head a new independent agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) (1964), Shriver convinced Richmond to take a leave of absence and join him. At OEO Richmond would use a demonstration grants mechanism to create two important new public health programs that incorporated OEO's mandate to aid local groups directly, rather than channeling resources through state health departments, the traditional partners of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's Public Health Service. During 1965, Richmond implemented Project Head Start, an enrichment program for disadvantaged pre-school age children that was greeted eagerly by community groups. Building on health-related proposals submitted in response to Head Start, in 1966 Richmond sponsored a series of Neighborhood Health Centers that united economic development and local oversight of, and participation in, health services delivery. In 1967, Richmond left OEO to return to Syracuse, to serve as Dean of the medical faculty. During 1971 he moved to Harvard Medical School, where he held professorships in two departments, Child Psychiatry and Human Development (1971–73) and Preventive & Social Medicine (1971–79), directed the Judge Baker Guidance Center in Boston (1971–77), a nonprofit mental health organization that works with Boston's juvenile courts, and also served as Chief of Psychiatry at the Children's Hospital Boston. Surgeon General Nearly a decade later after Richmond stepped down from OEO, former OEO official Joseph Califano, now President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of DHEW, asked him to return to Federal service as Assistant Secretary for Health (July 1977). Richmond accepted, on condition that his position as Assistant Secretary, with its line authority over PHS, be combined with that of Surgeon General, widely recognized as a spokesperson for public health. Califano obliged with a December 1977 inhouse reorganization that boosted and streamlined PHS's management capabilities through its Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH). Richmond brought a commitment to access and equity that reflected his earlier work implementing President Johnson's Great Society. In national health affairs, however, the latter half of the 1970s was a period of retrenchment and effort to curb health-related expenditures. Economic downturns challenged the country's willingness to support a continued expansion of health care programs and after 1974, the removal of wage and price controls on health care providers meant dramatic cost increases for the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Many believed that controls were a necessary prerequisite to any form of national health insurance, and the type of controls became a point