The Plutonium Files (77 page)

The president acknowledged that the subterfuge used during the
Cold War had added to the mistrust many Americans feel toward their government. “Because of stonewalling and evasions in the past, times when a family member or a neighbor suffered an injustice and had nowhere to turn and couldn’t even get the facts, some Americans lost faith in the promise of our democracy. Government was very powerful, but very far away and not trusted to be ethical.”

Although the committee had labored over the question of whether the radiation victims should receive an apology, Clinton swept away all the conditions and spontaneously offered an apology to all of the people who had been used in the radiation experiments. The government leaders responsible for the experiments were no longer alive to apologize to the people and communities whose lives were “darkened by the shadow of the atom,” he began. “So today, on behalf of another generation of American leaders and another generation of American citizens, the United States of America offers a sincere apology to those of our citizens who were subjected to these experiments, to their families and to their communities.”

Clinton was such a polished speaker, his words came so effortlessly, that the historic significance of what he was saying almost slipped by the audience. He was the first president born after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he had just broken with the official pattern of denial, cover-up, and secrecy that had characterized nearly every controversial issue surrounding the atomic bomb, including the building and dropping of the bomb itself. His speech took sixteen minutes.

With the president’s apology, the day of reckoning had finally come for the scientists, doctors, and bureaucrats who schemed for decades to keep knowledge of the plutonium injections and other radiation experiments from becoming public. Lawsuits were being brought, public denunciations made, but most of the experimenters were dead and spared the consequences they had feared so long.

Most Americans, in fact, paid little attention whatsoever to Clinton’s speech. Two hours later a jury in Los Angeles returned to the courtroom with its verdict in the sensational murder trial of football legend O. J. Simpson. In the frenzied media coverage that followed the innocent verdict, Clinton’s remarks on a much vaster question of guilt were reduced to sound bites on the evening news and stories on the inside pages of the nation’s newspapers. Not even the clever doctors of the Manhattan Project could have dreamed up such a diversion.

With the pronouncements by the Advisory Committee and President Clinton’s apology, the controversy over the human radiation experiments began to slip from public view. Although her stint as energy secretary was nearly over, Hazel O’Leary was not yet through with her involvement in the horrific scandal she had helped bring to light.

O’Leary’s public image had changed dramatically in the three years since her December 7, 1993 press conference. She also had made many formidable enemies as she went about trying to reform the DOE’s anachronistic bureaucracy and to dismantle its creaky cold war machinery. When she recommended in the spring of 1993 that the fifteen underground tests planned at the Nevada Test Site be canceled, powerful officials in the Pentagon began viewing her with suspicion. Was the elegant corporate lawyer in the bright tropical suits an antinuclear activist? Many thought so.

“She was not seen by the Defense Department, at least initially, as especially supportive of the weapons program,” said Al Narath, the former director of Sandia National Laboratories and one of the three weapons lab directors who was summoned to Washington for the debate in the tomblike room in the basement of DOE headquarters.
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“She and I never talked about this, but my guess is she came into the job with sort of a natural, anti-nuclear weapon inclination.”

John Nuckolls, the former director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who was also summoned to Washington, said he was taken aback by the way O’Leary had conducted the meeting. “And I was most startled when she invoked her grandmother in response to some of the
arguments for why the tests needed to be done, saying she couldn’t convince her grandmother of that.
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That’s THE memorable remark of the meeting. I think I would have felt more comfortable if the issue had been addressed on its merits for the national security of the United States and not for what she, with her lack of understanding and appreciation, could explain to her grandmother. So she suddenly introduced this way of thinking about the problem—can we convince the non-technically trained and oriented person of the validity of these requirements. And I would say I was astonished when she did that.”

