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DIOXIN IN THE NEWS: FROM ECOLOGISM TO ’ENDURING VALUES'
IN PRESS COVERAGE OF A SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY CONTROVERSY

BY
John Allen Palen

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1991

52;’ [(7.3 4

ABSTRACT

DIOXIN IN THE NEWS: FROM ECOLOGISM TO ’ENDURING VALUES'
IN PRESS COVERAGE OF A SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY CONTROVERSY

BY
John A. Palen

Dioxin became news about 1970 as a technical term in two
controversies, defoliation in Vietnam and pesticide use in the
United States. Soon it developed into a controversy in its own
right, culminating in 1983 and 1984 in the federal buyout of
Times Beach, Missouri, the out-of—court settlement of a massive
suit by U.S. veterans exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and
other incidents. Media coverage of the controversy, which was
voluminous and intense, was widely criticized for exaggerating
the human health risks of dioxin exposure, both explicitly and
because of the extent and intensity of the coverage. Yet few

have studied dioxin news coverage systematically or thoroughly.

This dissertation examines New York Times coverage of the
emergence of the dioxin controversy out of its precursors in the
late 19608, then goes on to study dioxin coverage through 1988 in
the Times and selected magazines. Through an index search, more
than 700 Times items on dioxin and closely related matters were
identified and their abstracts were examined in the New York
Times Index. More than 250 of these items themselves, as well as
more than 190 magazine articles, were carefully examined. The

study focused primarily on aspects of the controversy involving

defoliation in Vietnam, the 1976 contamination of Seveso, Italy,
the contamination and buyout of Times Beach, and the Agent Orange

litigation.

The examination revealed that press coverage of dioxin
involved a much broader range of tasks than merely the
transmission of health risk information to the public. It is
argued that the presence of dioxin in the environment posed
conflicts in what sociologist Herbert Gans identified as the
"enduring values" of the news, and that the main business of
dioxin coverage was to expose and then reaccommodate those
conflicts within a centrist, mainstream American ideology. In
doing so, it is argued, the coverage marginalized a more radical
ecologistic challenge to mainstream ideology out of which the

dioxin controversy originally emerged.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Raymond Pfeiffer of the philosophy department at Delta
College has been a part of this dissertation from the beginning.
His skeptical enthusiasm and enthusiastic skepticism,

communicated in our many long talks, have been invaluable.

I am grateful to Wendell Mullison, a retired Dow Chemical
Company scientist, who has been generous with his time and his
library. His knowledge of my topic saved me from numerous
factual errors. (I am responsible for any that remain.) I know
that he disagrees with some of what is written here. His
willingness to assist, regardless, exemplifies his commitment to

the process of free, rational inquiry.

Mitchell Hall of the History Department at Central Michigan
University read an early version of Chapter Eight and offered
suggestions and encouragement. My colleague in the Journalism
Department at CMU, Dennis Jeffers, did likewise with early
versions of Chapters Five and Six. The clarity and sense of the
manuscript benefitted from several critical readings by Lois
Palen. Help also came from Douglas Noverr of Michigan State
University and from anonymous referees for the Association for
Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Midwest
Regional Conference of Journalism and Mass Communications

Historians.

iv

V

During work on this dissertation, I received welcome
financial support through a College Graduate Fellowship from the

MSU College of Arts and Letters.

I am grateful for their support to my colleagues at CMU,
especially Jerome Fitzhenry, Jack Hartman, Ronald Marmarelli, Guy
Meiss, Joan Memering, Suzanne Nichols, Michael Petrick, Jean
Raber, Larry Reynolds, Tom Rood, Carol Sanford, Alice Tait, James
Wieghart and Ted Zolty. Departmental secretaries Jacqueline
Robert and Jacqueline Pappas and students Jennifer Wilson,
Jennifer Williams and William Ferguson worked cheerfully and

carefully on my behalf.

I welcome the opportunity to thank my dissertation advisers.
The committee chair, James McClintock, urged me on, helped me
focus, and gave me confidence. Discussions with David Wright and
Victor Howard were always stimulating. I owe more than I can say
to the scholarship and teaching of Philip Shepard and Norman

Pollack.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: DIOXIN AND THE JOURNALISM OF SCIENCE CONTROVERSY
I. An Example of Central Difficulties . . . . . . . . . .

II. Scholarly Treatments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
III. Methodology and Limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . .
IV. Summary of Findings . . ; . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
V. Plan of the Dissertation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

PART I: A Pre-Systematic Account of the Controversy

CHAPTER ONE: BEGINNINGS

I. Origins and Toxicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
II. Early Products Containing Dioxin . . . . . . . . . . .
III. Industrial Exposures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
IV. Later Studies of Industrial Exposure . . . . . . . . .
V. Ranch Hand: Defoliation in Vietnam . . . . . . . . . .
VI. The Bionetics Study . . . . . . . . .‘. . . . . . . .

VII. Domestic Uses of 2,4,5-T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

CHAPTER TWO: SEVESO AND AGENT ORANGE
I. Seveso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
II. Agent Orange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

III. Agent Orange Research and Legislation . . . . . . . .

IV 0 The settlement 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

V. Post-Settlement Research Findings . . . . . . . . . .

vi

12

21

24

27

29

32

36

41

44

49

56

62

66

68

vii

CHAPTER THREE: DIOXIN FIRESTORM IN 1983

I. Regulating Pesticides . . . . . . . . . . . . .
II. Regulating 2,4,5-T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
III. Times Beach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
IV. Firestorm of Coverage . . . . . . . . . . . . .

PART II: Assessing Media Performance

CHAPTER FOUR: RISK COMMUNICATION AND BEYOND

I. Concensus in Coverage . . . . . . . . . . . . .
II. Evaluating the Coverage: Error . . . . . . . . .
III. Evaluating the Coverage: Context . . . . . . . .
IV. Evaluating the Coverage: Amount and Intensity .

PART III: Fact/Value Separation

CHAPTER FIVE: FACTS IN SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY CONTROVERSY

I. Lowrance and Risk Assessment . . . . . . . . . .
II. Mazur and the "Science Court" . . . . . . . . .
III. But Facts Don't Settle Controversies . . . . . .

CHAPTER SIX: WHY FACTS DON'T SETTLE CONTROVERSIES

I. Value Neutrality in Science . . . . . . . . . .
II. Doing Science vs. Doing Controversy . . . . . .
III. Implications for the Dioxin Controversy . . . .

PART IV: Emergence of the Dioxin Controversy
CHAPTER SEVEN: PESTICIDES AND THE NATURAL WORLD
I. Attitudes Toward Nature . . . . . . . . . . . .
II. Insects and Pesticides . . . . . . . . . . . . .

III. Challenges to the Status Quo . . . . . . . . . .

72

76

82

86

91

98

101

109

114

119

125

133

138

145

153

157

163

viii
CHAPTER EIGHT: DEFOLIATION IN VIETNAM
I. Operation Ranch Hand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
II. The Bionetics Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

III. Searchlight on 2,4,5-T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

IV. The Focus of Controversy Shifts . . . . . . . . . . 181
V. Domestic Coverage Was Anthropocentric . . . . . . . 184
VI. Significance of Dioxin's Emergence . . . . . . . . . 188

PART V: The Mature Controversy
CHAPTER NINE: SEVESO AND JOURNALISM’S "ENDURING VALUES"
I. Ecologistic Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
II. The Enduring Values of the News . . . . . . . . . . 200

III. Why Seveso Was News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

IV. Social Disorder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
V. The Public Threat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
VI. Ethnocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

VII. Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
VIII. Scientific and Technical Knowledge . . . . . . . . . 212
IX. "The Questions Persist ..." . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
X. Two Conflicting Versions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
CHAPTER TEN: TIMES BEACH: REQUIEM FOR A WAY OF LIFE

I. Laying Blame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
II. Ecologistic Issues Unexplored . . . . . . . . . . . 224

III. Why Times Beach Was News . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228

IV. Failure of Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
V. The Authority of Science and Technology . . . . . . 234
VI 0 small-Town Pastoralism O O O O O O O O O O O O I O O 237

CHAPTER ELEVEN: AGENT ORANGE AND THE MARGINALIZED INDIVIDUAL
I. Differences and Similarities . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

II. Moral Disorder in Government and Business . . . . . 246

ix

III. The Threat From the Veterans . . . . . . . . . . . 252

IV. The Individual at War and After . . . . . . . . . . 256
V. Working Out the Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
VI. The Authority of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264

CHAPTER TWELVE: EPILOGUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

BIBLIOGRAPHY O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 276

INTRODUCTION: DIOXIN AND THE JOURNALISM OF SCIENCE CONTROVERSY

I. An Example of Central Difficulties

Coverage of dioxin comes up virtually whenever science
journalism is discussed. Along with Three Mile Island, Love
Canal, acid rain and the ozone layer, the dioxin story is said to
exemplify some of the central difficulties of reporting on
science and technology controversies. These include their
technical complexity, the inconclusiveness of scientific
research, and the phenomenon of expert disagreement. Also
included are such journalistic constraints as tight deadlines,
limited space and resources, and reporters' lack of scientific
sophistication, limitations which are said to push coverage
toward oversimplification and, in the view of some critics, a
bias against science and technology. In addition, dioxin and
similar controversies are said to demonstrate a science—
illiterate public's difficulty in understanding and making

rational decisions about such issues‘. In a 1984 report, the

 

1 Various aspects of this characterization of the
science/journalism problem are discussed in Twentieth Century Fund,
Science in the Streets: Regort of the Twentieth Century Fund Task
Forge on the Communicetion of Scientific Risk (New York: Priority,
1984); Sharon M. Friedman, Sharon Dunwoody and Carol L. Rogers,

eds., Scientists and Journalists: Reporting Science as News (New
1

2

Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Communication of
Scientific Risk spread the responsibility for dealing with these
problems broadly among journalists, scientists, government,
industry and educators”. The American Medical Association had
been more blunt in 1983 when it accused the media of conducting a

dioxin "witch hunt" that resulted in public "hysteria"’.

The attention focused on dioxin coverage is understandable.
For one thing, everything about the chemical itself seems to be
in the superlative. Not only is the 2,3,7-8 isomer of
tetrachlorodibenzo-prdioxin one of the most toxic substances ever
tested on laboratory animals, it was at the center of some of the
earliest, longest-lasting and most bitterly contested
environmental issues of the post—World War II era. In 1962 U.S.
Air Force planes were beginning in earnest to spray South
Vietnamese forests with dioxin-contaminated herbicides just as
Rachel Carson’s Silent Sering energized and redirected
environmental controversy at home. Within a few years
disagreement over the U.S. defoliation program in Vietnam had

become part of the maelstrom of controversy generated by the war.

 

York: Free 1986); and Dorothy'Nelkin, Selling Scienc : HOW‘the Press
Covers Science and Technology (New York: Freeman 1987).

2 Twentieth Century Fund 6-14.

3 Reported in Philip J. Hilts, "AMA Votes to Fight Dioxin
'Witch Hunt,'" Washington Post, 23 June 1983, A1. For a similarly
critical view of the coverage, see Hugh D. Crone, Chemicals and
Society: A Guide to the New Chemical Age (Cambridge: Cambridge UP
1986) 180-193.

3

Meanwhile, government efforts to ban a popular weed killer
contaminated with dioxin, 2,4,5-T, were fought strenuously for
nearly 15 years by one of the nation’s largest chemical
manufacturers, Dow Chemical Company. Hundreds, and by one
account thousands, of research papers were published, making
dioxin one of the most thoroughly technically studied chemicals
in history.‘

Dioxin also figured in one of the most serious instances
before the 1984 Bhopal disaster of a general population's
exposure to poison released in an industrial accident -- the
contamination of the Seveso area in northern Italy in 1976.
Seven years later, dioxin’s presence at Times Beach, Missouri,
led to the first federal buyout of an entire environmentally
contaminated community. Dioxin was at the center of both the
longest jury trial in U.S. history -- a suit against Monsanto by
65 persons exposed during a spill -- and the nation's biggest

class action suit and largest tort settlement, the Agent Orange

 

‘ Book-length treatments of the dioxin controversy as a whole
are Alastair Hay, The Chemical Scythe: Lessons of 2.4.5-Tgend.Diqyie
(New York: Plenum 1982) and Michael Gough, DioxinI Agent Orange: The
Facts (New York: Plenum 1986). A useful article-length account is
Fred H. Tschirley, "Dioxin," Scientific American 254-2 (1986): 29-
35. Carson's famous book.was published in 1962 by Houghton-Mifflin
of Boston; on its impact see Frank Graham Jr., Since Silent Spring
(Boston: Houghton 1970). U.S. Veterans Administration, Review of
Literature on Herbicides and Associated Dioxins v. 2, Annotated
Bibliography (Washington: U.S. Veterans Administration 1980) n.p.,
lists approximately 1,200 research papers on the topic. An estimate
that 40,000 research papers have been written about dioxin is given
in "Dioxin: Emergency Herbicide Ban Precipitates a Battle Over
Chemicals' Rights -- lAre They Innocent Until Proven. Guilty?"
SciQuest July/Aug. 1979: 28-9.

4

litigation leading to a $180-million payment by chemical
companies into a fund for veterans claiming exposure to dioxin-

contaminated defoliants in Vietnam.5

The magnitude, persistence and intensity of dioxin coverage
also have invited attention. The New York Timee alone, for
example, published more than 700 news articles, columns,
editorials and letters on dioxin or closely related topics from
1965 to 1988, ranging from two-and three-paragraph news items
inside the paper to page—one series treatment of the issues. As
well as the Times, other newspapers, magazines and broadcast news
organizations gave the controversy extensive play. In 1983, for
example, dioxin was a key factor in these developments, among

others:
* evacuation and federal buyout of Times Beach;

* the ongoing Agent Orange litigation;

In

allegations of preferential treatment of industry
by an already-beleagured Environmental Protection

Agency;

* controversy over dioxin in the environment in

Michigan, New Jersey and elsewhere;

 

5 On Seveso, see Thomas Whiteside, The Pendulum and the Toxic
Cloud (New Haven: Yale UP 1979); on Times Beach, Gough, Dioxin 121-
36; on Agent Orange, Peter H. Schuck, Agent Orange on Triel: Mass
Toxic Disasters in the Courte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1987), and
A. L. Young and G. M. Reggiani, eds., Agent Orange and Its
‘Aeeogieted Dioxin: Assessment of e Controverey (Amsterdam: Elsevier
1988); on the Monsanto suit, see Lee Griggs, "In Illinois: The
Longest Jury Trial Drones On," Time 23 March 1987: 1.

5

* fears in New York City that gefilte fish, an
important part of Passover, had been contaminated.
Mayor Edward Koch told the New York Times that "he
planned to eat gefilte fish tonight but then, 'to

be on the safe side,’ he will not eat any for the

next two months."6

In that year more than 350 items were listed under "dioxin" or
equivalent terms in indexes to the New York Times, Chicago
Tribune, Washington Post, and Reader's Guide to Periodical
Literature. In June alone the New York Times published 39 items

on dioxin issues, five of them on page one.

