Levi says the Surgeon General's Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was "as transformative as all the obits are saying."

While he was preparing the landmark report, Koop and his wife lived in the surgeon general's official residence on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland. Two hundred feet away was the office of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and the government's most visible HIV/AIDS scientist. Fauci became not only Koop's personal physician and friend, but his tutor on the epidemic as well.

"He would come home from hearings downtown as things started to accelerate with HIV," Fauci told me. "As he was walking home he had to pass my office. Around 7:30 at night, he would come knock at my door. He would say this thing about AIDS is very troubling, and I want to make the right impression on public awareness. He got it in his mind that we as the federal government need to be explicit about this -- oral and anal sex, commercial sex. He was hell-bent on doing it. When it came out, it shocked a lot of people because of its explicitness."

Dr. Koop wrote in the report's foreword, "At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, many Americans had little sympathy for people with AIDS. The feeling was that somehow people from certain groups 'deserved' their illness. Let us put those feelings behind us. We are fighting a disease, not people ...The country must face this epidemic as a unified society. We must prevent the spread of AIDS while at the same time preserving our humanity and intimacy."

Said Fauci, "He was deeply driven by principle when it came to public health, not by any ideology."

"Principled" is a word you hear frequently from those who knew Dr. Koop. Georgetown University law professor Tim Westmoreland, counsel to Rep. Waxman's health subcommittee at the time, said Koop "was quite possibly the most principled person I've ever met in my life." He added, "Sometimes that would drive me crazy. There was an occasion when I needed him to be in a Senate meeting with senators to talk about this tobacco legislation. He said he couldn't be there because he was giving a high school graduation speech and he was unwilling to break his promise."

Mary Beth Albright, a Georgetown-educated food and public health lawyer, was Koop's personal assistant from 1996 until she "officially" left in 2003. "I can count on one hand the number of times I had to cancel events for him," said Albright, "and those were for hospitalizations--not 'Oh, I'm sorry, I have to go talk to the senator.'" She added, "I think that was part of who he was. He treated everyone equally. I saw it firsthand. He treated every sick person as someone who needed help. I think you can find no better example of being a person of religion in public service. He took all the morality of his religion--but none of the moralism."