Frank Gaffney, a former assistant secretary in the Defense Department during the Reagan administration, compared her 1993 press conference to the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor: “It is somehow fitting that the Secretary of Energy, Hazel O’Leary, chose Pearl Harbor Day 1993 to launch what was, arguably, the most devastating single attack on the underpinnings of the U.S. national security structure since Japan’s lightning strike on the 7th Fleet fifty-two years ago.”
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Many active and retired scientists viewed her remarks about the radiation experiments as a slap in the face. In the weapons labs, the dislike for O’Leary was almost palpable. Some officials openly ridiculed her, calling her “Witch Hazel.”

But O’Leary airily dismissed the criticisms in the waning weeks of her four-year tenure. She told
Inside Energy,
a trade newspaper that covers her department, that she credited her achievements to the “audacity of this sort of aging, old broad, who doesn’t sit at the table and never sat at the table before, to walk in and say, ‘Uh-uh, I’m not certifying [fifteen nuclear] tests.
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I don’t think so.’ I’m proud of having the guts to say, ‘Why are we doing this? Would you tell me again why we’re doing this?’ ”

By the time she made those remarks, she was practically out the door. Partly due to her own mismanagement, in the latter part of her tenure O’Leary had found herself facing hostile questions from Republicans regarding expenditures on trade missions to India, Pakistan, China, and South Africa. Although O’Leary, unlike other members of President Clinton’s cabinet, was not accused of self-enrichment, she found her folk-hero status evaporating as she was portrayed in hearing after hearing as a high-flying Evita Peron intent on seeing the world at taxpayers’ expense. Her trade missions may have been overstaffed, but none of the documents and testimony submitted in the course of numerous congressional hearings revealed any criminal or ethical wrongdoing.

In an interview just two weeks before leaving the office, O’Leary said
that she viewed the congressional inquires as a personal attack by Republicans bent on destroying her.
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She said that she believed her “tear-down” was also related to the fact that she refused to seek help from Washington’s power brokers. One congressman believed she had been “too uppity,” she confided.
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“Do you know that word? It’s a very Southern word. And by that he meant—and this is a congress person—that I was self-assured, extremely direct and never needy. And there was something about that in a woman which was unseemly; to be so self-assured, to be so large and never to be asking for help. And that my sin was not that I had been extraordinary to the positive but that I had been too large and too uppity; that I should have been quieter, softer and needy of the supportive protection of others. And the way I translate that is, I rarely asked for permission.”

O’Leary pointed out that while congressional investigators had found no evidence of either criminal or unethical behavior on her part, several of her fellow cabinet officers, by contrast, were mired in serious criminal probes. “What I’ve learned is that I’m a lot tougher than anyone ever thought.
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And that we have managed to get our work done and I ’m still standing. If I had done something terribly wrong, I wouldn’t be the longest serving secretary of energy in the history of the United States of America—and I am.” A few minutes later, she added, “I feel like a tough old chick who’s been through an extraordinary four years and I’m extremely proud of every outcome.”

O’Leary held one more “Openness” press conference just five days before she left her job. Among the items she released was an extraordinary report on weapons tests and peaceful nuclear explosions conducted in the former Soviet Union between 1949 and 1990. The report, received from the Russian Federation for Atomic Energy, was a mirror image of the study O’Leary made public in 1993 on U.S. tests.
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She also released the first batch of some 6,500 government films chronicling the troop maneuvers in Nevada and other spectacles of the atomic age. Perhaps more than anything else, the films capture the arrogance and ignorance of the nuclear weapons program.

On an overcast, cold day in mid-December of 1996, O’Leary flew to Rochester, New York. When she had discussed the experiments at her first press conference three years earlier, she had vowed to meet personally with the families of the plutonium patients. Now she was fulfilling that pledge in a private meeting room at the Radisson Hotel. The lawyers were asked to leave the room. For forty-five minutes, O’Leary talked with the families of several of the patients.