II. Scholarly Treatments

While often mentioned as an example of the problems of risk
communication in the mass media, however, the journalism of the

dioxin controversy has been much less often examined thoroughly

 

‘ On alleged EPA pmeferential treatment, see "Dow Chemical
Urging Got EPA to Soften 1981 Dioxin Water Report, Officials Say,"
Well Street Journal 16 March 1983: 4, and Howard Kurtz, "Dow Got to
Suggest Dioxin Report Changes," Weehinqton Poep_16 March 1983: A1+;
on EPA's other troubles, Philip Shabecoff, "Environmental Agency:
Deep and Persisting Woes," New York Tillee 6 March 1983: 1+; on
Michigan contamination, Robert Reinhold, "E.P.A.'s Dow Tests Find
High Toxicity,” N12_1 April 1983: 1+; on New Jersey contamination,
Joseph F. Sullivan, "High Level of Dioxin.Found.at Jersey Site; Food
Center Is Shut," _N_Y_T_ 3 June 1983: 1+; on gefilte fish, Robert
Reinhold, "New York Area Is Receiving Carp From Toxin-Tainted
Michigan Bay," NY! 28 March 1983: 1+; Marian Burros, "Mayor Says
U.S. Should Inspect Fish," M 28 March 1983: B8; Robert D.
McFadden, "New York Area Callers Seek Reassurance on Eating Carp,"
NY: 29 March 1983: B3.

6

or systematically. Two studies were published by the Media
Institute, a Washington, D.C., media research organization. In
one, Edward J. Burger Jr. carried out case studies of print media
coverage of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), cancer chemotherapy
and dioxin. In the other, the institute conducted a content
analysis and audience survey on print and television news about
ethylene dibromide (EDB), a Louisiana train wreck involving
chemicals, and dioxin contamination in Times Beach’. In addition
to these two studies, Dorothy Nelkin of Cornell University, as
part of her ongoing inquiry into the inter-relationships of
science, technology and society, briefly examined dioxin themes

in her book on media/science issues, Selling Science.

Burger, director of the Georgetown University Institute for
Health Policy Analysis and associate professor at Georgetown's
medical school, examined items in the New York Timeey the
Washington Post and the New Yorker on the controversy over U.S.
defoliation in Vietnam. Noting several factual inaccuracies, he
also criticized the material as biased and politically motivated
and found a "tendency to sensationalize issues" and "a clear
tendency to simplify factually complex issues and uncertainties

into seemingly simple and unadorned constructs."° Similarly, the

 

7 Edward J. Burger, Jr., Health Risks: The Chfilenge of
Informing the Public (Washington: Media Institute 1984); and Media
Institute, Chemical Risks: Fears, Facts and the Media (Washington:
Media Institute 1985).

' Burger 23-39, 49.

7

institute's study of the Times Beach episode criticized coverage
as sensationalized, speculative, anecdotal and imbalanced, with
too much emphasis on health risks and too much reliance on
government and citizen sources instead of industryu’ Adopting a
different mode of inquiry, Nelkin found that major daily
newspapers and news magazines had treated dioxin in terms of
sharply polarized themes. Dioxin was portrayed as a peril of
technology, a "monster" from the chemical lab, but also as an
unjustly maligned chemical, victimized by politics and bad
reporting. It was also treated as a "mystery" to be solved by
science, and as an aberration to be corrected by improved
regulatory control of industry. Most articles, however, "raised
no structural questions about the nature of industrial practices
that contributed to the dumping of toxic waste, or more generally

to the risks of technological development"”.

All three scholarly treatments of dioxin coverage have their
limitations. In the decade after the first defoliation stories
appeared in the New York Times in 1965, that newspaper published
more than 80 items directly related to the controversy. Yet
Burger examined fewer than 20 articles from the Tlmee and the
Washington Post, without making clear why he selected some and
not others. Media Institute more systematically studied 76

Times Beach items published in three newspapers during a

 

9 Media Institute 19-40.

” Nelkin 64-9; quotation 67—8.

8

specified time period, as well as 26 segments from network
nightly newscasts. Defoliation and Times Beach, however, were
only two aspects of the complex dioxin controversy. In addition,
both studies make unexamined assumptions about the nature of
scientific/technical controversy and the role of experts, media
and the public. The assumptions are that objective human health
risks are the sole or at least most important issue in these
controversies, that science is society’s authoritative guide to
dealing with them, and that the function of the media is to
communicate scientific information to the public with as little
distortion as possible“. As I will argue, when these
assumptions are problematized -- that is, when they are made the
focus of critical inquiry -- a different set of questions arises.
Critical examination of several of just these assumptions has
been an important feature of Nelkin’s work,12 but her treatment
of dioxin news, while suggestive, deals with a limited sample of
articles in an important but limited time frame, the spring of

1983.

 

“ Burger 1-9; Media Institute v—xiii.

” In addition to Selling ScienceI see Dorothy Nelkin,
"Science, Technology, and Political Conflict: Analyzing the Issues,"
in Controversy: Politic; of TechnicaLDecieions, 2d ed., ed. Dorothy
Nelkin (Newbury Park CA: Sage 1984) 9-24; and "Background Paper,"
Twentieth Century Fund 21-84.

9

III. Methodology and Limitations

I have attempted to look at coverage of the dioxin
controversy more systematically and thoroughly than others have
done. In order to get an overall sense of the course of the
controversy, I identified and examined more than 700 abstracts of
news stories in the New York Times Index between 1965 and 1988
about dioxin and closely related controversies. In addition, I
carefully examined more than 250 of the news items themselves on
New York Timee microfilm, as well as more than 190 articles in
magazines and journals, located serendipitously or identified
through Reader’e Guide to Periodical Literature and Business
Periodicals Index. I examined the items in the light of
critical interrogation of widely held assumptions about the
relationship among science, technology, media and society. At
the same time, I tried to arrive at a clearer formulation of that
relationship by examining the material. The process involved a
constant back-and-forth movement between explanation and data,
with ongoing mutual adjustment: What I conceived to be the role
of media in science and technology controversy was influenced by
what I saw in the coverage, but I also saw there what my
understanding of the relationship led me to look for. Only at
the end of the process did the two fall into something
approaching a stable relationship. Although I did use several

simple quantitative techniques, such as counting, on the whole I

10

did not focus on quantitative data. Rather, through the
identification and analysis of themes in the texts, I tried to
understand in cultural terms the meaning of the dioxin
controversy and its coverage in the press. Thus I worked within
the cultural, qualitative and critical traditions, rather than

the positivistic tradition, of media scholarship”.

The size, length and complexity of the dioxin controversy
made choices necessary. Because it seemed that the story could
not be told otherwise, I have paid most attention to the

following central aspects:
* Defoliation in Vietnam;
* The battle over regulating domestic use of 2,4,5-T;
* Contamination of the town of Seveso, Italy, in 1976;

* The Agent Orange litigation on behalf of Vietnam

veterans;

* The contamination and federal buyout of Times Beach, Mo.

I have dealt hardly at all with a major dioxin incident at
Newark, N.J., because it seemed repetitive in many respects.
Likewise but for other reasons, I have seldom mentioned an
important dioxin contamination controversy at Midland, Mich. I
edited the local newspaper, the Midlend Daily Newey from 1975 to

1983. The pressure to justify (or criticize in hindsight) my own

 

” See Clifford G. Christians and James W. Carey, "The Logic
and Aims of Qualitative Research," and Robert S. Fortner and
Clifford G. Christians, "Separating Wheat From+Chaff in Qualitative
Studies, " both in Research Methods in Mags Conluunicetioni ed. Guido
H. Stempel III and Bruce H. Westley (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice
1981) 342-74; Michael R. Real, Stmer Media: A Cultural Studies
Approach (Newbury Park: Sage 1989).

11

journalistic performance I have dealt with through avoidance.
Numerous other localized incidents involving dioxin offered
tempting possibilities for analysis, which I resisted. They

offer opportunities for further research.

Another limitation of this study is its focus on one elite
newspaper, the New York Times, and on less than a dozen national
magazines. I chose to examine coverage in the Times for several
reasons. One is the convenience and completeness of its index,
the only newspaper index that provided abstracts of items
throughout the entire period of the controversy. The abstracts
saved me countless hours in locating items dealing with dioxin as
well as in gaining an overall sense of the coverage.
Additionally, however, the New York Timee_is an appropriate
choice for study because of its importance as a source of news
for several hundred thousand readers, its accessability to
millions more through its index and microfilm service, and its

influence on other newspapers and on the wire services.

Accessability to large numbers of readers was also one reason
for choosing the magazines whose coverage was examined. The
publications were all indexed either in Reader's Guige to
Periodical Literature, or Business Periodicals Index, two widely
available reference works. Another reason for choosing to look
at magazine coverage was the different perspectives it provided,
in material written for relatively narrowly defined audiences

ranging from the technically oriented readers of Chemical &

12

Engineering News and Science to the liberal constituency of the

Progreeeive and the Nation.

Overall, I looked at printed material which would have been
reasonably accessible to any reader with the time and interest to
research the subject in a public library. I did not examine
broadcast coverage, a limitation which restricts conclusions
about what Americans were told and shown about dioxin. My study
would, however, contribute toward such a larger undertaking by
providing a thorough, systematic textual analysis of an important

part of the overall journalistic performance.

IV. Summary of Findings

Two decades after dioxin was first mentioned in the news, a
recurring interpretation of media coverage of the controversy has
emerged. This interpretation held that the long—term human
health risks of environmental exposure to dioxin were exaggerated
in the press, with the result that people were needlessly
frightened and resources needlessly spent. Next time, it was
said, we must do better. Far from being a neutral judgment,
however, this standard interpretation was itself a move -- and a
powerful one -- in the ongoing dispute. While it focused
attention on the assertion that health risks were exaggerated (a
case which there is data to support), it disinvited examination
of two important assumptions. One was that long-term human

health risk from environmental exposure was the dioxin issue with

13

which journalism was concerned. The other was that the press
should be judged entirely or at least primarily on how well it
transmitted that risk information to the public. In reality,
both the coverage itself and the media's role in the controversy

were more complex than that.

Coverage of the controversy can better be seen, I believe, as
a "constructed reality"“ in which conflicts among strongly held
values were first exposed and then reaccommodated within a
centrist, mainstream American ideology. That ideology is one in
which industrial capitalism and democracy are believed to march
amicably hand in hand. One group of participants believed
strongly in the authority of positive science as a basis for
responsible, orderly, progressive American capitalism. The
dioxin controversy, emerging out of a conflict between this
belief and emerging ecologistic values of the environmental
movement, went on to expose conflicts with such strongly held
residual values as small—town pastoralism, individualism, and
participatory democracy”. More than merely a transmitter of

risk information, the media were an institution in which these

 

“ See for example David L. Altheide, Creating Reelity: How TV
News Digorte Evente (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage) 1976, and Gaye
Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New
York: Free) 1978.

‘5 On "emergent" and "residual" cultural forms, see Raymond
Williams, "Base and Superstructune in Marxist Cultural Theory,"
Contemporary Literary Criticiem: Literary and Cultural Studies 2d
ed., ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (New York: Longman
1989): 378-90.

14

value conflicts were exposed, debated, evaded, smoothed over,
reshaped, redefined and in a limited way resolved. Eventually an
accommodation was found that preserved the ideology's essential
features. While the media did transmit a great deal of risk
information over more than a quarter century of coverage, their
real labor was to preside over the revision and preservation of

the ideology.

A normative objection can be raised to this interpretation of
the media's role. Even though the dispute as constructed in the
news did include conflicts over values, one could object, it
should have been carried out more rationally; facts should have
been dealt with separately from values, enabling issues to be
clarified and factual questions to be decided by science while
value questions were left to politics. In this scheme of things,
exaggeration of health risk in the media would be a cardinal
flaw, because it would fail to provide an adequate factual basis
for political decisions. I could, of course, respond that I am
only interested in describing what actually happens in media
coverage of science and technology controversy, not in what
should be the case. In fact, however, I am interested in both,
and so I have had to examine the question of fact/value

separation in some detail.

I have concluded that while it may be possible to decide
factual and value issues separately at the core of some

supposedly "pure” science, it is demonstrably impossible to do so

15

in science/technology controversy. Once one is in the public
arena of controversy, I argue, every introduction of fact
involves an inseparable judgment that the fact is relevant to the
issues at stake -- and deciding which issues are at stake
requires value judgment. To make the point another way, one
might successfully separate facts from values in science; but in
disputes like those over dioxin, one is not "doing" science. One
is doing social and political controversy. Conflicts over values

are inescapable.

What, then, were the values in conflict in the dioxin

controversy?

Initially dioxin appeared in the news as a technical detail
in two controversies that pitted the emerging belief system of
ecologism against aspects of the American ideology of industrial
capitalist democracy. One was the use of defoliants in the
Vietnam War, while the other was the use of synthetic chemical
pesticides in domestic agriculture and forest management.
Ecologism offered radical challenges to certain fundamental
aspects of the dominant ideology -- principally its underpinning
in a centuries-old anthropocentric view of the relation between
humans and nature. In this view, nature existed to be used by
man for his purposes; human risks were direct and of paramount
concern; they could be controlled, averted or avoided by
manipulating nature. In the ecologistic view, by contrast, many

of the products of modern industrial capitalism threatened the

16

complex web of relationships of all living things. Risk to
humans was less direct, subordinated within the risk to nature
itself. The prudent course was to "go along" with natural
processes to a greater extent, relinquishing some measure of
human control in return for the enhanced safety and well-being of
the biota. Both world views were represented in the
controversies over domestic pesticide use and Vietnamese
defoliation. Introduction of dioxin into these controversies,
however, allowed them to shift toward less radical ground -- the
terrain of direct human health risk from pesticide residues that
had been scuffled over and to some extent mapped and rationalized
since widespread use of arsenical insecticides began in the late

19th century.

This shift in focus was crucial. At its most uncompromising,
emergent ecologism claimed that pesticides were a problem
precisely because they did what they were designed to do -- kill
living things man had defined as "pests." But if attention
shifted to a "flaw” in pesticides -- if the problem was dioxin
rather than the products it contaminated -- then several
technical arguments available to manufacturers, arguments which
were marginally relevant before, grew more to the point. These
arguments were that 1) dioxin was an unintended contaminant of
useful products; 2) that it had been virtually eliminated; and 3)
that its environmental human health risks were minimal and had

been blown out of proportion by the media. Concerned

17

increasingly with long-term human health risks of environmental
exposure to dioxin, the controversy after about 1970 was fought

out on this less radical terrain.

Even after its deradicalization, however, what had emerged as
the dioxin controversy exposed flaws and weaknesses in the
ideology of industrial capitalist democracy, particularly those
aspects of it which Herbert Gans identified as the "enduring
values" of journalism”. These identify ethnocentrism,
responsible capitalism, altruistic democracy, individualism,
small-town pastoralism and respect for authority as non-
contradictory and even complementary values in the American way
of life. Much of dioxin coverage was not concerned with
transmitting risk information at all; instead, it was busy
responding to the danger to the ideology's integrity posed by
those flaws and weaknesses -- first exposing them, then analyzing
what had gone wrong and seeking solutions, and finally reassuring
its audience that the American way of life had adjusted for the

better, but without fundamental change.

For example, contradictions between the ideal of pastoral,
small-town life and the realities of industrial capitalism were
exposed by the dioxin contamination of Seveso and Times Beach,
whose small-town aspects were stressed. (In fact, both are in

urbanized areas). The threat posed to the ideology by this

 

“ Herbert Gans, Deciding What's Newe: A Study of CBS Evening
News. NBC Nightly Newe, Newsweek, end Time (New Ybrk: Pantheon
1979): 39-69.

l8

contradiction was dealt with and brought to closure in news
stories chronicling the restoration of normality at Seveso and
the process of "mourning" and renewal following the "death" of
Times Beach. The main business of the news coverage, over time,
was to provide a stage where the conflict was worked out and

eventually resolved.

In addition to small—town pastoralism, another "enduring
value" in the American ideology is responsible capitalism, the
belief that business operates unexploitively in a regulated free
market for the ultimate good of all. A great deal of coverage
focused on -— and in effect punished -- what appeared to be
transgressions of this value, such as industry’s continued
manufacture and sale of Agent Orange and 2,4,5-T after knowing
they contained a contaminant that caused cancer and birth defects
in laboratory animals. On the positive side, the news dealt at
length with industry's development of technical responses to the
dioxin problem, including cleanup measures and scientific
research. These stories showed the "system" working to punish
irresponsibility at the same time that capitalism as a whole was

acting responsibly.

