Burton James Lee III (March 28, 1930 – November 25, 2016) was a physician and oncologist who was Physician to the President under President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He also served on the President's Commission on the HIV Epidemic.
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Early life and education
Burton James Lee III was born on March 28, 1930, in Manhattan, New York City, New York, to Burton J. Lee II and his wife, the former Rosamond Saltonstall Auchincloss. He and his twin sister, Rosamond Saltonstall Lee, were the eldest of four children born to the couple. His other siblings were Susannah (born 1932) and Mary Josephine (born 1937). His parents, who wed in New York City on June 20, 1929, were important members of high society. His father was a banker, and his mother a member of one of the most prominent families of New England. His paternal grandfather, Burton James Lee, had been an oncologist and the first clinical director at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center after its relocation. His childhood idol was his maternal grandfather, Charles Auchincloss.
As a youth, Lee attended the Buckley School on New York City's Upper East Side, and then graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He entered Yale University, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1952. While at Yale, he became close friends with Jonathan Bush, George H. W. Bush's younger brother, and with Nicholas F. Brady, the future Secretary of the Treasury under George H. W. Bush. This led to a close friendship with George H. W. Bush. He received his M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1956. Lee interned at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.
About 1945 or 1946, Rosamond and Burton Lee, Jr. divorced. Rosamond married Thomas Campbell Plowden-Wardlaw, a prominent New York attorney, on July 2, 1954, and died on November 4, 1971.
Burton Lee, Jr. married Margaret DeWolf Erskine on January 11, 1947. The couple had four children (Jared E., Timothy M., Marion Rogers, and Cecelia DeWolf), leaving Lee a large, extended family of seven siblings. Burton J. Lee, Jr. died suddenly of a heart attack in July 1962, while step-mother Margaret Erskine Lee died in 2005.
Career
Lee joined the medical staff at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 1960. In 1961, Lee enlisted in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, and served for two years in West Germany. Leaving the Army in 1963, he volunteered for Medico International, and spent time in Algeria administering to refugees, people injured in the country's civil war, and victims of torture. Returning to the United States, Lee rejoined the staff at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he worked as an oncologist and chemotherapist. He took a special interest in treating patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma, leukemia, and lymphoma, and oversaw the treatment of more than 1,500 patients. By 1989, he had risen to become senior attending physician at the Hospital for Allied Diseases at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Lee became well known for having unorthodox views on Hodgkin's disease. He argued that while the cancer could be put into remission, the cause of the illness was poorly understood and the damage to the immune system remained untreated. His views were so controversial that Memorial Sloan-Kettering officials barred him from talking to the National Cancer Institute for 10 years.
Lee was a prolific author, having contributed to or solely-authored more than 120 articles and medical books by 1989. In the fall of 1988, Lee published an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which he attacked the medical profession for putting greed ahead of patients by ordering too many tests. He also accused physicians of neglecting patient care while using patients for research, and advocated changes to medical practice laws to allow physician assistants and registered nurses to perform some medical procedures and assessments currently prohibited to them. The article was widely debated within the profession, and generated a back-and-forth discussion in the journal's letters page between Lee and his critics.
1987 AIDS commission
On July 23, 1987, through his connections with then-Vice President Bush, Lee was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the President's Commission on the HIV Epidemic. Lee himself said that, as the panel's only practicing physician, "I was going to die before I let that commission fail..." Lee personally reviewed much of the medical literature on HIV and AIDS, and insisted that the commission visit AIDS patients in hospitals and hospices. Aware of how cancer patients are often discriminated against, Lee was greatly disturbed by the much greater discrimination AIDS patients faced. He was particularly moved by the plight of Ryan White, a boy who became infected with HIV while receiving treatment for his hemophilia. Dr. Frank Lilly, a geneticist and openly gay member of the commission, described Lee as a "receptive learner" on HIV and AIDS issues, even though his only experience with AIDS had been the treatment of HIV-infected individuals who had cancer, and commission executive director Polly Gault said Lee played a critical role in overcoming divisions among commission members and in drafting its final report. Lee cast the critical vote in approving the commission's report, which passed 7-to-6.
Lee was widely viewed as helping to turn the commission away from being a rubber stamp for anti-gay conservative views and toward championing improved research on HIV/AIDS and treatment of AIDS patients. Lee later credited the militant HIV/AIDS group ACT UP with making many positive contributions to the commission's work.
Physician to the president
Through his friendships with Jonathan Bush and Nicholas F. Brady, Lee became a close friend of George H. W. Bush. Lee's stepdaughter and Bush's daughter, Dorothy, were roommates at Boston College.
Elected president of the United States in 1988, George H. W. Bush considered appointing Lee to be Surgeon General of the United States, but Lee's support for abortion rights was incompatible with Bush's position and he was not nominated for the position. Bush also considered Lee for the role of Special Assistant to the President for Health Policy, but once more Lee's abortion views cost him the job. Lee was also under consideration for the position of Commissioner of Food and Drugs after the Bush administration became dissatisfied with Food and Drug Administrator Dr. Frank Young. But Bush chose Dr. David A. Kessler for the position instead.
President Bush appointed Lee to be Physician to the President on March 8, 1989. Colleagues counseled him against taking the position, noting that many previous Physicians to the President had been pressured into keeping presidential illnesses a secret, damaging their reputations as doctors. Lee, however, told Bush that he would resign if told to conceal a serious medical issue. Lee subsequently attended an April 1989 meeting at which Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle discussed the conditions under which Bush might invoke the 25th Amendment.
Lee oversaw a staff of 16 (which included four physicians) while director of the White House Medical Unit. Lee was assisted by Colonel Lawrence C. Mohr, Jr., MD (a United States Army expert in emergency care) in providing White House healthcare. Lee had a close doctor-patient relationship with President Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush, and Lee and his wife often spent weekends with the Bushes at Camp David. Beginning in 1989, Lee prescribed the powerful drug Halcion to help President Bush sleep while traveling. Lee said Bush took the drug "rarely" over the next three years, but even so Lee's prescription of the drug was controversial. Lee's April 1990 report on President Bush's health was overwhelmingly positive. But in 1991, Bush was hospitalized for three days for shortness of breath he experienced while jogging. Lee diagnosed Bush with Graves' disease, an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid and which had caused Bush to have an irregular heartbeat. Lee was criticized for not diagnosing the disease earlier. Lee also treated Bush for intestinal flu after the president vomited and collapsed during a dinner at the home of the Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa in January 1992. Bush had ignored Lee's advice to skip the dinner. Lee was criticized by a number of American physicians for the treatment Lee administered, with several arguing the president should have been hospitalized.
Post-White House work
After leaving the White House, Lee moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where he became administrator of the Greenville Health System and established the system's first comprehensive cancer treatment program. In the late 1990s, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he was a member of the board of directors of the Marine Biological Laboratory.
Lee retired and lived briefly on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, before moving to Vero Beach, Florida. He served as chairman of the Indian River County Hospital District, and on the board of directors of the Whole Family Health Center. He also co-founded Alcohope, a nonprofit alcohol recovery center.
In 2005, Lee authored an editorial in The Washington Post in which he condemned military medical personnel who participated in the torture of individuals taken prisoner during the war on terror.
Personal life and death
Lee married Pauline Herzog in 1953. Their marriage ended in divorce. The couple had three children: Chip, Jackie, and Roz. Lee then married Ann Kelly, and was step-father to her three children from her first marriage: Debbie, Wendy, and Leigh.
Lee died of bladder cancer at his home in Vero Beach on November 25, 2016, aged 86.