Present were the relatives of Amedio Lovecchio, HP-1, the maintenance man who each fall buried his fig trees in the ground to protect them from the harsh winter; Jean Daigneault, HP-4, the young woman who craved hot dogs when she went on a rice-and-raisin diet; and Paul Galinger, HP-5, the tall man with trembling hands. Also in attendance were family members of John Mousso, HP-6, the gentle man from East Rochester; Janet Stadt, HP-8, the woman who suffered from scleroderma; and Fred Sours, HP-9, the politician with the red, swollen face whose body was analyzed for plutonium even as his constituents mourned his death.

After the meeting, O’Leary vowed, “My commitment is: Never Again.
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This should never happen again in government.” Standing among the family members was Mary Jeanne Connell, the only known survivor of the injection experiments at Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital. The sting of the humiliation that Connell felt when she learned she had been used as a laboratory animal was still with her. O’Leary’s “never again” promise was reassuring, but for Connell the world had become a less trustworthy place. She told a Rochester reporter, “I’m afraid it’s going to happen again, you know.”
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Ultimately, the subjects used in the Cold War radiation experiments went to court to seek justice. The legal hurdles were immense and the lawsuits extremely difficult to pursue. Decades had passed since the experiments had taken place. Many of the subjects and scientists were dead. Key documents had been lost or destroyed. Then there was the question of harm, the nearly impossible task of linking a long-ago radiation exposure to health problems, some of which hadn’t shown up for decades, or might be dormant even now—still waiting for the right trigger.

Relatives of the plutonium patients were among the first to file lawsuits in federal court. Some families banded together and filed joint lawsuits, others filed individually. Eventually the federal government settled out of court with sixteen of the eighteen plutonium families. The relatives of thirteen patients received approximately $400,000 each. The surviving kin of Una Macke’s family received $300,000; Simeon Shaw’s family, $262,500; and Edna Bartholfs relatives, $160,000. Mary Jeanne Connell, who was injected with uranium, also received $400,000.

As for the remaining two patients, CHI-3, the young Chicago patient, was never identified, and the family of William Purcell, one of the Rochester injectees, chose not to participate in the lawsuit.
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In Massachusetts, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of the boys who were enticed into eating radioactive oatmeal at the Walter E. Fernald State School. The petition claimed that the state owed the children “the highest duty of care, including the duty not to use them as human guinea pigs.”
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In April 1998 Quaker Oats and MIT agreed to pay $1.85 million to
settle the claims against them.
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The money will be split among forty-five of the former test subjects. The commonwealth of Massachusetts has also agreed to pay another $676,000 to twenty-seven participants. Other state claims, as well as federal claims, are still pending.

In Cincinnati, five years of rancorous legal proceedings came to an end on May 4, 1999, when a federal judge approved a $5.4 million settlement.
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Eugene Saenger, wearing a gray suit and red bow tie, was present in the courtroom for the judge’s ruling but declined to talk with reporters afterward. Under the terms of the settlement, most of the families will receive about $50,000 each. In addition, a large plaque commemorating the victims of the Pentagon-funded study will be placed in a courtyard at the University of Cincinnati hospital. Many families also wanted a personal apology from physician Eugene Saenger, but Saenger’s attorney, R. Joseph Parker, said Saenger felt he had done nothing wrong and that an apology was “non-negotiable.”

In Oak Ridge, relatives of Woodrow Wilson Litton retained flamboyant San Francisco lawyer Melvin Belli
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, the “king of torts,” to represent them in a lawsuit against the government.
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But the case fell into limbo when Belli filed for bankruptcy protection and later died. The lawsuit was dismissed in 1996 by a federal judge.

Attorneys for Vanderbilt University fought hard to get the class-action lawsuit brought by the women who unknowingly drank the radioactive iron cocktails thrown out of court. But a federal judge kept rejecting their arguments. Kenneth Feinberg, one of the two attorneys who served on the Advisory Committee, eventually was appointed to serve as a mediator in the case. The lawsuit was settled in the spring of 1998 for approximately $10.3 million with $3 million earmarked for attorneys’ fees.
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