Many dioxin stories included individual narratives, the
stories of residents or veterans with illnesses or other damage
they blamed on dioxin. Within a framework of risk information
transmission, this technique is vulnerable to criticism as

"anecdotal." What such stories accomplished, however, was to

19

expose, examine and resolve conflicts between the values of
responsible capitalism and individualism. Characteristically,
individual narrative functioned as a story-telling device, a way
to establish the conflict. The individuals’ stories were seldom
if ever followed through; instead, the conflict is shown as being
resolved either through the authority of science or the workings

of the democratic process -- and sometimes both.

Perhaps the most fundamental ideological fault-line exposed
by the dioxin controversy was the conflict between respect for
the authority of science and the value placed on democratic
decision making. The press devoted substantial coverage to this
conflict, focusing attention on legislative, regulatory and
judicial attempts to resolve the controversy in ways consistent
with science. And just as apparent corporate irresponsibility
was punished in the press, instances of lax regulation of
industry and of public "hysteria" over dioxin were publicly
exposed as threats to the appropriate working of democratic
government. Government-sponsored research was also an important
story, for perhaps the most reassuring evidence of the
consistency of democracy with science was the grounding of

government decisions in scientific research.

There are other instances as well of coverage whose raison
d'etre lies in the ideological stresses and strains brought about
by dioxin. By the mid—19803, the following consensus had emerged

in the news: The main threat from dioxin—containing pesticides

20

was posed by dioxin itself and was of long-term human illness
from environmental exposure; science, the authority, eventually
had come down on the side of the manufacturers, whose behavior
was for the most part vindicated. Meanwhile the political
system, including the courts, handled the conflict in a way that
was reasonably fair and responsive to individuals and small-town
communities, yet was also reasonably consistent with science; in
addition, irresponsible parties were exposed and punished.
Finally, the media were criticized, not least by themselves, for

having blown the controversy out of proportion.

In working through to this consensus, the news carried out
three important functions. It exposed certain conflicts in the
dominant ideology of industrial capitalist democracy, served as a
forum for discussion of the conflicts, and worked out an
accommodation that incorporated some change while preserving the
ideology's essential features. These are legitimate functions,
and the news is at least as appropriately judged on how well it
carried them out as on the reductively narrower question of how
well it transmitted risk information. In my judgment, that part
of journalism studied here did its ideological work
conscientiously, with commitment and a high degree of
professionalism. Nevertheless, in perhaps the most important
finding of my research, the job was done within a far less
radical framework than that in which ecologism presents its

challenge to industrial capitalist democracy. The dioxin

21

controversy did not deal with ecologistic issues; rather, it was
a way of marginalizing them. In that sense, the press may have

carried out its responsibilities less than well.

V. Plan of the Dissertation

From this point on, the dissertation proceeds through 12
chapters. Chapters One, Two and Three present a pre-systematic
account of the dioxin controversy as a whole, organized more or
less chronologically and based on scholarly, scientific and
journalistic sources. The pre—systematic account is not
intended as a preferred, objective account of the controversy
against which coverage is to be judged. Rather, its purpose is
to provide a framework of convenience to facilitate reading of
the thematic analysis which comes later. I tried to write it in
such a way that readers with widely differing views on the merits
of dioxin coverage could agree that the pre-systematic account is
reasonably complete, fair and balanced and has documentary
support. Chapter Four sets out widely held criticisms of dioxin
coverage and argues that while they are supported to some extent
by the evidence looked at here, there is also significant
evidence to the contrary. Chapters Five and Six examine whether
fact/value separation would have been a helpful strategy for
dealing with the controversy, concluding not. Chapters Seven and

Eight establish the background of the pesticide and defoliation

22

controversies and chart the emergence of dioxin as a technical
term introduced into those disputes. Chapters Nine, Ten and
Eleven carry the analysis forward through three major dioxin
controversies -- the contamination of the Italian community of
Seveso in 1976, the contamination and federal buyout of the
Missouri community of Times Beach, from 1971 through 1983, and
the Agent Orange litigation from 1978 through 1988. An epilogue

summarizes and draws conclusions.

PART I

A Pre-Systematic Account of the Controversy

CHAPTER ONE: BEGINNINGS

I. Origins and Toxicity

According to one theory initially proposed by Dow Chemical
Co. scientists, dioxin is as old as ordinary fire, one of the
"myriad of initial pyrolysis products formed during combustion
(and) jumbled at low concentrations in a sea of chemical
reactions. . . ."1 If it has indeed been present that long and
is virtually everywhere in the environment, as research at Dow
and elsewhere indicates, nevertheless sampling of lake bottom
sediments indicates its presence in the environment took an
upward turn in the 19408. That coincided both with the increased
use (and disposal by burning) of plastics and the large-scale
production of the industrial chemical 2,4,5-trichlorophenol, from
which weed and germ killers are made. In addition to being
produced when plastic and other materials are burned in municipal
and industrial incinerators, dioxin is a controllable but
inevitable contaminant in the production of the chemical
intermediate trichlorophenol, of which an estimated 150,000 tons

per year were manufactured in the early 19803. Trichlorophenol

 

1 R. R. Bumb, et al., ”Trace Chemistries of Fire: A Source of
Chlorinated Dioxins," Science 210 (1980): 385-90; quotation, 386.

24

25

is no longer made in the United States, but in its heyday it was
chemically transformed in industrial-size batches into the germ
killer hexachlorophene and the weed killer, 2,4,5-T (2,4,5-

trichlorophenoxyacetic acid)’.

Dioxin is one of the chlorinated dibenzo—pfdioxins, an
extended family of 75 chemical "next of kin" -- isomers, or
compounds made up of the same kinds and numbers of atoms but
differing in structural arrangement. It has four chlorine atoms
linked laterally to two benzene molecules, which are in turn
connected by two oxygen atoms. The lateral connecting points are
identified by chemists as the 2, 3, 7 and 8 positions, giving the
compound its technical name, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-peme—
dioxin}. When tested in laboratory animals, not only is it the
most acutely toxic member of its family, it is one of the most
toxic substances known. Vanishingly small amounts cause

extensive and often fatal damage to the liver‘.

A common standard of toxicity in laboratory animals is the
"LDW," or dose of a poison that kills 50 percent of a test group.

For guinea pigs given dioxin this lethel dose is quite small,

 

2 Alastair Hay, The Chemical Scythe: Leesone of 214,5-T and
Dioxin (New York: Plenum 1982): 5-23; Michael Gough, Dioxin, Agent
Orange: The Facte (New York: Plenum 1986): 27-41. A chemical
intermediate is a substance produced as a necessary stage between
raw material and final product.

3 Following lay usage, I will use the term "dioxin" throughout
to refer to the 2,3,7,8 isomer of tetrachlorodibenzo-pfidioxin.

‘ Hay 5—23, 28-36.

26

0.0005 to 0.002 thousdandths of a gram (milligram) per kilogram
of body weight. Dioxin’s deadliness varies from species to
species, however. The LD5° for female rats is 0.044 milligrams
per kilogram. For dogs it is 1.05. Thus depending on the animal
being tested, dioxin is an acute poison whose potency is roughly
equivalent to botulinum toxin and nerve agents. By comparison,
aspirin is considered only slightly toxic, with a lethal oral
dose in rats of about 1,000 milligrams per kilogram of body
weight‘. Dioxin also causes cancer, birth defects and embryonic
and fetal death in laboratory animals, but a 1980 summary of
research by Air Force herbicide consultant Alvin L. Young has not
been overturned: "There is no conclusive evidence at this time
that TCDD (dioxin) is mutagenic, teratogenic, or carcinogenic in

man "7

 

5 Rodney W. Bovey and Alvin L. Young, The Science of_g.4.5—T
.endlAssociated Phenexy'Herbicides (New'York: Wiley 1980): 172-3; Hay
5-23.

‘ Hugh D. Crone, Chemicalegand Society: A Guide to the New
Chemical Age (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1986): 28-35; on aspirin
toxicity, see U.S. Department.of Health and.Human.Services, National
Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, RecLietry of Toxic
Effects of Chemical Substancee, 1981-8; vol. 3 (Washington: U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services 1983): 567.

7 Bovey and Young 192; Gough 218.

27

II. Early Products Containing Dioxin

However, the work establishing dioxin’s severe effects on
laboratory animals and investigating its long—term effects on
humans was done primarily in the 19703 and 19803. Neither its
potency nor its presence were suspected when the two major
commercial derivatives of trichlorophenol, hexachlorophene and
2,4,5-T, came on the market soon after World War II.
Hexachlorophene was first sold by the Swiss chemical firm
Givaudan in the late 1940s as a weapon against staphylococcus
bacteria. Later it fell into disuse when its risks came to be
considered more serious than its benefits. A toxic compound
apparently irrespective of its contamination with dioxin,
hexachlorophene was found in 1971 to cause cerebral fluid
accumulation, brain lesions and paralysis in rats, and the next
year it was implicated in France in the death of 36 infants and
serious nerve damage to 145 more after it was mistakenly mixed
with talcum powder. In the 19403, however, staphylococcus
infections and epidemics were a frequent and often fatal
occurrence in nurseries; hexachlorophene was found to be
efficient against the organism and rapidly became the germ killer

of choice”.

The herbicide 2,4,5-T, whose synthesis was first reported in

1941, was likewise marketed as a response to problems, those

 

’ Hay 71-75.

28

caused by or perceived to be caused by weeds. Weed-caused losses
to agricultural output have been estimated at $3 billion to $5
billion annually in the United States, but in the words of one
textbook, unwanted plants also cause difficulties in many other
aspects of "our modern industrialized, suburbanized culture,"
including "forestry, highway, waterway, and public-land
management, arboretum, park, and golf course care, and home

9 After undergoing military tests during

landscape maintenance."
World War II, 2,4,5—T went on the market in 1948 as a broadleaf
weed killer approved for use on rangeland, pastures, fence rows,
farm lands and rights of way. Like 2,4-D (2,4-
dichlorophenoxyacetic acid), an even more widely used herbicide
with which it was eventually to be mixed in Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T
is a synthetic plant growth regulator which works by causing
cells to elongate. One of its most valuable characteristics as a
weed killer is its selectivity. In general, it kills broad-
leaved plants while leaving cereal crops, grasses and conifers
alone. By 1960 U.S. chemical firms were making nearly eight

million pounds a year of it, 2.7 million of which were

exported”.

 

’ Alden S. Crafts, Modern Weed Control (Berkeley: U of
California P 1975): 13-4.

“ Bovey and Young 1-2, 50. By way of comparison, production of
2,4-D was 36 million pounds in 1960. See Gale E. Peterson, "The
Discovery and Development of 2,4-D, " Agricultural Hietory 41 (1967) :
243-53.

29

III. Industrial Exposures

With large—scale trichlorophenol production picking up after
the war, however, the record of harmful industrial exposure to
what was later found to be dioxin began almost immediately. A
runaway reaction caused an explosion in a 500—gallon
trichlorophenol reactor at a Monsanto factory in Nitro, W. Va.,
on March 8, 1949. Clean—up crews complained of skin, eye and
respiratory irritation, headaches, dizziness and nausea. Weeks
later other symptoms appeared: an acne-like skin eruption, severe
muscle pain (requiring hospitalization in some cases), fatigue,
nervousness, shortness of breath, decreased sex drive and
intolerance to cold. Doctors found liver enlargement, nerve
damage, elevated blood fat levels, and a strong phenolic body
odor when several of the men were together in a room. The skin
eruption, developed by approximately 120 workers as a result of
the explosion, was chloracne, a disfiguring, persistent skin
disease commonly associated with chemical workers. Doctors
didn’t know it then, but within a few years dioxin would be

indentified as one of its principal causes“.

Chloracne among workers did not motivate the chemical

industry to cease trichlorophenol production, however. Nor was

 

‘1 Hay 98-100; Gough 27-33; 157-62; R. R. Suskind and V. S.
Hertzberg, "Human Health Effects of 2,4,5-T and Its Toxic
Contaminants, “ QAMA: Journal of the American Medical As_sociation 251
(1984): 2372-2380.

 

30

the industry successful in eliminating harmful exposures.
Reactor explosions at chemical plants continued periodically for
more than a quarter century after the one at Nitro. In 1953 a
trichlorophenol reactor blew up at the Badische Anilin & Soda-
Fabrik (BASF) plant in Ludwigshaven, West Germany, affecting 75
workers. In 1956, a 2,4,5-T reactor exploded at a Rhone-Poulenc
facility at Pont de Claix, France, exposing 17 people to dioxin.
Trichlorophenol reactors blew up in 1963 at a Philips-Duphar
plant in Amsterdam, Holland, with 106 persons exposed, and five
years later at a Coalite and Chemical Products Ltd. plant at
Bolsover, Derbyshire, U.K. Only eight workers were in the
building at the time, one of whom was killed by falling masonry,
but more than 80 came down with Chloracne from dioxin
contamination after the plant was reopened. The 1976 accident at
Seveso was also a reactor explosion, but in this case it was the

public, not workers, who were most numerously exposed”.

In addition, by the count of British dioxin authority Alastair
Hay, there have been at least 19 instances of exposures at
chlorinated phenol plants, involving a total of many hundreds of
workers, during routine production processes as a result of poor
industrial hygiene. These include incidents at Nordrhein-
Westfalen and Boehringer plants in West Germany (1949 and 1952-
54), Rhone-Poulenc in France (1953-71), Diamond Alkalai in

Newark, N.J., and Hooker in Niagara Falls, N.Y. (both 1956),

 

” Hay 95-146.

31

Melegnanesi Saronio in Italy and Thompson-Hayward in Kansas City
(both 1959), Diamond Shamrock in the United States (1960), a 1964
incident somewhere in the Soviet Union, Dow in Midland, Mich.
(1964), Spolana in Czechoslovakia (1964-69), Coalite in the U.K.
(1970), a 1970 incident somewhere in Japan, a 1972 incident in
the USSR, Linz Nitrogen in Austria (1972-73), Bayer in West

Germany (1974), and Monsanto in the U.K. (1976)”.

All in all, Hay concluded, "(t)wo thousand men have developed
a most disfiguring skin condition, chloracne, as a result of
their involvement" in trichlorophenol production. Symptoms of
Chloracne include straw-colored cysts, black-heads, pustules and
abscesses, which may eventually leave scars. The skin takes on a
dirty gray appearance, so severe in one case that a Southern
white worker with strong racial prejudices developed emotional
problems because he was often regarded as black. Under Jim Crow
laws he was forced to use segregated facilities. In severe
cases, the eruptions appear on the neck, shoulders, genitals,
chest, lower trunk and, in worst cases, the hands, feet and legs.
The disease is also persistent. A study of Monsanto
trichlorophenol workers in 1979 found 29 men who had had

Chloracne for 30 years“.

 

” Hay 96-97.

“ Hay 90-1; quotation, 138; Gough 167-68. The study cited is
Marion Moses, et al., "Health Status of Workers With Past Exposure
to 2 , 3 , 7 , 8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin in the Manufacture of 2 , 4 , 5-
Trichlorophenoxyacetic Acid: Comparison of Findings With and Without
Chloracne," Americen Journel of Induetriel Medicine 5 (1984): 161-

32

On the other hand, damage to the liver and nervous system
that doctors had found in victims of the Nitro explosion had
subsided by 1953, and the Chloracne had improved. Industry's
approach was to treat the chloracne, monitor workers' health and
try to limit their exposure. At Nitro, a hazard-pay surcharge
was negotiated with the union, and men were allowed to refuse to
work in the trichlorophenol or 2,4,5-T processes. After 1957,
when dioxin was identified as the cause of Chloracne among
trichlorophenol workers by Dr. George Schulz of the University of
Hamburg, steps could also be taken to limit the amount of dioxin

by controlling production temperatures”.

