Defense Health Official Lamented Quality of Care

Vernon McKenzie, 92, a retired Army colonel who became acting principal deputy assistant of defense for health in the 1970s and was named by a newsmagazine as one of the "super bureaucrats" who really run Washington, died of cancer Aug. 17 at his home in Broad Run.

Col. McKenzie worked in military health fields most of his career, battling Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) during his 1950s search for communists in government and tangling with many of the leaders of health care in the Army, Navy and Air Force over the quality of military medical care. In 1975, U.S. News & World Report named him one of the 100 government employees who exercised outsize power, because of his long tenure and knowledge of key players in his field.

Just after he retired in 1985, he was quoted in an article in the New York Times about his "gnawing, nagging sense of dissatisfaction" with the quality of military medicine. "Doctors don't want to squeal on each other," he said, and military surgeons general and commanders resented and opposed quality control efforts imposed from the Pentagon. "They're on the road to reform but they're fighting it every inch of the way," he added.

"The basic problem is that nothing ever really happens to these guys,'' Col. McKenzie said about senior officers who failed to crack down on incompetent military doctors. Two became three-star generals after abuses were exposed, and a third was named the Army's surgeon general, he told the Times.

He wrote the Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services (CHAMPUS), the military's health-care program that preceded the current TRICARE for Life program.

Born in Ukiah, Calif., he grew up in Northern California. Drafted into the Army in summer 1941, he was on a troopship en route to the Philippines when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He spent World War II in the Army's medical corps, serving in India, Burma, China and Okinawa. After the war, while assigned to the Army Surgeon General's Office in Washington, he signed promotion papers for the Army dentist Irving Peress, among 700 others, although Peress had not completed a loyalty form.

"For three days," Col. McKenzie wrote in the obituary he had prepared for himself, "a sound truck had circled the Pentagon playing music and interrupting it every few minutes with 'Who promoted Peress?' The simple answer to that complex question was Major McKenzie."

In 1955, while testifying before the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations, Col. McKenzie's answers to McCarthy's questions resulted in the volatile senator throwing down his pencil and leaving the hearing room, whereupon the subcommittee's chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, took over the questioning and elicited information about a special law requiring the promotions.

During his later years at the Pentagon, Col. McKenzie attempted to establish a unified Defense Health Agency. He did not reach that goal, although the concept is still being discussed.

After he retired from the Defense Department, Col. McKenzie worked as a consultant to health-care companies and the comptroller general.

Among his military awards were the Distinguished Service Medal and the Legion of Merit. As a civilian, he received two Defense Medals for Distinguished Public Service.

Survivors include his wife of 64 years, Marjorie Fitzgerald McKenzie of Broad Run; four children, Catriona McKenzie of Warrenton, Mercedes McKenzie-Veal of Indianapolis, Scott McKenzie of Castleton, Va. and Mark H. McKenzie of Broad Run; and two grandsons.