found that some Red Cross officials possessed a
startling ”lack of concern for patients.” The F.D.A. wanted the Red Cross to move from an ”ear
stick” to a ”finger stick” method of drawing blood for testing, for instance; the ear­stick method
often overestimated the blood count, deeming some with low blood counts eligible for donation.
”In one instance in the past, this caused a perfectly healthy donor to require an emergency blood
transfusion hours later,” Healy wrote in a memo, adding that the reason the Red Cross was
resisting the change was that it would decrease blood collections by 5 to 6 percent.
”Although the blood supply was safe,” Healy wrote in her memo, ”the near misses that had
occurred presented a clear risk for the future.” The gravity of the findings propelled the board to set
aside $100 million to upgrade the blood business. Healy hired several high­profile executives to
oversee the process. One new executive was Decker, who had been associate general counsel at
Pharmacia. He and others moved quickly into positions of power within the organization, which
some veteran Red Crossers found threatening, although in fairness, Healy was promoting insiders
too. Would the Red Cross be overtaken by bloodless professionalism?
McLaughlin said that he considered Healy’s ”brilliant” hires to be her legacy, ensuring a solid
future for the American Red Cross ­­ if the individuals stay. The F.D.A., however, is dubious about
the Red Cross’s ability to follow through on its intended reforms. Despite Healy’s concern and
investment of time, money and personnel, the F.D.A. also found serious problems under her
watch, citing the troubled Salt Lake City blood center for multiple violations last spring. In mid­
December, the F.D.A. for the first time asked a judge to hold the Red Cross in contempt of the 1993
consent decree and to authorize serious financial penalties ­­ $10,000 a day per violation, which
could amount to more than $10 million a year.
In the days after Sept. 11, Healy oversaw the transformation of the Red Cross’s austere
headquarters into what looked like the stage set for a field hospital. Medical technicians were
stationed at gurneys beneath stained­glass windows, drawing blood in assembly­line fashion.
Outside in the garden, the Red Cross choir performed ”God Bless America” and received a
standing ovation from hundreds of phlebotomists and donors. Healy found it moving. ”It was like
a temple of healing and grieving,” she said.
At first, the Red Cross sought to impose a system on would­be donors, urging them to make
appointments to return as needs arose. But people would not be turned away. They wanted to wait
in long lines and give of their vital fluids. It was a spiritual thing, Healy said, and her intuition told
her to respect those feelings, even if it wasn’t the most logical way to proceed.
Over the following two weeks, the Red Cross’s three­day reserve of blood built to a 10­day reserve
because the demand was less than expected: there were relatively few wounded. Nonetheless, the
Red Cross continued to collect blood, having decided it should stockpile in anticipation of another
attack or a military deployment. Eventually, some red blood cells, which expire after 42 days, had
to be thrown away, which engendered considerable criticism of the Red Cross for being
overzealous in its collections. Healy shrugs this off: ”Look, the plasma was saved and frozen.
People don’t realize that red blood cells are perishable commodities. They expire. It happens. Better
to have had too much than too little.”
It is that kind of crisp logic that Healy’s critics found off­putting ­­ even when she was right and
especially when she displayed a certainty that she was right. It bothered the board again and
again. She would not walk them through the paces of her decision making; she didn’t like stupid
questions; she wanted action ­­ yesterday. Then Healy, after taking insufficient time to explain
herself, would end up feeling misunderstood. It happened with her subordinates too.
On Sept. 13, for instance, Healy boarded an Amtrak train for New Y ork. The head of Amtrak had
lent five mail cars to the Red Cross to transport supplies to the World Trade Center relief effort.
Healy pushed her subordinates to load up the cars by 11 a.m., which required working through the
night. Some of the workers thought her haste was excessive and that she simply wanted the glory
of personally delivering the goods. But she was unaware. She was elated as she watched the Red
Cross executives on the train working their cellphones, like Ramesh Thadani, her new ”C.E.O. of
blood,” who was trying to line up freezers for plasma. ”I was thinking, ‘Hey, we did it guys,”’ she
told me wistfully. ”I didn’t know they were irritated.”
That same week, Healy taped a first batch of solicitations for donations. Many Americans believed
that she was asking them to use the Red Cross as a conduit for cash assistance to the Sept. 11
victims themselves. But she never said any such thing. Her appeals were vague, the essence of
which was that Americans should give of their blood and their dollars to help the American Red
Cross provide ”lifesaving assistance.” ”Together, we can save a life,” each public service
announcement ended.
Healy’s appeals were purposely general because the American Red Cross sees its role in a disaster
as broad. It is not a charity per se but a disaster­relief organization that sets up mess halls and
respite centers for emergency workers while providing food, comfort, counseling and safe haven
for survivors and their families. The Red Cross never solicits funds just for individual victims.