IV. Later Studies of Industrial Exposure

In the 19705 and 19805, after the exposure of civilian and
military populations to dioxin had become controversial, there
was increased research interest in what could be learned from the
industrial exposures. Here the pre-systematic account leaps

ahead chronologically to summarize that research.

The 1949 Nitro explosion was the first, and workers there
have been studied the longest. In the 19805, researchers found
that they do not seem to have died as a result of dioxin

exposure, or to have developed cancer or heart disease. Nor does

 

82.

u Hay 98-102; Gough 29-33, 157-71, 183-92.

33

their exposure seem to have caused them to father fewer children,
or children with birth defects. They did suffer -- many of them
severely, many for decades -- from Chloracne. In addition,
studies have found other health differences between exposed and
unexposed workers. For example, exposed workers experienced a
significantly higher incidence of gastrointestinal ulcers and

”farmer's skin, a condition in which the skin swells when
exposed to sunlight. Also, smokers exposed to dioxin had poorer
lung function than smokers who had not been exposed. The ulcers
and poor lung function were not associated with the presence of
chloracne, however, weakening the case that they might have been
caused by dioxin. Although there seemed to be no association
between dioxin exposure and heart disease, there was an increase
in heart-disease risk factors -- elevated blood cholesterol and

triglycerides. Studies also found an association between dioxin

exposure and complaints of decreased sex drive and impotence”.

Studies have also been carried out on the health and/or

mortality of workers exposed to dioxin at the BASF plant in West

 

“ My summary of the research follows Hay 98-102 and Gough 157-
71. Major Nitro studies include Judith A. Zack and Raymond R.
Suskind, "The Mortality Experience of Workers Exposed to
Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin in a Itichlorophenol Process Accident,"
Journal of Occupational Medicine 22-1 (1980): 11-14; R. R. Suskind
and V. S. Hertzberg, "Human Health Effects of 2,4,5-T and Its Toxic
Contaminants," JAMA: Journel of the Americaanedical Aeeociation,
251-18 (1984): 2372-80; Marion Moses, et al., "Health Status of
‘Workers With Past Exposure to 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin
in the Manufacture of 2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic Acid: Comparison
of Findings With. and.‘Without Chloracne," ‘emericen_ Journal of
Industrial Medicine 5 (1984): 161-82.

 

34

Germany in 1953, the Philips-Duphar plant in Holland in 1963 and
the Coalite plant in England in 1968, as well as of some of the
routine production exposures”. As in the Nitro studies, workers
were found to have suffered persistent Chloracne and a variety of
other complaints, but there was no firm evidence that workers

were dying early or of unusual causes. "(M)en who participated
in trichlorophenol and 2,4,5-T manufacture are neither dying like
flies nor displaying symptoms that suggest that their lives will
be shortened," Gough concluded. "Although many were clearly
exposed to dioxin because they came down with chloracne, life-
threatening and life-shortening diseases are no more frequent

among them than can be expected."18

Almost as persistent as the chloracne, however, was the
ambiguity of the studies in regard to cancer, heart disease and
birth defects. For example, a study of BASF workers found an
excess of gastrointestinal cancer. Although the number of
cancers was small, three or four, the incidence was two to three
times the expected rate. Such data not only permit but require
interpretation. The authors of the study concluded that the

incidence of stomach cancer "cannot be adequately explained as a

 

” Gough 173-82 and citations.

” Gough 182.

35

mere chance event."19 Gough, however, interpreted the situation

this way:

If that excess (of stomach cancers) is actually related to
dioxin, there must have been something special about
exposure at BASF, because no excess of stomach cancers is
seen in other dioxin-exposed workers. Alternatively, the
BASF workers might have shared another common exposure
that was associated with their cancers, or the cluster of
three stomach cancers might have occurred by chance,
unrelated to any common exposure“.

Similarly in the Philips-Duphar case, no excesses of heart
disease among production workers were found, but four of seven
heart disease deaths recorded among men at the plant were of
workers hired especially to clean up the factory after the
accident. That was above the statistical norm. British dioxin
authority Alastair Hay's interpretation is that the use of
organic solvents to remove paint may have exposed the cleanup
crew to more dioxin than usual, which could also account for an
unexpected high incidence of Chloracne. The picture is
complicated, he noted, by the fact that crew members were
professionally exposed to a "variety of toxic substances both

before and after coming into contact with dioxin."21

Gough, on
the other hand, while noting many of the same complicating

factors, suggests that "other exposures could at least partly

 

” A.M. Thiess, et al., "Mortality Study of Persons Exposed to
Dioxin in a Trichlorophenol-Process Accident Which Occurred in the
BASF AG on November 17, 1953," American Journel of Induetriel
Medicine 3 (1982): 179-89; quotation 188.

“ Gough 174.

“ Hay 109.

36

explain the excess of heart disease deaths" at Philips-Duphar,
which he finds "more of a puzzle than an indication of an

association."22

There were 12,500 to 16,000 accidental workplace deaths
annually in the United States in the years 1949-76”. In that
context, chlorinated phenol plant accidents whose only
unambiguous link was not with cancer or heart disease but with a
skin ailment, even a sometimes disfiguring one, were not a major
social problem. They did not become major news stories. A search
of the New York Times Index failed to find any contemporaneous
news accounts of the explosions at Nitro in 1949, BASF in West
Germany in 1953, Philips-Duphar in Amsterdam in 1963, or Coalite
in Bolsover, U.K., in 1968. Trichlorophenol workers, in fact,
were seldom the focus of media interest in their own right.
Their symptoms did command attention, however, often being used
to describe the possible ill effects of dioxin in a context
seemingly far removed from chemical factories, the forests of

South Vietnam.

V. Ranch Hand: Defoliation in Vietnam

Although it was considered for use in both World War II and

the Korean War, the first military application of 2,4,5—T

 

” Gough 174.

3 National Safety Council, Accident Facts: 1988 Edition

(Chicago: National Safety Council 1988): 35.

37

apparently was by the British in Malaya in the 19505. They
sprayed it on forests to increase visibility and reduce the
danger of ambush, and also used herbicides to destroy crops grown
by and for communist insurgents“. Denying the enemy food and
forest cover were likwise the twin goals of the U.S. defoliation
program in Vietnam, which began with small-scale tests in 1961
and peaked in 1967-69 before being phased out in 1970-71.
Upwards of 20,000 herbicide missions were flown over South
Vietnam, by crews whose motto was "Only We Can Prevent Forests"
and whose crest was a green field bisected by a swath of brown.
About 19 million gallons of herbicide, mostly 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D,
but also including another plant growth regulator named picloram
and an arsenical compound, cacodylic acid, were sprayed on an
estimated 8.5-10 percent of the land area of the country, or

6,600 square miles”.

Herbicide barrels were color-coded in Vietnam. Agent Blue,
cacodylic acid, was widely used to destroy rice crops, on which
the growth regulators are ineffective. It was used from

beginning to end of the operation, 1962 to 1971, as was Agent

 

".Arthur H. Westing, "Herbicides in War: Past and Present,"

Herbicides in Wer: The Long-Term.Ecological and Human Conseguences,
ed. Arthur H. Westing (London: Taylor 1984): 4; Hay 149.

 

” WillianlAJ BuckinghanlJr., "Operation Ranch Hand: Herbicides
in Southeast Asia, Air University Reyiew 35 (July-August 1983): 42-
53; Hay 147-85; Westing 5-7; Gough 43-61; motto and crest, Michael
Uhl and Tod Ensign, GI Guineemgig_: How the Pentagon Exposed Our

Troone to Dangers More Deadly Than War: Agent Orange and Atomic
Radiation (N.p.: Playboy 1980): 111-135.

38

White, a mixture of 2,4-D and picloram. Neither was contaminated
with dioxin. About 5.6 million gallons of White were used, and
about 1.1 million gallons of Blue. The herbicides with the
highest levels of dioxin contamination, Purple, Pink and Green,
were used from 1962 to 1965. Based on only a very few samples,
scientists later concluded that Pink and Green may have contained
around 65 parts per million of dioxin, and Purple half that much.
About 145,000 gallons of Purple, 123,000 gallons of Pink and only
8,200 gallons of Green were used. Agent Orange came into use in
1965, after its major supplier, Dow Chemical Co., had reduced the
dioxin level in its 2,4,5-T as the result of a Chloracne outbreak
at its Midland, Mich., plant in 1964. From 1965 until 1971 more
than 10.5 million gallons of Agent Orange were used, with Dow's
product mixed with that of other suppliers, some of which had far
higher dioxin levels. However, at an average estimated at 1.98
parts per million, Agent Orange was less contaminated with dioxin

than its forerunners.26

The program was called Ranch Hand. Military assessments were
that it was tactically successful, but it was also controversial

almost from the start”. In the early 19605, before dioxin

 

“ Janice R. Long and David J. Hanson, "Dioxin Issue Focuses on
Three Major Controversies in U.S.," Chemical & Engineering News 6
June 1983: 23-36, especially 29; Peter H. Schuck, Agent Orange on
Trial: Mass Tomig Disasters in the Courte (Cambridge: Harvard UP
1987): 85-7; Gough 184-5; .

2" Buckingham 44-8. For a contrary view on its tactical
usefulness, see James William.Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in
Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly 1986): 123-4.

39

became an issue, there seem to have been three overlapping

controversies:

1) whether herbicides and other chemical agents used in

Vietnam constituted chemical warfare;

2) the morality of using crop destruction and hence

starvation as a weapon;

3) and the overall impact of the war on the ecology of

Vietnam.

The fear of being accused of conducting chemical warfare had
been one reason the U.S. decided against using herbicides in
World War II”. In the Vietnam era, the issue was raised early
by the editors of the New Republic, by British philosopher and
pacifist Bertrand Russell and by the Federation of American
Scientists, among others.” Among those protesting against the
use of herbicides to destroy food crops -- a tactic which
arguably hurt civilians more than enemy troops —- was Harvard
nutrition professor Jean Mayer. Food denial and chemical warfare
were also issues for biochemist John Edsall and molecular
biologist Matthew Meselson, both of Harvard, who led a drive that

garnered signatures of 5,000 scientists on a petition presented

 

” Hay 149.

2’ See "One Man's Meat," New Republic 23 March 1963: 5;

Bertrand Russell, "Correspondence: Chemical Warfare in Vietnam, " New
Republic 6 July 1963: 30; Federation of American Scientists, "FAS
Statement on Biological and Chemical Warfare," Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists October 1964: 46-7. The variety of chemical
agents used by the U.S. military in Vietnam is discussed in M. F.
Kahn, ”Vietnam," CBW: Chemical and Biologicel Warfare, ed. Steven
Rose (Boston: Beacon 1969): 87-98.

 

40

to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. One specific concern was
that the United States might be violating the 1925 Geneva

Protocol prohibiting chemical and biological warfare”.

Criticism of herbicide spraying in Vietnam, however, came to
be focused most strongly on the ecological impact of the war.
Some members of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, led by E. W. Pfeiffer, a zoologist at the University of
Montana, and Arthur Galston, a Yale biologist, began seeking a
AAAS investigation of ecological damage as early as 1966. The
association’s leaders instead approached the government, which
the next year hired Midwest Research Institute to assess the
likelihood of long-term environmental damage to Vietnam by
reviewing the literature on domestic uses of 2,4,5-T. In 1968
the institute reported no clear danger of long-term damage.
Later that same year an on-the-spot investigation by U.S.
Department of Agriculture botanist Fred H. Tschirley concluded
that Ranch Hand had caused ecological damage, particularly to
mangrove forests, but that the damage probably could be reversed

over time”.

 

” Jean Mayer, "Starvation as a Weapon," Ecocide in Indochina:
The Ecology of War, ed. Barry Weisberg (San Francisco: Canfield
1970): 79-88, originally under the same title in Scientist and
Citizen 9 (August-September 1967): 115-21. On the scientists’
petition, see Hay 153, and Harold M. Schmeck Jr., "U.S. Review Urged
on Chemical War," New York Timee 15 Feb. 1967: 1+.

3‘ Hay 152-5; Walter Sullivan, "War Defoliation Studied in
Report," ‘New York. Times 7 Jan. 1968: 3; Fred H. Tschirley,
"Defoliation in Vietnam," Science 163 (1969):779-86.

41

A field study the next year by Pfeiffer and University of
Washington zoologist Gordon Orians, sponsored by the Society for
Social Responsibility in Science, was harsher. While
acknowledging the military value of the herbicides, Pfeiffer and
Orians reported that South Vietnam was being environmentally
devastated. Meanwhile, the leadership of AAAS, the nation’s most
prestigious umbrella organization for scientists, remained
divided over the wisdom of singling out Vietnam for ecological
concern. Anthropologist Margaret Mead was reported to have
called Vietnam "just peanuts" compared to technological
intrusions such as the Aswan High Dam in Egypt. There was also
reluctance to get involved in the politically polarized Vietnam
War controversy. Calls for study of long-term alteration of the
world environment were passed in 1967 and 1968, without
mentioning Vietnam. Finally, in December 1969, the AAAS voted to
investigate herbicide damage in Vietnam and asked Meselson to
head the study”. By then, however, the controversy had taken a

dramatic new turn.
VI. The Bionetics Study

In 1965 the National Cancer Institute hired a private
Lliiboratory, Bionetics Research Laboratories of Litton Industries,

to investigate a number of chemicals for cancer- and birth

” Hay 153-60; Mead quotation, 157; Gough 55—7.

42

defect-causing potential. One of the substances was 2,4,5-T, and
in 1966 the herbicide was found to be teratogenic, that is, to
cause birth defects in laboratory animals. The information was
not disclosed for nearly three years, until an associate of Ralph
Nader leaked it to a student of Matthew Meselson, the Harvard
molecular biologist who was also active in seeking a scientific
evaluation of the U.S. defoliation program in Vietnam. Meselson,
Arthur Galston and other scientists took the information to Lee
DuBridge, a friend of Galston’s and science adviser to President
Richard M. Nixon. In October 1969 DuBridge set the defoliation
controversy on its ear by making the Bionetics findings public

and announcing that use of 2,4,5-T in Vietnam would be restricted

to areas remote from the population”.

DuBridge’s announcement had little immediate effect on Ranch
Hand. The Department of Defense maintained it was already
limiting spraying to remote areas. Arguing for the program’s
military necessity, it made no changes. The Bionetics results
did galvanize the AAAS, however. The organization called for an
immediate halt to 2,4,5-T use in Vietnam in the same December
1969 meeting in which it authorized the ecology study. The
resulting Herbicide Assessment Commission was headed by Meselson
and directed by Arthur H. Westing, another early critic of
defoliation and a botany professor at Windham College in Vermont.

The HAC was at work by February 1970 and arrived in Vietnam in

 

” Hay 158-9.

43

July. Meanwhile, the pace of activity and controversy quickened
on other fronts. Government agencies carried out reviews of the
Bionetics research, journalist Thomas Whiteside published highly
critical articles on defoliation in the New Yorker, and the
Commerce Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources and the
Environment, chaired by Sen. Philip A. Hart, D—Mich., opened
hearings on 2,4,5-T. Later in the summer, Congress mandated a
National Academy of Sciences study of the effects of herbicides
in Vietnam. In April, the Defense Department announced the
suspension of use of 2,4,5-T-based Agent Orange (but not other

herbicides) in Vietnam“.

