“Keith Reemtsma was chairman of the department of surgery at Columbia University when I came to New York. He had served in Korea, and the lore is that he’s the person behind the character Hawkeye in M*A*S*H. He made me chief resident and mentored me on how to be a leader. He said the hard part of leadership was keeping smart people from killing each other — you had to make everyone feel special. People at my level were ambitious, vying for positions. He’d take your strength and find a place you could emphasize it, so it wouldn’t seem as if you were competing directly with one another.