In fact, until Sept. 11, it had never solicited donations for individual disasters, either, but rather ­­
and this is mandated language ­­ for this and other disasters.” Since the Red Cross can raise
serious money only in the wake of a high­profile disaster, it uses the high­profile disasters to beef
up general disaster­relief funds. That way, there is money in the pot to assist, as Decker puts it,
”the little old lady in Philadelphia who loses her home to fire” ­­ and to cover some of the
operating expenses of the DOC.
This practice of the Red Cross has come under fire many times ­­ after the San Francisco
earthquake of 1989, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, the Red River floods of 1997, the
wildfires in the San Diego area last January. Some communities just didn’t like the idea that the
money being raised because they suffered an earthquake, say, was going to be used elsewhere or
tucked into the Red Cross’s coffers. In several instances, the Red Cross ended up having to redirect
funds back to disaster­struck communities because the pressure grew too intense.
But the Red Cross stuck by its approach until Healy declared Sept. 11 an extraordinary disaster
that belonged in a class of its own. It didn’t make sense to her to treat Sept. 11 as if it were an
earthquake. Americans were responding quite specifically to the enormity of a terrorist attack.
They were donating buckets of money, over $600 million in the end, because she believed they
were heartbroken and scared. She thought that to commingle those emotions and those funds
with the money set aside for more plebeian disasters would never stand up to public scrutiny.
Besides, she did not want huge sums of money deposited in a general disaster­relief fund that is
sometimes used as a ”piggy bank” for the chapters. So she created a stand­alone fund for Sept. 11
and whatever might follow it. The Liberty Fund, with its own team of 800 outside auditors, was
born.
This set off alarms throughout the Red Cross system. What about the little old lady in
Philadelphia? Was Healy single­handedly changing a Red Cross commitment to equity for all
victims? Was she making Sept. 11 victims into a special class whose treatment would raise difficult
demands from other disaster victims down the road? Was she unwittingly creating public
expectations that all money raised would go to Sept. 11 victims?
Healy didn’t think she was creating such expectations, not among reasonable people. She didn’t
call it the Sept. 11 Fund, after all. And Healy said she felt that the Red Cross needed to plan ahead
at the same time as it dealt with the crisis of the moment creatively. So while she set up a cash gift
program for victims’ families, which was novel for the Red Cross, she also seized the opportunity
to beef up some expensive pet projects that had gained new urgency ­­ like the weapons­of­mass­
destruction­preparedness program and the creation of a strategic reserve of frozen blood. She
thought this was logical, but she didn’t initially bother to explain herself to the American public.
She didn’t even bother to explain herself to the board, which turned out to be a fatal lapse. For
while the governors ended up endorsing the Liberty Fund, they were forced to do so after Healy
had already made it a fait accompli. And they would never forget that.
On Oct. 3, as if the Red Cross didn’t have enough to deal with, a board member from Louisiana
placed a big thorny issue on the table: Israel, or specifically the Israeli Red Shield of David, Israel’s
disaster­relief organization. The executive committee asked Healy to leave the room so that they
could discuss the matter freely. Members were concerned that she would stifle open discussion
because of her intense, domineering views on the subject.
The American Red Cross has long opposed the exclusion of Israel’s Red Shield of David, called
Magen David Adom (M.D.A.), from the international federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
societies. But Healy decided to give teeth to that quiet opposition. She believed that the
international movement needed to be prodded to clear the legal and diplomatic hurdles preventing
it from accepting the Star of David as an emblem. If the Geneva Convention ­­ which recognizes
only the cross and the crescent as internationally protected symbols of humanitarian aid societies ­
­ needed to be amended, then amend it, she believed. If not, then skirt it.
Two months after assuming command of the American Red Cross in September 1999, Healy flew
to Geneva to address a large assembly of the International Red Cross movement. And, in the eyes
of international officials, she charged in like a bull in a china shop.
”She comes in and makes a speech in which she harangues the assembled membership about the
inequity of the exclusion of M.D.A. and how the American Red Cross is going to make inclusion
happen now, whether we liked it or not,” said Christopher Lamb, an executive of the international
federation. ”She spoke about the movement, describing everyone as cowards and failures and
people who didn’t understand.”
Healy nominated Lawrence Eagleburger, the former secretary of State, to the commission that
governs the international movement. After her speech, he lost the election. Officials in Geneva
postulated that Healy felt humiliated, which in turn fueled a redoubling of her commitment to
Israel. But Eagleburger, who went on to serve as her ambassador on the Israel issue, wrote in a
Washington Post op­ed column recently that Healy simply refused to turn ”a blind eye on a moral
wrong.” And persuaded by her passion, the American Red Cross board went right along with her.
It agreed to start withholding its $4.5 million annual dues to the international federation; that
money is 25 percent of the federation headquarters’ budget.
Officials in Geneva contend that they had been proceeding quietly, on a diplomatic track, to
include Israel since 1995. Y et just two months after the Americans began withholding their dues,
there was progress. An international working group decided the world needed a neutral emblem to