Back from Vietnam since August, the Herbicide Assessment
Commission presented a highly critical report to the AAAS in
December 1970. The commission found that Ranch Hand had caused
"extremely serious harm" to land and people in Vietnam. One-
fifth to one-half of South Vietnam’s mangrove forests had been
destroyed, it reported, along with perhaps half the trees in the
hardwood forests north and west of Saigon. It reported that the
crop denial program actually denied food not to enemy soldiers
but to civilians, and it called for further study of reported
increases in stillbirth and birth defect rates among South

Vietnamese. Forewarned that the study had harsh things to say,

 

“ Hay 159-61; Gough 57; "Meselson to Head Herbicides Study,"
Science 167 (1970): 37. Whiteside’s New Yorker articles, appearing
in the 7 Feb. and 14 March issues, are reprinted in Thomas
Whiteside, Defoliation (New York: Ballantine 1970): 1-53.

44

the White House announced on Dec. 26, 1970, that spraying would
be phased out rapidly. Except for brush control around military
bases, herbicide use was terminated in Vietnam in February

1971”.

VII. Domestic Uses of 2,4,5-T

Disclosure of the Bionetics research also directed attention
to domestic use of 2,4,5-T. The herbicide thus joined a
lengthening list of pesticides -— DDT, aldrin/dieldrin,
heptachlor and chlordane -- under attack by environmentalists in
the courts and under increasingly critical scrutiny in regulatory
agencies”. In the same October 1969 statement in which DuBridge
announced restrictions on Ranch Hand, he also announced that the
U.S. Department of Agriculture would in effect ban 2,4,5-T'5 use
on food crops after Jan. 1, 1970, unless a safe residue level
could be established by then by the Food and Drug Administration.
His announcement had as much effect domestically as in the war
zone. The Department of Agriculture ignored it, testifying in

the spring of 1970 that 2,4,5-T did not pose a hazard on food

 

” Hay 161-2; Philip M. Boffey, "Herbicides in Vietnam: AAAS
Study Finds Widespread Devastation," Science 171 (1971) 43-7.

“ See Graham, Since Silent Spring, and Thomas R. Dunlap, DDT:
Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy (Princeton: Princeton UP)
1981.

45

crops that required cancellation or suspension, although no safe

tolerance level had been established by the FDA”.

Controversy continued to build in early 1970. In February,
Rep. Richard D. McCarthy, D-N.Y., held informal hearings at
Globe, Arizona, where residents had complained of deformed animal
offspring, human illness and damaged vegetation near a national
forest area sprayed with herbicides including 2,4,5-T. An
investigating team headed by Fred Tschirley, who two years
earlier had investigated ecological damage in Vietnam, cleared
the herbicides of all but minor damage to plants. Whiteside’s
New Yorker article, appearing the same month, was credited with
spurring the Senate Commerce subcommittee hearings chaired by
Hart. Convening in April, the panel heard testimony on the one
hand that the Bionetics birth defects might not have been caused
by 2,4,5-T at all, but by its contaminant, dioxin. The committee
was told that dioxin was present in higher concentrations in the
Bionetics samples, around 27 parts per million, than in current
production grades (under 1 ppm). On the other hand, the panel

was told that even 2,4,5-T with less than a half part per million

 

” Nicholas Wade, "Decisions on 2,4,5-T: Leaked Reports Compel
Regulatory Responsibility, " Science 173 (1971): 614-5; Congressional

Quarterly, Almanac: 915t, Congres . 2nd Session . . . . 1970
(Washington: Congressional Quarterly 1971): 495-6.

46

dioxin was associated with birth defects, and that the product

was widely available for casual use by consumers“.

While the hearings were still under way, the government
announced that liquid formulations of 2,4,5-T could no longer be
used around homes or on lakes, ponds or ditch banks, and that the
Department of Agriculture was canceling the registration of non-
liquid forms around homes and on food crops, including rice. The
product was still registered for use in many areas, however,
including range and pasture land, forests, and rights of way.

Dow Chemical Company quickly appealed the cancellation on rice
and asked for a scientific advisory committee to investigate, as
provided under the federal pesticide act. Filing the appeal

allowed use on rice to continue”.

The nine-member advisory committee, chaired by James G.
Wilson, a research pediatrics and anatomy professor at University
of Cincinnati, submitted its report in May 1971. It recommended
that all uses of 2,4,5-T be restored, but with limitations on the
amount of residue allowed on food or in drinking water, as well
as limitations on dioxin contamination. For example, no more
than 0.1 ppm of dioxin would be permitted in future production.

The committee’s advice, however, was rejected by William D.

 

“ Bovey and Young 11-13; U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on
Commerce, Effects of 2,4.5-T on Man and the Environment. Hearings
‘geforeepthe Subcqmmitteefi on Energy. pNeturel Reeources and the
Environment, 9lst Cong., 2nd sess.

” Bovey and Young 13; Donald E. Davis, "Herbicides in Peace
and War," BioScience 29 (February 1979): 93.

47

Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the new Environmental
Protection Agency, which had taken over responsibility for
pesticide regulation from the Department of Agriculture in

December 1970. Ruckelshaus instead called for public hearings“.

Ruckelshaus’ rejection of the committee’s expertise as a
sufficient basis for decision shocked some scientists. It also
set off a long series of complex legal and administrative
developments involving manufacturers, environmental groups and
the government. Hearings were scheduled to begin in April 1974,
then delayed. A scientific conference held in Washington in
March 1974 brought together representatives of all sides for
technical discussions. In June the EPA dropped its cancellation
of 2,4,5-T’s registration for use on rice and announced that it
no longer intended to hold hearings, saying it had run into

methodological problems in trying to monitor residues on food“.

In addition to precipitating the end of Ranch Hand and
directing attention toward domestic uses of 2,4,5-T, the
Bionetics report also set off a wave of dioxin research. Studies
published in the early 19705 generated data on dioxin’s acute
toxicity, teratogenicity and carcinogenicity in laboratory
animals, as well as its chemical characteristics and sources in
industrial processes and techniques for detecting it in

increasingly minute concentrations. By the mid 19705, the

 

“ Bovey and Young 14-17.

“ Bovey and Young 14-26.

48

defoliation controversy seemingly was closed out except for
decisions on disposal of surplus stocks of Agent Orange. (The
last of it was burned at sea in 1977). Meanwhile, regulatory
moves against 2,4,5-T were on hold awaiting new scientific
information, which was accumulating rapidly”. The pace of
controversy had slackened, but only for a time. It would pick up
again in 1976, with the reactor explosion that exposed thousands
of Italian citizens to dioxin, and gain even more force in 1978
and 1979, as veterans of the Vietnam war began to associate their
illnesses and misfortunes with exposure to Agent Orange during

the war.

 

“ Bovey and Young 133-205; on disposal of surplus Agent Orange
see Hay 162-3.

CHAPTER TWO: SEVESO AND AGENT ORANGE

I - Seveso

The dioxin controversy entered a new phase when a reactor at
the Industrie Chimiche Meda Societa Anonima (ICMESA) plant near
Seve so, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, overheated and

blew its safety valve shortly after noon on Saturday, July 10,

19 7 6 - The formation of dioxin increases at high temperatures,

and a cloud of trichlorophenol contaminated with an estimated

hal f pound of the contaminant escaped. Previous such releases
had exposed a relatively few industrial workers inside factories.

This one escaped the plant into a community. It drifted downwind,

sett ling over a densely populated, socially and economically
diverse -- and already industrially polluted -- area of about

37 . . .
' O 00 people. The country51de included family farms, homeyard

an '
J‘mal breeders, small handicraft shops and furniture factories,

in
addition to chemical plants like ICMESA‘.
Officials of the company and of local government appear not

to 11
QVie realized the seriousness of the situation at first.

\

1 Alastair Hay, The Chemical Scythe: Lessone of 2.4,5-T and

Di
Q): -

93 in (New York: Plenum 1982): 197-227; Thomas Whiteside, The
\“Qulum and the Toxic Cloud (New Haven: Yale up 1979).

49

 

 

50

ICMESA, a subsidiary of the Givaudan and F. Hoffmann-LaRoche

chemical firms, made trichlorophenol at Seveso for processing

into hexachlorophene. Since trichlorophenol was also used to

make herbicides, however, company officials decided to warn

residents not to eat vegetables from the area. It took days to

determine that dioxin had been released, and more than two weeks

to begin evacuations. Meanwhile, animals sickened and died.

Area residents, many of them children, developed skin
inflammations that probably were the result of chemical burns.

At least a dozen children were hospitalized shortly after the

explosion as a precautionary measure, and on July 20 eight

persons were hospitalized with skin inflammation and vomiting.

They had handled and presumably eaten contaminated fruit and

ve ge tables’ .

Residents had only to look around to see disaster. "Bird

life appeared to have been devastated," wrote Thomas Whiteside,
who Continued in Italy the dioxin reportage he had begun in

V'
letnam. "(F)ields, gardens, and orchards were littered with the

Ca . .
reasses of swallows, martins, warblers and goldfinches, also

wi
th those of thousands of rats, mice, and moles.“3 An estimated

81
' O O O farm animals lived in the areas later defined as
CC)
at Quinated, including almost 25,000 domestic rabbits and 55,000

Po
ultry and other small animals. By the end of August 1976,

\

2 Hay 197-202.

 

3 Whiteside, Pendulum 38.

51

2, 062 rabbits and 1,219 small farmyard animals had died.

Eventually the entire farm animal population of the area was

s 1 aughtered‘ .
When officials did finally determine that the cloud which had

settled over the area contained dioxin, they marked out

geographical zones roughly corresponding to the severity of soil
The area

contamination and began moving residents out.
Zone

south/southeast of the plant was divided into three zones:
A, the most heavily contaminated, comprised 269 acres. Dioxin
Was found there in concentrations up to 21,000 micrograms per
Square meter. Zone 8, less heavily contaminated, contained 669
acres, and Zone R, a precuationary "Zone of Respect," 3,575

acres . Several towns were wholly or partially within the

In late July and early August all of Zone A was

b0 u n daries .
Women in the first trimester of

evacuated, about 730 people.
EDI-‘i’glt'lancy in Zone B also were ordered out, and other safety

The remaining Zone 8 residents, for

prec dilutions were imposed.
" as Alastair

e)( u . .
amp 1e, were urged to refrain from procreation,

Ha .
)7 put it, and were told not to plant crops or to consume fruits

an . .
d vegetables grown in the area. They also were adVised to wash

IE2
gu larly. Steps were taken to limit children's contact with

 

\
et al., "Environmental Impact of the

‘ Francesco Pocchiari,
Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin at Seveso

Ace -
(It; <1ental Release of
Frequ) , ” Accidental Ex osure to Dioxins: Human Health As ects, eds.
19 Stick Coulston and Francesco Pocchiari (New York: Academic
8 3 ) : 5-35.

52
"some of these

contaminated soil, but inevitably, Hay observed,

rules were flouted."5
The initial skin inflanunations cleared up quickly, but five

to six weeks after the explosion, Chloracne began to appear among

children. Perhaps they were more susceptible because of their
age or because they played outside and were less careful about

Eventually, about 187 cases of chloracne, mostly among

hygiene.
In Zone A, an estimated 7 percent of

children, were confirmed.

the population came down with the disease, a total of 50 cases.
The

Eleven were determined to be severe and eight very severe.

rest were mild. (One case was still classified as severe 18 to
24 months after the accident, but by 1980, four years after,
everYOne's Chloracne had cleared up. This contrasts with the

peers istence of Chloracne often observed in industrial

expo sures. )‘5
Because of research showing that dioxin caused birth defects

luong laboratory animals, the contamination at Seveso also

geltie-Treated considerable concern about pregnancies under way at the

Seven months before the explosion, abortion had been

time
1e
9‘: lized in Italy to preserve the mother's physical and

De
ye hological health. Thirty-four women in the Seveso area are

 

\

5 Hay 197—202, 220-1.
Gough 152; Francesco Pocchiara, et al., "Human

flea 6 Bay 212-4;
1th Effects from Accidental Release of Tetrachlorodibenzo-p—
in (TCDD) at Seveso, Italy," Annals of the yew York Academy of

die
SQ -
N 320 (1979): 311-20.

53
known to have obtained legal abortions after the explosion, but
because of strong anti-abortion pressure from local doctors and

politicians and the Catholic Church, an undetermined number
obtained abortions in Switzerland or Britain’. This was to be

only one of many complicating factors as scientists tried to

determine the health effects of the disaster.
For residents, the aftermath was long and difficult. People

evacuated from Zone A did not begin returning to their homes

(As late as 1982 large areas of the zone were

unti 1 late 1977.
Many of the homes were purchased by Hoffmann-

Sti ll uninhabited.
LaRoche and demolished). Meanwhile, residents had to contend with

restrictions on raising crops and advisories regarding their

Contaminated soil was scraped up and deposited

pe r s onal hygiene .
Lives were disrupted in other ways as

in a landfill nearby.
in a visit to the region two years after the

we 1 l - Whiteside,
a<2c5—dent, found serious economic dislocation in the important
fu r11 iture and timber import industries. "Few outsiders," he

rote , "wanted to take the chance of liv1ng with furniture that

m
19111:. be impregnated with dioxin."8
E\Ien the experience of being subjected to long-term

Sc ‘
a‘elTItific studies was a strain. A factory worker told a

tea
E>QI‘ter in 1983, "We are tired of doctors and technicians

1‘35Vr
a~<iing our homes and inspecting us like laboratory animals.

\

7 Hay, 214-5.
8 Whiteside, Pendulum 78; Hay 218-22; Gough 151-5.

 

54

What will happen has happened.” The research was also a strain
on those trying to conduct it. Two characteristics of the Seveso
disaster made it very difficult for epidemiology, the study of

diseases in populations, to be carried out. One was the

complexity of what happened there. As one scientist put it, a

large, densely populated area was

heavily polluted by an extremely toxic substance, capable
of affecting several organs and systems both acutely and
chronically. The involvement of a general population and
the etherogenicity at (sic) the types of exposure, acute
and chronic, heavy and light, in every possible
combination . . . made it extremely difficult to design

and carry out an epidemiological strategy”.

The other problem for epidemiologists was that Seveso turned

out to be a different kind of disaster than they had feared.

Severe health effects were expected in much of the population,

and refined studies using standardized protocols or control

9'J”:<>‘l--=l.£>s were not thought to be necessary. After it became clear

that gross, widespread damage to health had not occurred,

ac=<—‘-Gbr'ding to the scientist, "the lack of well-designed
epidemiological studies . . . made it impossible to rule out that

m'
11101:” health effects had affected large portions of the

\

Ha <1 9 Jon Nordheimer,
Been Feared," New York Times 31 Jan.

1° Paolo Bruzzi, "Health Impact of the Accidental Release of

To
5 at Seveso," Accidental E osure to Dioxins, ed. Coulston and

o
Qthari 215-6.

 

"Dioxin's Effects in Italy Less Severe Than
1983: 13.

55
population . . . or that very serious effects had occurred in

very limited subgroups."11
An international committee which reviewed the research into

health effects at Seveso concluded in 1984 that, except for
Four

chloracne, no adverse health effects had been observed

years later scientists reported finding no evidence of increased

birth defect risk, but noted that low risks might have slipped

If dioxin exposure did increase the chances of

th rough the net .
"the overall risk is unlikely

birth defects, the study concluded

to be large or might be limited to very rare and speCific birth

de fects. "12
clean soil was trucked into an area where

Meanwhile,
cOntaminated soil had been scraped up, and grass and trees were

planted to make a park. The park was donated to a foundation.

Res:Lcients filed about 6,000 civil claims against the company,

which eventually paid about $80 million in damages to indiViduals

Some company officials received jail sentences

and governments .
In 1980 the plant’s chief

failing to prevent the accident.

for
apparently by left-wing terrorists.

en - .
g 1 hear was assaSSinated,

\\

 

“ Bruzzi 216.
"Birth Defects in the Seveso

1’ Pierpaolo Mastroiacovo, et al. ,
Journal of the American

Ar
3‘ After TCDD Contamination," J_A_MA.

