WASHINGTON (AP) President Clinton's third nominee for surgeon
general could prove to be the lucky charm for a politically luckless
job.

Clinton today will nominate Dr. David Satcher, director of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, as surgeon
general and assistant secretary of health, according to an
administration official who spoke Thursday on condition of anonymity.

If confirmed by the Senate, Satcher would be the first to hold both
positions since Julius Richmond served the Carter administration in
the 1970s. President Reagan divided the jobs to resolve a controversy
about appointing C. Everett Koop as assistant health secretary. Koop
was named surgeon general.

Satcher, 56, has served as CDC director since 1993. He was president
of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., for 10 years and was
chairman of the community medicine and family practice department at
Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.

The nomination would put Satcher on the path to a job that has seemed
starcrossed since Clinton took office in 1993.

Clinton's first surgeon general, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, left in
December 1994 in a cloud of controversy over her frank comments on
sex education and masturbation. The nomination of her successor, Dr.
Henry Foster, fizzled amid a furor over abortions he performed. He
failed to win Senate approval.

After the embarrassing hurlyburly over Foster, the Clinton
administration filled the post only temporarily. The acting surgeon
general, Dr. Audrey Manley, left office July 1.

Satcher emerged as a possible nominee in April. But his nomination
was delayed by paperwork, the congressional recess and the
president's threeweek vacation, according to administration
officials.

The decision to nominate him disappointed some.

``He's another bland bureaucrat,'' said Steve Michael, spokesman for
the AIDS activist group ACTUP, which has been urging the CDC for
years to broaden its AIDS prevention programs among young, gay men
and injection drug users.

``He won't use this as a bully pulpit, the way C. Everett Koop or
Joycelyn Elders used it. That's the kind of person we need,'' Michael
said.

But Satcher's supporters say he is a tireless advocate for the health
concerns of the poor and underserved.

In a letter to Clinton, Dr. Nathaniel Murdock, president of the
National Medical Association, said during Satcher's CDC tenure, child
immunization rates rose from 55 percent in 1992 to 78 percent last
year, the CDC's breast and cervical cancer screening programs
expanded to all 50 states and the groundwork was laid for an ``early
warning system'' for foodborne diseases.

Yet Murdock acknowledged the difficulties of previous nominees,
expressing hope that Satcher's confirmation process ``will be without
the slightest remonstration.''

The son of a foundry worker, Satcher was raised in a large family on a
farm
outside Anniston, Ala.

He graduated in 1963 from Morehouse College, and became the first
black student to earn simultaneously a medical and doctoral degree at
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1970.

Satcher began his medical career in Los Angeles at the Martin Luther
King Jr. Medical Center, where he developed the family medicine
department and directed the sicklecell anemia program.