Along With New Post, Elizabeth Dole Takes on Troubles of Red Cross

In taking on the presidency of the American Red Cross, Elizabeth Dole is moving to the helm of an organization that has known controversy from the days of Clara Barton to the era of AIDS and the Loma Prieta earthquake.

She isn’t likely to face criticism for living in a tent and directing operations from the field, as Red Cross founder Barton did, but she could end up having easily as many battles on her hand as she did in President Bush’s Cabinet.

After a year in which it faced record disaster expenditures, the organization has taken heat not only for its handling of such emergencies but for its role as a supplier of blood for transfusions.

“Elizabeth Dole has the stature and talent to revitalize the national Red Cross and make it the kind of modern helping force necessary for disasters in the 1990s,” San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos said when the outgoing labor secretary was named to the post.

“From our experience in the Loma Prieta earthquake, it is needed,” Agnos added.

Others echoed his view.

“When the national Red Cross has become involved in the past, there has been a letdown in coordination,” said Carl Bradford, director of emergency services for West Virginia. “The Red Cross seems to function very well at the local level. But when national comes in, they do not work as well with state and local governments.”

Carol McArthur, press secretary to Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson, was so upset by the Red Cross’ performance after the Oct. 17, 1989, earthquake in Northern California that she resigned from the board of the organization’s Oakland and East Bay chapter.

“The local Red Cross was very, very efficient, but they had national representatives breathing down their necks,” McArthur said. “Mainly the problems had to do with individuals not understanding the varied needs of the ethnically diverse community we have here.”

Jim Cassell, a media associate at Red Cross headquarters, said the organization is making a study of its disaster services, due for completion in March.

“We will look at all disasters, including the major ones of last year, the earthquake on the West Coast and Hurricane Hugo in the East,” Cassell said. He said the study was in large measure “due to our own interest in always improving our services . . . and not just in response to criticism from outside.”

Richard Smith, vice president and general manager at the organization’s eastern operations headquarters in Alexandria, Va., said: “We have learned a lot of lessons we can put into our operational planning right away.

“Mostly our need is to try to streamline our training,” he said. “At a time when emotions and passions can run rather high, and then you bring augmented resources in from outside, it is very challenging to make sure you do that so that feelings don’t get rubbed in the wrong way. Some people have worse skills than others in doing that and we sometimes have moments of tension.”

“We had a difficult year, but all that assessment is being put to our improvement,” Smith said.

In a separate initiative, the Red Cross announced in August that it was substituting centralized management for its system of local control in each of 54 blood service regions, which supply blood to more than half the hospitals in the United States.

The action followed months of scrutiny by the news media and the Food and Drug Administration. In 1988, the Red Cross acknowledged it distributed 24 pints of blood that had failed AIDS procedures but said none of the blood was used and none carried the AIDS virus. The FDA said the units were shipped by Red Cross centers in Washington and Nashville, Tenn.

Brad Stone, an FDA spokesman, said: “The purpose of those reforms is to help the Red Cross come into greater compliance with our standards. We have an ongoing system of inspections, and so we hope the improvements they are making will be reflected in those inspections. We are very encouraged by the steps they are taking.”

The American Red Cross is one of 150 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies affiliated with the International Committee of the Red Cross, based in Geneva. In some countries, the society is an arm of the government, but in the United States, it is a private organization supported by contributions.

Congress gave the Red Cross a charter in 1918 to conduct disaster preparedness and relief. There is no congressional oversight, however.

The American Red Cross has around 2,700 chapters, a paid staff of 25,000 and more than 1 million volunteers. In 1989, it received a record $165 million in donations and spent $151 million, more than tripling the previous record. Its national office is in Washington. It has operational headquarters for the East Coast in Alexandria, Va., for the Midwest in St. Louis and for the West in Burlingame, Calif.

Clara Barton, a former schoolteacher and government clerk who became a superintendent of nurses during the Civil War, founded the group as the American Assn. of the Red Cross in 1881 and became its first president.

“She was always very much hands-on when a big disaster struck,” said James Perry, a National Park Service ranger at the Clara Barton House in Glen Echo, Md. “She would personally lead the field operation.”

During the Johnstown, Pa., flood of 1889, Barton was in the field for five months.

Critics of her style of personal leadership forced her resignation in 1904 at the age of 83.

Dole, 54, will become president in January. She succeeds Richard Schubert, who resigned from the $185,000-a-year job more than a year ago.

Smith, whose first disaster experience with the Red Cross was in the aftermath of Hurricane Camille in Louisiana in 1969, said the role of the Red Cross has changed since it was chartered by Congress in 1918.

“At that point, the federal agencies’ role was much more in dealing with public utilities and infrastructure and much less with individual families, and so the Red Cross in those days took the primary job even of rebuilding people’s homes and long-term recovery help,” the Red Cross vice president said. “As the federal government expanded its role to be more that of long-term recovery, the Red Cross withdrew from that and put more emphasis on short-term emergency response.”

Government disaster relief is now run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, created during the Carter Administration.