Me
\Qical Association 259 (1988): 1668-72; Gough 154.

56

His was the only fatality known without doubt to have resulted

from the release of dioxin at Seveso”.

II - Agent Orange

Two years after the release of dioxin at Seveso, the

controversy had calmed. In June 1978 the New York Times reported

an announcement by Hoffmann-LaRoche that "scientific findings

permit the 'confident assumption’ that no serious and permanent

damage to health occurred."“ Almost simultaneously, however,

the first stirrings occurred of a new dimension to the dioxin
controversy, one that would eventually overshadow Seveso: U.S.
Veterans of the Vietnam War became convinced that their health

and that of their offspring had been damaged or destroyed by

expo sure to Agent Orange.
One point of origin was the work of a benefits counselor in

the Chicago Veterans Administration regional office, Maude

Cle"-:.Lc:tor. DeVictor noticed what she believed to be a common

h ' .
l 8‘t—ory of Agent Orange exposure among veterans coming to her
0 -
f f lee to inquire about benefits for health problems.
Co
mpensation was denied by the VA, on grounds that there was no

ev ‘
ldence Agent Orange had caused the problems. DeVictor pressed

 

\
13
Paying

In -
jury," New York Times 25 June 1978: 4.

Hay 218-22; Gough 151—5; "Owners of Chemical Plant in Italy
$80 Million in ’76 Mishap," New York Times 21 May 1980: 10.

1‘ Paul Hofmann, "Company Says '76 Blast in Italy Caused Little

 

57
the issue, however, and a documentary was broadcast March 23

1978 , on Chicago television station WBBM-TV, detailing her
efforts to help what the liberal Progressive would soon call "the
The documentary, titled

latest victims of the Vietnam War.
seems to have been the first

”Agent Orange: The Deadly Fog,
major news treatment of this domestic aspect of the defoliant
Inquiries and disability claims quickened, and the

controversy.
VA in late 1978 set up a registry of information gleaned from

PhYSical examinations of veterans claiming Agent Orange related

i l LLriessesls .
Another starting point was the illness and death of Paul

Reutershan, a former Army helicopter crew chief in Vietnam

Before he died of cancer in December 1978, Reutershan helped

oJrgaJiize Agent Orange Victims International and filed a lawsuit
against three defoliant manufacturers. The organization would be

one of the spearheads of the veterans’ fight for recognition and

c:c>1r'-E>ensation, and the suit eventually ballooned into a mass1ve

c . . . .
lag 8 action against the manufacturers. "I got killed in

"and didn't know it.

“16

V .
l e t mam, " Reutershan said,

 

 

 

___g___~_‘._‘
” Peter H. Schuck, Agent Orange on Trial. Mass Toxic Disasters
{PCDQ Elle Courts (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1987): 23- 4; Michael Uhl and
Ensign, ”Blowing the Whistle on Agent Orange," Progressive 42

he 1978). 28- 3o.
“ Schuck 37 8; Reutershan quotation, Richard Severo, "Vietnam

Ve
he ran s Family Vows to Continue His Fight, " New York Times 19 Dec.

1978: 32.

58

In its final form, the Agent Orange litigation begun by
Reutershan was a mammoth action against seven industrial
corporations with possible damages in the billions of dollars.
The leading plaintiffs' attorney through most of the battle was
Victor Yannacone, who had been instrumental in the litigation to
ban DDT a decade earlier, but as many as 100 plaintiffs' lawyers
also were involved. Many of them worked on a contingency basis:
They would get paid if their clients won. The defendants were
Dow Chemical Company, Monsanto Company, Diamond Shamrock
Corporation, Uniroyal, Inc., T. H. Agriculture and Nutrition
Company, Thompson Chemical Corporation and Hercules, Inc., all
manufacturers of 2,4,5—T. More than 80,000 veterans sought tests
at VA clinics for what they thought might be Agent Orange-related
illnesses, and eventually more than 244,000 claim forms were
filed with the court seeking compensation for a host of injuries
and illnesses. Veterans believed Agent Orange had caused
cancers, birth defects among their children, miscarriages by
their wives, skin rashes, nervousness, loss of sex drive and
other problems. The manufacturers argued throughout that no one
could have received a high enough exposure to dioxin in Vietnam

to have been harmed by it.17

 

” Schuck 37—57, 76, 99-100, 193, 206-7. A convenient summary
of the case on the eve of trial is Ralph Blumenthal, "Vietnam Agent
Orange Suit by Veterans Is Going to Trial,” New York Times 6 May
1984: 1+.

59

Even before assuming its final shape, the case raised
numerous issues that had to be disposed of. Among them were
whether the veterans would be allowed to sue as a class (they
were), whether state law or federal common law would apply (a
question eventually "defined out of existence" by an imaginative
judge),18 and whether the government could be sued by plaintiffs
or manufacturers. On this last issue, U.S. District Judge George
Pratt of the Eastern District of New York ruled in late 1980 that
the doctrine of ”sovereign immunity" protected the government
from suit not only by veterans but by manufacturers. (The makers
maintained that any injury caused by Agent Orange was the result
of government negligence. They wanted to sue the government to
pay any damages assessed against the companies.) Let off the
hook by Pratt, however, the government was dragged back into the
case by Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the Eastern District of
New York, who replaced Pratt as the trial judge in October 1983.
Weinstein ruled in December 1983 that sovereign immunity did not
exempt the government from suit by wives, parents and children of

veterans”.

Another important question explored in the pre—trial period
was, What did the manufacturers and the government know about the
risks of Agent Orange, when did they know it, and how did they

act on the knowledge? This was important in regard to the

 

” Schuck 128.

u Schuck 67, 110, 131-8.

60

"government contractor defense" adopted by the manufacturers.
This line of defense argued that the government controlled and
dictated the manufacture and use of Agent Orange; therefore, if
any harm had been done, the government and not the makers was
responsible. After an outbreak of Chloracne among
trichlorophenol workers in Midland, Mich., in 1964, Dow Chemical
Company notified Michigan health authorities and called a meeting
of its competitors to warn of the health hazard and share
analytical techniques. The fact of the meeting had been known
for years", but so-called "smoking gun" memoranda from
participants, quoted in pre—trial documents in April 1983,
indicated industry's fear that publicity would bring federal
regulation. There were "alarming amounts" of dioxin in some
manufacturers’ 2,4,5-T, one memo was quoted as saying, "and if
the Government learns about this the whole industry will
suffer."21
The question was, did the manufacturers hide risk information
from the government that would have led to more cautious use of

Agent Orange in Vietnam? No, said Dow in a motion to dismiss the

suit. The company offered three arguments. One was that the

 

" A Dow official, Julius E. Johnson, discussed it in testimony
before Sen. Philip Hart’s environmental subcommittee in 1970. See
U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Commerce. 1970. Effects of
2.4,5-T on Man and the Environment. Hearings Before tie Subcomittee

on Energy, Natural Resources and the Environment. 9lst Cong., 2d
sess., testimony of Julius Johnson.

“ Schuck 61, 85-7, 99-100.

61

risks of which the company was aware involved extremely high
workplace exposures of 6,000 to 10,000 parts per million, orders
of magnitude above any dose veterans could have received in
Vietnam. Therefore, the company argued, there were no relevant
hazards to report to the government. Dow’s second line of
argument was that middle-level government officials knew plenty
about the potential hazards of dioxin and its presence in Agent
Orange. For example, the Rand Corporation had warned the
government in 1967 that Vietnamese peasants' fears of the
toxicity of Agent Orange were founded on more than solely
Vietcong propaganda. Finally, the company argued, even if the
government had been told more, it would not have acted

differently”.

In their case against dismissal, veterans' attorneys said in

a motion that since the mid-19605,

Dow had information that Agent Orange supplied to the
Government contained large levels of dioxin, far in excess
of anything Dow considered safe or necessary . . . . Dow
also knew that its own product would be mixed with that of

others and used in this manner on the battlefield.
What did Dow do with this information? . . . . It

concealed it from the Government and asked others, its co-
defendants, to do the same”.

 

” Schuck 99-100; see also David Burnham, "Dow Says U.S. Knew
Dioxin Peril of Agent Orange," N1T_5 May 1983: 18. On the level of
workplace exposures, see E. R. Russell, "U.S. Government's Early
Knowledge of Dioxin in Agent Orange," 1tr, N12 15 July 1983: 22.
Russell was director of public issues for Dow.

’3 David Burnham, "Dow Says U.S. Knew Dioxin Peril of Agent
Orange."

62
In May 1983, in what legal scholar Peter H. Schuck calls "one
of the most important decisions in the long, tortuous history of

the Agent Orange case, Pratt ordered the trial to go forward.
Saying that the government "had a considerable amount of
knowledge about dioxin and its health hazards going back to the
19408,” he nevertheless ruled that only a jury could decide
whether Agent Orange was indeed safe or whether knowledge had

been withheld that would have changed the government's course of

action“.

III. Agent Orange Research and Legislation

Pratt's ruling refocused the attention of lawyers on both
sides on how to present the issue of whether Agent Orange had in
fact caused any illnesses or death. Parallel with these
developments in the courtroom, a number of research projects were
undertaken to attempt to answer just that question. In addition
to more than 50 federally-sponsored studies costing more than
$100 million, research was also sponsored by veterans
organizations and by some of the states. Among the more
important epidemiological studies was an Air Force investigation
of the deaths and illnesses (mortality and morbidity) of airmen

directly involved in Operation Ranch Hand. In addition, four

 

“ Schuck 98-102; quotation from judge's ruling, Michael
Winerip, "U.S. Judge ClearsHWay'for'Trial on.Agent.Orange," New York
Times 13 May 1983: 12.

63

projects were planned by the federal Centers for Disease Control.
These were to study selected cancers among Vietnam veterans;
birth defects among children fathered by Vietnam veterans; the
mortality and morbidity of military personnel who served in
Vietnam (the so-called "Vietnam Experience" project), and the
mortality and morbidity of ground troops likely to have been

exposed to Agent Orange”.

The CDC investigation of troops most likely to be exposed to
Agent Orange was never carried out at all. Hampered by the
difficulties of determining just who had been exposed to how
much, the study was eventually scrapped after investigators
decided not enough troops had been significantly exposed to allow
meaningful science to be done“. Results from the birth defects,
cancer and Vietnam Experience studies began to come in only years
later, after the Agent Orange suit was settled. One study had
gone forward, however. That was the investigation of the men in
the "Ranch Hand" crews who had actually carried out the spraying.

The first results of Ranch Hand came out in early 1984. The
basic conclusion was that the men were not dying at high rates,
at early ages, or from unusual diseases. Nevertheless, hopes that

science would neatly resolve the controversy were dashed on the

 

’5 Gough 68-75, 95-97, 108-114. A convenient summary of
research in progress as of late 1982 is Philip M. Boffey, "Agent
Orange: Despite Spate of Studies, Slim Hope for Answers," New York
Times 30 Nov. 1982: Cl+.

 

“ Philip M. Boffey, "Lack of Military Data Halts Agent Orange
Study," New York Times 1 Sept. 1987: 1.

64

study’s inconclusiveness. Part of that inconclusiveness lay in
the fact that although the great majority of Ranch Hands were
studied, there were only about 1,300 of these. Statistically, the
study's power to detect anything other than sizable health
effects was limited“. Inconclusiveness also marked the findings
themselves. Although overall the study gave Agent Orange a clean
bill of health, it did find some unexplained differences, some

not statistically significant, some not plausibly connected with
Agent Orange exposure. Ranch Hands reported more past liver
disease than controls and had poorer pulses in their feet, for
example, and those over 40 who smoked had more heart disease than
non-Ranch Hand smokers. Most noticeably, Ranch Hands' offspring
died in the first 28 days of life more often than the offspring

of the control group, and enlisted Ranch Hands reported more
psychological and neuropsychiatric symptoms and performed less
well on behavior and personality tests“. Predictably, both
sides claimed vindication. The veterans' attorneys noted the
high infant death rates and liver and circulatory problems, while
Dow said the results offered "overwhelming" evidence that Agent
Orange was not responsible for a variety of diseases for which it

was being blamed”.

 

N "Air Force Under Fire for Agent Orange Study," Chemical Week

21 May 1980: 18.
“ Gough 68-75, 80-81.

’9 Kenneth B. Noble, "Defoliant Study Sets Off Debate," New
York Times 26 Feb. 1984: 33.

 

65

Along with the research projects, legislative responses also
were under way. Medical care and compensation for those who
believed they had been injured by Agent Orange were among a broad
range of issues raised by veterans who had received less than a
hero's welcome back home. The study that eventually was scrapped
by the CDC got its start in Congress in 1979, which passed a bill
requiring the Veterans Administration to study the health effects
of Agent Orange on veterans. President Carter vetoed the bill on
constitutional grounds but pledged the research would be done
anyway. Veterans, however, were suspicious of the VA’s ability
to carry out an impartial study, and the project was plagued with
disagreements over design. Responsibility for the study was
transferred to the CDC in 1982”. Two years later, after
numerous attempts by legislators sympathetic to the veterans,
Congress passed and President Reagan signed legislation that for
the first time mandated disability compensation for veterans with
a limited number of dioxin-associated symptoms other than
Chloracne. The payments were to be "interim," however, until a
scientific advisory panel could review claims in the light of
future research results, and it took a court challenge by

veterans to dislodge the VA from drawing the line at Chloracne“.

 

3° "Carter Veto Cites Procedure on Study of Defoliant," New
York Times 3 Jan. 1980: 17; "Agency to Yield on Herbicide Issue,"
New York Times 16 Oct. 1982: 6.

 

3‘ Sheldon P. Yett, "What Is Agent Orange?" Congressional
Quarterly Weekly Report 16 Dec. 1989: 3430.

66

IV. The Settlement

Approach of the Agent Orange trial date in May 1984 found
all sides debating the first Ranch Hand findings as well as the
plans for additional studies and Congressional proposals to
compensate the veterans. Meanwhile, the Agent Orange litigation
had changed dramatically under Weinstein, a liberal and
innovative judge who had concluded that the veterans deserved
compassion but that their case was very shaky on the causation
issue”. The litigation reached a turning point on May 7, with
the announcement that the suit had been settled out of court.
Urged on by Weinstein, whose every action after taking over the
case seemed designed to push for a settlement, lawyers negotiated
an agreement over the weekend whose main features, according to
legal scholar Peter Schuck, had been drawn by the judge

himself33 .

The defendant companies, while not admitting any liability
for health problems of veterans, agreed to set up a $180-million
fund for veterans and their families, in return for the suit
against them being dropped. Eventually, more than 200,000
veterans filed claims for compensation from the fund. Ruling
that there was no way to connect specific diseases with Agent

Orange exposure, Weinstein approved a plan to award most of the

 

” Schuck 111-42, 155.

” Schuck 143, 159-60.

67

money to the totally disabled and to the families of deceased
veterans. The money was to be paid regardless of the nature of
their illness, so long as they were among the 50 percent thought
to be most heavily exposed to Agent Orange. Under that plan,
about 50,000 veterans were to receive payments, which began to be
made in 1989, 11 years after the suit was first filed by Paul

Reutershan“.

