WASHINGTON – Dr. C. Everett Koop, who as U.S. surgeon general in the 1980s led high-profile campaigns to highlight the dangers of smoking and to mobilize the nation against an emerging AIDS epidemic, has died. He was 96.

Koop died Monday at his home in New Hampshire, Susan Wills, a colleague at Koop’s Dartmouth Institute, Told the Associated Press. The cause was not given.

Unlike his predecessors and many of his successors, who were largely figureheads, Koop initiated a new era of influence for surgeons general by turning the post into a national bully pulpit. He used his eight years as the nation’s top doctor to express his opinions on the country’s most urgent public health problems — often to the chagrin and irritation of the man who had appointed him, President Ronald Reagan.