\nAlthough she denied it, I always suspected she joined with others to encourage her husband to appoint me as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services in his administration, where we worked to improve the health of Americans by decreasing tobacco use, increasing use of seat belts in our vehicles, creating at NIH the office for Research on Minority Health (which has grown into the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities).\u00a0 We worked to increase race and gender diversity among the leaders in the department, including the first female director of NIH (Dr. Bernadine Healey), the first woman and first minority Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service (Dr. Antonio Novello), the first African American Commissioner of the Social Security Administration (Gwendolyn King) and the first African American Administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration (now the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS: William Toby).<\/div>\n

\nBarbara Bush was committed to the concept of equal opportunity for all Americans.\u00a0 She embodied a quiet, but firm and noble dignity.\u00a0 She glorified the importance of public service, to uplift the lives of others. \u00a0She believed in the importance of family and a strong, clear value system.\u00a0 We are all beneficiaries of her contributions and are inspired by her citizenship.\u00a0 Barbara Bush lived her life to the fullest and is a role model for all of us.<\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201300\u2013<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barbara Bush was a great humanitarian and a \u201clarger than life spirit\u201d who contributed much to enhance and enrich the lives of Atlantans and people around the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pemsm.com\/enter\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pemsm.com\/enter\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pemsm.com\/enter\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pemsm.com\/enter\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pemsm.com\/enter\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1314"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pemsm.com\/enter\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4176,"href":"https:\/\/pemsm.com\/enter\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions\/4176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pemsm.com\/enter\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pemsm.com\/enter\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pemsm.com\/enter\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}