Reactions to the settlement and distribution plan were mixed.
Many veterans were angered at being left out of the negotiations
toward a settlement, at being deprived of a chance to have a jury
decide on their claims, and at Judge Weinstein's evident
conclusion that they had no case on the merits. Al Marcotte of
Yonkers, N.Y., told the New York TimggL "I don't think they (the
manufacturers) should get off this easy. I have no feeling for
this country anymore. They have total disregard for us when they
can plea bargain behind a closed door without notice to us."
Lawyers for the veterans, however, told the newspaper the large
settlement amounted to an admission of responsibility by the
companies. Yannacone called the amount "insignificant in view of
the damages, but the point has been made." The veterans won "the
final battle of the Vietnam War," he said. A Dow Chemical
Company spokesperson called the agreement a "compassionate,

expedient and productive means" of meeting the needs of all

 

“ Schuck 143-67; 206-23; Stephen Labaton, "Five Years After
Settlement, Agent Orange War Lives On," NYT 8 May 1989: 01+.

68

parties. "Despite the strength of the scientific case, it would
be difficult for the jury to sort out the issues in this highly

emotional case," the company said”.

V. Post-Settlement Research Findings

At the time of the settlement, Dow was not the only party to
interpret the veterans’ case as lacking scientific merit. Judge
Weinstein himself had reached the same conclusion, despite the
fact that results had been obtained in only one of the major
studies of veterans, the one involving Ranch Hands. In the years
after the settlement, however, scientists worked through the huge
amount of research undertaken to settle the veterans'
contentions. Like the studies of industrial exposure, the
results were marked by ambiguity while offering no positive
support that Agent Orange veterans were dying, falling ill or
fathering defective children in unusual numbers. Again it is
necessary to leap ahead chronologically to summarize the

findings.

The first Ranch Hand results, the reader may recall, came out
just before the settlement in early 1984 and suggested that while
crew members were not dying early or from unusual causes, there

were some unexplained health differences”. Later that same

 

’5 Ralph Blumenthal, 'Veterans Accept $180 Million Pact on
Agent Orange,” NYT 8 May 1984: 1; Schuck 171—3.

“ Gough 68-75, 80-81.

69

year, a birth defects study by the Centers for Disease Control
was published. It found that Vietnam veterans appeared to be at
no unusual risk of fathering children with defects, although it
did find an association between exposure to Agent Orange and four
specific defects, including spina bifida. The results were
questioned, however, because of the difficulty of determining who

was exposed to how much Agent Orange in Vietnam”.

In 1986 a new technique allowed scientists to measure
individual levels of dioxin by analyzing blood samples. Matching
blood sample with military records and interviews indicating
potential Agent Orange exposure, a CDC pilot study concluded, in
the words of federal health official Vernon Houk, that "it is not
possible to get a sufficient number of exposed people through
military records to do a meaning study of ground troops." The
conclusion was questioned on the grounds that the military
records did not give an accurate picture of potential exposure.

In addition, the Times reported,

various panelists suggested that a limited number of
troops, perhaps 20,000 to 60,000 from among the 2.9
million who served in Vietnam, might have received
significant exposure to Agent Orange. But the C.D.C.
argues that except for a few thousand people who regularly
sprayed the chemicals, no practical means exists to find
most of those with higher exposures. Testing all Vietnam
veterans' blood would be prohibitively costly and would
overwhelm laboratory capacity, Federal scientists say”.

 

” Gough 108-15.

” Philip M. Boffey, "Lack of Military Data Halts Agent Orange
Study," New York Times 1 Sept. 1987: 1+; David J. Hanson, "Science
Failing to Back Up Veteran Concerns About Agent Orange," Chemical

70

Almost simultaneously, the Veterans Administration announced
results of a routine study of Vietnam veterans, many of whom
served after Agent Orange spraying was halted. The study found
that Marines (but not Army personnel) who served in Vietnam were
dying significantly more often from non-Hodgkins lymphoma and
lung cancer. Again there was no way to tell whether those deaths
were related to Agent Orange. Also in 1987, the CDC’s "Vietnam
Experience" study concluded that Vietnam veterans were not dying
of cancer at unusual rates”. In 1990 the CDC’s study of cancer
among Vietnam veterans found them more likely to develop the
cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma. However, the lymphomas tended to
be among sailors, rather than ground troops more likely to be
exposed to Agent Orange. Though it was not designed to answer
questions about Agent Orange, the study said no evidence was

found that the defoliant had injured troops“.

As is the case with Seveso and industrial exposures, research
into the health of Vietnam veterans seems to indicate that if
there were long-term health effects (other than Chloracne) they
are of the kind or magnitude that can't be caught in the net of
epidemiology or unequivocally inferred from animal studies. Much

of the research seems to indicate that dioxin is not as severe a

 

8 Engineering News 9 Nov. 1987: 7-14.
” Hanson, "Science Failing to Back Up Veteran Concerns" 8-9.

“ Andrew Purvis, "Clean Bill for Agent Orange," Time 9 April
1990: 82.

71

health threat as it was once considered to be, but as to just how
serious it is, the research contains large areas of uncertainty.
Nevertheless, some authorities see an emerging scientific
consensus. Gough summarizes the overall dioxin health risk

controversy this way:

After a decade and a half of studies and debates, harm
from environmental exposure to dioxin has been assessed as
nondetectable. Although concern about risk remains,
exposures have been reduced, so that the level of risk has
decreased. The consensus among most scientists -- that
harm has been limited to highly exposed industrial
populations and that none has been shown from
environmental exposures -- may often be ignored, and the
old claims about harm will be brought up again and again.
But I am confident that the information gathered by

science will eventually prevail. We are putting the
dioxin problem behind us“.

 

“ Gough 257.

CHAPTER THREE: DIOXIN FIRESTORM IN 1983
I. Regulating Pesticides

In leaping ahead chronologically to summarize Agent Orange
research, two other aspects of the dioxin controversy were placed
to the side. Both were to combine with the Agent Orange
litigation to produce the media firestorm of 1983-84. One was
the federal effort to regulate the herbicide 2,4,5-T, culminating
in the manufacturers' decision to drop the fight for the product.
The other was the dioxin contamination of Times Beach, Mo.,
leading to federal buyout of the town in the spring of 1983.

Both of these additional strands of the dioxin controversy need

to be placed in historical context.

Until 1970, regulating pesticides was primarily the
responsibility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, although
the Food and Drug Administration had some jurisdiction as well.
The USDA had been given the task by the Federal Insecticide,
Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), which was initially
enacted in 1947. Political scientist Christopher J. Bosso,
however, has described pre-1970 regulation as being overseen by a
tightly controlled ”pesticides subgovernment" made up of the

agriculture committees in Congress, plus industrial and

72

73

agricultural companies and trade associations and the USDA. All
participants in the process shared a belief in what Bosso has
called the "pesticides paradigm" -- the conviction that
herbicides, insecticides and other agrichemicals were the key to
economic survival for farmers in the postwar economy. FIFRA's
purpose was to assure farmers that the pesticides they purchased
were of good quality. This it did by requiring manufacturers to
register new products and to promise that they were effective and
safe. Under the watchful eye of the pesticides subgovernment,
the net effect of the law was to facilitate pesticide use. In

Bosso’s view, FIFRA was "a label law and little more."1

In the climate of enhanced environmental awareness of the
early 19703, however, the mission of the new Environmental
Protection Agency was to protect the environment, not to promote
chemical agriculture. When the EPA took over pesticide
regulation, it was evident that FIFRA was inadequate to the task.
A major rewriting resulted in the Federal Environmental
Pesticides Control Act of 1972 (FEPCA). This law tightened
registration requirements and streamlined the procedures through
which EPA could cancel or suspend products that posed

unreasonable risks. It also allowed citizens a standing in court

 

1 Christopher J. Bosso, Pesticides and Politics: The Life Cycle
of gggublic Issue (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P 1987): 32-3, 79-
108; "label law" quotation, 51. See also James Whorton, Before
Silent Spring: Pegicides and Pyglic Health in Pre-DDT Ameriga
(Princeton: Princeton UP 1974).

74

on cancellation and suspension actions. From a political

perspective, according to Bosso, passage of the law

marked a critical change in the relationship among
competing interests and between each interest and the
government . . . The pesticides subgovernment that so long
had dominated the direction of policy was forced to
compromise with those who did not share full faith in the
pesticides paradigm. . . . Environmental and health views
that once had been almost automatically screened out in

committee were now integral to policy deliberations. . .
2

Legislation is one thing and implementation another, however,
and in Bosso’s analysis the young EPA soon found itself
overwhelmed by the large tasks and short deadlines given it by
Congress. EPA was charged with developing uniform comprehensive
guidelines for registering pesticides by 1974. In addition, it
was charged with reregistering about 50,000 products and uses by
October 1977. The agency failed to meet either deadline. The
fundamental problem was the sheer lack of data. Registration of
pesticides depended on accurate and comprehensive knowledge, "but
the ad hoc, case—by—case process of USDA registration before the
19708 left the EPA with very little uniform data in its files,“
Bosso determined. Much of what it had was 10 to 20 years old,
and new technologies and testing protocols made much of it
"suspect, if not totally unreliable." Registrants were asked to
fill in gaps in the data, but EPA made little effort to verify

their validity. Such practices culminated in the Industrial

Biotest scandal of 1976, in which charges of spurious tests and

 

2 Bosso 176—7.

75

data falsification at a private laboratory sent company
executives to jail and called into question the registration of

about 200 pesticides’.

Meanwhile, EPA's first administrator, William Ruckelshaus,
wanted to act quickly to establish the agency's environmental
credentials. He did so by moving responsibility for enforcement
of the act to the Office of General Counsel, which was staffed by
lawyers instead of the scientists who had run enforcement at USDA
and FDA. Often disregarding the scientists' views, the lawyers
moved dramatically against several of the so-called persistent
organochlorines -— such as DDT -- that were the main focus of
environmental concern. Controversy followed. Finally in 1975,
Bosso concluded, efforts by EPA to cancel the registrations of
the pesticides chlordane and heptachlor brought such pressure for
moderation from Congress and the administration of President
Gerald Ford that EPA chief Russell Train reined in the Office of

General Council‘.

The agency then entered a period of routinized regulation, in
which litigation and media coverage were de—emphasized and

caution was stressed. One important administrative tool that

 

3 80880 178-84, 199.

‘ Bosso 178-83. The crucial role played by OGC in the banning
of one such organochlorine in 1974 is examined.in Brendan Gillespie,
Dave Eva and Ron Johnston, "Carcinogenic Risk Assessment in the USA
and UK: The Case of Aldrin/Dieldrin," Science in Context: Readings
in the Sociology of Science, eds. Barry Barnes and David Edge
(Cambridge: MIT P 1982): 303-35.

76

helped EPA proceed more cautiously was the so-called Rebuttable
Presumption Against Registration, or RPAR. This was a less
formal procedure adopted by EPA in 1975 which allowed the agency
to serve notice that it perceived a problem with a pesticide, but
stopped short of more formal suspension or cancellation
procedures. Served notice that EPA was concerned, the
manufacturer was allowed to "rebut the presumption" that a

problem existeds.

II. Regulating 2,4,5-T

It was within this framework that EPA continued to seek a
satisfactory solution to the problem of regulating 2,4,5—T.
Regulatory attention had focused on the herbicide, it was
recounted in Chapter One, after Bionetics Research Laboratories
found that it caused birth defects in animals. For a time the
controversy over domestic regulation was interwoven with the
Ranch Hand matter, but after defoliation ended in Vietnam the two
controversies went their separate ways. In May 1970 uses of
2,4,5-T most likely to result in human exposure were suspended or
cancelled, although the herbicide continued to be sprayed on
pastures, rangelands, forests, right-of-way, miscellaneous non-
agricultural areas and (because a cancellation order was under

appeal) on rice. A scientific advisory committee recommended

 

5 Bosso 175.

77

that all its uses be restored, with restrictions on food residues
and dioxin contamination. Ruckelshaus rejected the committee's
advice, however, and announced plans to hold public hearings --
an example of bringing people into the decision—making circle who
in Bosso's words "did not share full faith in the pesticides

6

paradigm." In March 1974, scientists from industry, government,
academia and environmental groups attended a two-day conference
in Washington, D.C., discussing technical and legal issues.
Three months later, in June 1974, EPA announced that it lacked

sufficient data to proceed. It withdrew both its rice

cancellation and its intention to hold public hearings.

This decision was sharply attacked by environmentalists and
some EPA staff members. The chief of the toxic effects branch at
the National Environmental Research Center, Dianne Courtney,
testified before a Senate Commerce subcommittee that dioxin was
"by far the most toxic compound known to mankind." The EPA
defended its decision, however, and said more research was
planned’. During the next several years the research picture was
indeed filled in by both industry and government scientists.
Scientists examined such questions as the breakdown of dioxin
metabolically and in the environment, its environmental fate in

soils and water, its uptake in plants, its bioaccumulation, its

 

‘ Bosso 176-7.

7 Boyce Rensberger, "E.P.A. Ends Drive to Ban Defoliant," NYT
27 June 1974: 8; David Burnham, "Scientist Urges Congress to»Bar.Any
Use of Pesticide 2,4,5-T," NYT 10 Aug. 1974: 13.

78

residues in soil, water and air, and its carcinogenic and
teratogenic effects in laboratory animals. In general,
scientists found dioxin and dioxin-contaminated 2,4,5-T to be
potent animal toxins, carcinogens and teratogens, for which there
were, however, dosages so small they were associated with no
apparent effects‘. By 1978 the agency felt it had enough data
from animal studies to require it to move again against 2,4,5-T.
Specifically, it claimed to have research showing carcinogenic

and teratogenic effects from 2,4,5-T containing as little as 0.05
parts per million of dioxin. Since current formulations of the
herbicide were allowed to contain as much as 0.099 parts per
million, EPA in April 1978 published a notice of "rebuttable
presumption" against the continued registration of 2,4,5—T for

any use”.

At about this same time, a high school teacher from Alsea,
Ore., Bonnie Hill, began a grass—roots research project,
gathering information from area women relating their miscarriages
to the dates of spraying of 2,4,5-T in nearby forests. She wrote
letters to numerous government agencies, and news media did
stories about her. As a result, the EPA commissioned researchers

at Colorado State University to look into the situation, and

 

° The research is summarized in U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency, "Rebuttable Presumption Against Registration and Continued
Registration of Pesticide Products Containing 2,4,5-T," Federal
Register 43-78 (1978): 17,124-43.

’ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Rebuttable
Presumption," 17124, 17128.

H?
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after quickly conducting an epidemiological study they reported a
strong correlation between 2,4,5-T spraying and the miscarriage
rate. Citing an "imminent hazard" to humans, the agency in March
1979 took the most drastic action it could, issuing an emergency
suspension of the registration of 2,4,5-T for forestry, right-of-
way and pasture use, about 75 percent of its remaining uses.
Emergency suspensions are drastic because they take the suspended
product off the market immediately, unlike notices of rebuttable
presumption or intent to cancel, which allow challenged uses of

the product to continue until a final determination is made”.

The Colorado State research was severely criticized by
scientists at Oregon State University and elsewhere, leading to
charges that EPA had acted on the basis of flawed science.
Michael Gough, a senior analyst with the federal Office of
Technology Assessment, observed in his assessment of the
controversy that the Oregon State critique was itself flawed, and
that neither study nor critique has been published in the

refereed scientific literature. "On balance," he concluded,

the critics are probably more right than are the original
investigators. The study does not prove anything about
the connection between 2,4,5-T or dioxin and spontaneous
abortions, except that such a study may be impossible to
do, given small populations and uncertain information
about exposures and outcomes.11

 

1° Gough 139-43; Hay 173-5; (L. S. Environmental Protection
Agency, "Decision and Emergency Order Suspending Registrations for
the Forest, Rights-of-Way and Pasture Uses of 2,4,5-T," Federal
Register 44-52 (1979): 15,874-97.

“ Gough 143-5.

80

Nevertheless, Alsea was not the only arrow in EPA’s quiver,
and the suspension continued in effect while the process of
"rebuttable presumption" moved ahead. The herbicide was still
allowed to be used on rice, rangeland, fences, hedgerows and such
sites as airports, lumber yards, refineries, vacant lots, tank
farms and industrial sites. In July 1979 EPA announced in a
"preliminary determination" that the presumptions of risk
resulting from these uses had not been rebutted, called for a
public hearing, and sent the issue to a Scientific Advisory Panel

for review”.

In September the advisory panel issued a report concluding
that while 2,4,5—T posed some cancer risk to humans, the risk
apparently was not substantial. As far as birth defects and
other teratogenic effects were concerned, it said that an
apparent "no-observable-effect level" of about 0.001 microgram of
dioxin per kilogram of body weight had been established "for all
practical purposes" in animal studies. It recommended against a
public hearing, urging instead that further efforts be made to
reduce the level of dioxin in in 2,4,5-T. The EPA, however,
argued that more information was needed on the extent to which
humans were exposed to 2,4,5-T in the environment, and that "for

all practical purposes" wasn’t good enough. In December 1979 the

 

" U.S. Environmental Protection .Agency, "Preliminary
Determination Concerning the Rebuttable Presumption Against
Registration of Certain Uses of Pesticide Products Containing 2,4,5-
Trichlorophenoxyacetic Acid, " Federal Register 44-138 (1979) : 41531-
43, especially 41531 and n. 3.

81

agency concluded that the remaining uses of 2,4,5-T posed risks
of cancer, fetal toxicity and birth defects that did not appear
to be justified by benefits. Moving from rebuttable presumption

to more formal action, it ordered a public hearing to determine

whether the remaining uses should be cancelled”.

This hearing, combined with a hearing on the uses suspended
after Alsea, began in March 1980. After nearly a year in which
more than 100 witnesses were heard, 1,500 exhibits were entered
and 23,000 pages of transcript were taken, the presiding
administrative law judge put the hearing on hold while
negotiations toward a settlement took place. The talks were
fruitless. In 1983, a year marked by many hundreds of dioxin
stories in the media, one was a story reporting a decision by Dow
Chemical Co. to drop its fight for 2,4,5-T. Spokesmen said the
company still did not believe the herbicide was harmful, but that
the cost of appealing EPA regulatory actions far outweighed any
revenue that could be gained. Other manufacturers quickly
followed suit. By 1984, after more than 35 years on the market,

2,4,5-T was a dead product“.

 

” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Final Determination
Concerning the Rebuttable Presumption Against Registration for
Certain Uses of Pesticide Products Containing 2,4,5-T," Federal
Register 44-241 (1979): 72316-28.

1‘ Mark A. Stein, "Dow Ends Bid to Market Herbicide, " E1
Angeles Times 15 Oct. 1983: 1+; U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency, "2,4,5-T and Silvex Products; Intent to Cancel Registrations
of Pesticide Products Containing 2,4,5-T and Silvex, " Federal
Register 48-202 (1983): 48434-7.

82

III. Times Beach

That did not occur, however, until after the other major
dioxin controversy, the contamination of Times Beach, Mo., had
been woven into the story. Through the 19705, regulatory efforts
in regard to dioxin had focused primarily on its possible
ingestion as residue resulting from the application of 2,4,5-T.
In the latter years of that decade, however, chemical waste
disposal gained visibility as a social problem, symbolized by
Love Canal. This was the Niagara Falls, N.Y., neighborhood whose
chemical contamination led to passage of the Environmental
Response Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, or "Superfund."
Dioxin was a relatively minor aspect of the Love Canal
controversy. Only one of hundreds of chemicals disposed of by
Hooker Chemical Co. in the abandoned canal, its presence was not
discovered until seven months after the state health commissioner
declared a serious threat to health in the neighborhood”. The
Love Canal controversy did help draw attention, however, to Times
Beach, where dioxin was the central concern. Although careless
disposal of waste dioxin came to a head in Times Beach in 1983,
however, it was virtually a statewide problem that had begun 12
years earlier, diagonally across the state, in the small town of

Verona.

 

‘5 Adeline Gordon Levine, Love Canal: Science, Politics, and
People (Lexington, MA: Heath 1982): 20, 95-8.

83

There, in 1971, a company that manufactured hexachlorophene
from trichlorophenol hired a waste oil hauler named Russell Bliss
to dispose of dioxin—contaminated production wastes, or "still
bottoms." Bliss' company took away 18,500 gallons of residues.
An estimated 50 pounds of dioxin was spread around several dozen
locations in Missouri, in waste oil sprayed to control dust at
horse arenas and on unpaved roads. Dioxin was eventually found

in soil at levels as high as 1.8 parts per million“.

As at Seveso, the effect was obvious first in the animals.
At a stable near Moscow Mills northwest of St. Louis, 62 horses
died or had to be put down. Birds fell dead from the arena’s
rafters. A dozen horses died at a stable near Jefferson City.
Children and adults became ill but recovered. One girl was
hospitalized with severe bladder inflammation and bleeding. The
federal Centers for Disease Control investigated, and in August
1974 notified the Missouri health department that dioxin had been
found in soil at the two horse arenas. With the help of stable
owners who surreptitiously followed Bliss’ trucks on their
rounds, the CDC began mapping the path of the dioxin. Meanwhile,
13 pounds of still bottoms, contaminated with dioxin at 300 parts
per million, were found at the site of the hexachlorophene plant,

which had closed in 1972. In 1980, investigators found 90 buried

 

” Gough 121-36.

84

drums, corroded and leaking, with dioxin levels up to 2,000 parts

per million“.

Press interest in the Missouri situation, at least judging from
coverage in the New York Times, was minimal. A 1974 item,
reporting that dioxin had been identified as the cause of animal
fatalities and human illnesses in Missouri, was not followed
up”. Likewise, the level of EPA interest in Missouri dioxin
contamination apparently fluctuated in the early years of the
Reagan Administration. The Environmental Defense Fund brought
the situation to public attention, however, by publishing a list
of 14 confirmed and 41 possible dioxin sites in the state. The
federal government tested several of the sites, including Times
Beach, a western rural suburb of St. Louis where Bliss had
sprayed dioxin-contaminated oil on 23 miles of unpaved roads from
1972 to 1976. The last soil samples from Times Beach were sent
off for analysis on Dec. 3, 1982. Coincidentally, this was one
day before a flood on the Meramec River forced the evacuation of
the town. The analysis showed dioxin in the soil in
concentrations as high as 300 parts per billion. Two days before
Christmas 1982, the CDC recommended that Times Beach residents,

driven out by the flood, stay out because of the dioxin”.

 

” Gough 121-36.
” "Deaths of Animals Laid to Chemical," NYT 28 Aug. 1974: 36.

” Gough, 121-36.

85

Meanwhile, EPA had troubles of its own. President Ronald
Reagan’s first-term program for the EPA called for budgetary and
staff cutbacks, a less confrontational stance toward industry,
and an easing of regulation. The program was highly
controversial, and by late 1982 Reagan’s first appointment as EPA
administrator, Anne M. Gorsuch, was battling Congress over access
to EPA documents amidst charges of "mismanagement,
politicization, favoritism to business and corruption.”0 Among
the charges were allegations that Superfund money had been
delayed or speeded up in order to influence elections in
California and Indiana. Agency officials also were accused of
failing to disqualify themselves from acting on matters involving
former employers, committing perjury in congressional testimony,
compiling "hit lists" tracking the political views of staff
members, failing to vigorously enforce environmental laws, and

entering into "sweetheart deals" with polluters“.

A beleagured Anne Gorsuch Burford flew to Missouri in
February 1983 to announce that $33 million in Superfund money

would be used to buy out the town of Times Beach, including 437

 

" Philip Shabecoff, "Environmental Agency: Deep and Persisting
Woes," NYT 6 March 1983: 1+. Gorsuch married in the midst of the
controversy and became Anne Burford.

“ Stuart Taylor, Jr., "E.P.A. Inquiries Center on Four
Issues,” NYT 13 March 1983: 36; Shabecoff, "Environmental Agency,"
1, 38.

86

permanent homes, 364 mobile homes and 40 to 50 businesses”. The
show of decisive action did not save Burford, however, who

resigned on March 10.

IV. Firestorm of Coverage

Within a week dioxin was in the news again, in stories by the
NBC and CBS television networks reporting that the EPA in 1981
had softened a draft report on dioxin contamination at the urging
of Dow Chemical Co. The disclosure fueled criticism that EPA was
too close to the industries it was charged with regulating”.

The dioxin controversy increased in intensity with the disclosure
in April of dioxin contamination at Dow Chemical's home-base
factory in Midland, Mich., and in June at an abandoned Diamond
Alkalai plant in Newark, N.J. Also in April came the uproar over
the "smoking gun" memoranda in the Agent Orange case -- documents
detailing the 1964 meeting between Dow and its competitors on the
high dioxin levels in some of the companies' 2,4,5—T. In October
Dow decided to abandon the fight for 2,4,5-T, and in May 1984 the
Agent Orange suit was settled. These were decisive and dramatic
months for those whose lives were affected by dioxin, and the

developments were covered intensively by the press.

 

’2 Robert Reinhold, "U.S. Offers to Buy All Homes in Town
Tainted by Dioxin," NYT 23 Feb. 1983: 1+.

“ Howard Kurtz, "Dow Got to Suggest Dioxin Report Changes,"
Washington Post 16 March 1983: 1.

87

In the New York Times alone, for example, there were 188
items (including news stories, editorials, letters, columns and
photographs) on aspects of the dioxin controversy during 1983.
That is an average of one item every other day. Using the number
of items as a criteria, the Missouri controversy was the most
heavily covered, with about 70 items. Disputes over the dioxin
contamination of the Ironbound section of Newark and of other New
Jersey sites occasioned about 40 items“, and about 25 items
dealt with the Agent Orange litigation, then moving toward a
trial date in 1984. The dioxin controversy in Michigan, home

base of Dow Chemical Company, was explored in about 15 items”.

These were the major focal points of press attention in 1983.
Additional coverage, a few items each, was devoted to a number of
other places where dioxin had become an issue. These included
New York state, Illinois, Arkansas, Ohio, Connecticut and Nova

Scotia. In New York, for example, items mentioning dioxin had to

 

“ See for example these page-one items: Joseph F. Sullivan,
"High Level of Dioxin Found at Jersey Site; Food Center Is Shut,"
312:3 June 1983: 1+; Douglas C. McGill, "Kean Tours Area Near Dioxin
Site," £11 5 June 1983: 1+; McGill, "Tests at Newark Show More
Dioxin," N11 8 June 1983: 1+; McGill, "Kean Orders 3d Dioxin Site
Shut,” £12_19 June 1983: 1+.

3 See for example these page-one items: Shabecoff, "Scheuer
Says E.P.A. Aide Let Dow Delete Dioxin Tie in Draft Report," NYT_16
March 1983: 1+; Shabecoff, ”Dow Has Refused to Give E.P.A. Data,"
113 17 March 1983: 1+; Leslie Maitland, "E.P.A. Aides Charge
Superiors Forced Shift in Dow Study," NY_ 19 March 1983: 1+;
Reinhold, "New York Area Is Receiving Carp From Toxin-Tainted
Michigan Bay," N12_28 March 1983: 1+; Reinhold, "E.P.A's Dow Tests
Find High Toxicity," EXI.1 April 1983: 1+; Iver Peterson, "Reduced

Levels of Dioxin Found in Michigan Fish," NYT 17 July 1983: 1+.

88

do with a 1981 fire in a state office building in Binghamton, a
planned incinerator at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the fact that
gefilte fish available in New York City originated in a bay where
carp were contaminated with dioxin“. The Illinois story reported
that dioxin had been found in two dump sites known to have been

used by Missouri waste hauler Russell Bliss”.

Other items dealt with the aftermath of the Seveso incident,
including an eight-month international search for 41 barrels of
chemical waste from the plant, and with the disclosure that
Pennsylvania prison inmate volunteers had been deliberately
exposed to dioxin in a research project in the 19605“. In the
midst of these events, the press itself became an issue. The
American Medical Association condemned the coverage as a "dioxin
witch hunt" and voted to conduct a publicity campaign to

alleviate public fears”.

 

“ See for example "Dioxin Level Down in State Building," N11
13 Jan. 1983: B2; Barry Commoner, "Transmuting Trash," N12 15 Jan.
1983: 23; Reinhold, "New York Area Is Receiving Carp From Toxin-
Tainted Michigan Bay," NYT_28 March 1983: 1+; Marian Burros, "Mayor
Says U.S. Should Inspect Fish," N12 28 March 1983: BB; Robert D.
McFadden, "New York Area Callers Seek Reassurance on Eating Carp,"
m 29 March 1983: 133.

" "Dioxin Found at Illinois Sites," NYT 15 Feb. 1983: 21.

" See for example, E. J. Dionne Jr., "Europe’s Dioxin Drama:
A Slaughterhouse Finale,” N11 13 June 1983: 2; William Robbins,
"Dioxin Tests Conducted in 60's cn1‘70 Philadelphia Inmates, Now
Unknown," NYT 17 July 1983: 16.

” See Bayard Webster, "A.M.A. Plans Drive to Counter Reports
of Dioxin as Hazard," N11 23 June 1983: 811; Francis X. Clines,
"Reagan Asks Doctors to Support Freeze in Their Medicare Returns,"
El 24 June 1983: D14; Reinhold, "A.M.A. Disavows Jab at Dioxin

89

The complex dioxin controversy was moving toward conclusion
on many fronts. In late 1983, Dow Chemical Company dropped its
fight to keep 2,4,5-T on the market, and was soon joined by the
other manufacturers of the product. In Missouri, although some
holdouts would remain for years, the buyout of Times Beach was
moving toward completion. In mid-1984, the Agent Orange suit was
settled, although conflicts over the distribution of the money
would continue for years. Meanwhile, dioxin research projects
continued to bear fruit, moving toward a consensus view that
"harm has been limited to highly exposed industrial populations
and that none has been shown from environmental exposures.“30 On
all fronts, the controversy began to move into a new stage, one
in which loose ends would be tied up. One of these loose ends
was an assessment of media performance. The pre-systematic

account completed, the dissertation turns to that topic.

 

Reports," NYT 1 July 1983: 6.

” Gough 257.

PART II

Assessing Media Performance

CHAPTER FOUR: RISK COMMUNICATION AND BEYOND

I. Consensus on Coverage

Along with the emerging consensus on health risks of dioxin,
there also has emerged a consensus on media coverage of the
controversy. While not universal, the assessment is generally
subscribed to by those scientists, science policy experts and
media scholars who have written on the topic -- and even by some
professional journalists. Washington Post ombudsman Richard
Harwood and Pulitzer Prize—winning science writer Jon Franklin
are two who have sharply criticized media performance on dioxin.
Franklin, assigned to the Agent Orange story while reporting for

the Baltimore Evening Sun, eventually concluded that it was

a myth created by a group of Vietnam-era protesters,
seized upon by Viet vets and disseminated by the press.
That discovery and the more shaking discovery that my
colleagues didn't care much about the truth of the matter
and had never bothered to look into the substance very
deeply, changed my life‘.

Scientists who have written books dealing with the dioxin
controversy have also been critical. A. L. Young, who was
involved in the controversy as a herbicide consultant to the Air

Force, complained of the "intense and frequently inaccurate"

 

1 Quoted in Richard Harwood, "Agent Orange Myth at War With
Science," Detroit News, 17 Oct. 1990: 11.

91

92

coveragez. The head of the personnel protection group of
Materials Research Laboratories in Melbourne, Australia, Hugh D.
Crone, made the dioxin controversy a centerpiece of his book on
chemicals and society. He blamed the lack of "deep scientific
background" among journalists, as well as what he perceived as

the influence of media economics on news decisions.

The newspapers and television like issues that are
sensational and alarm the public. They like
elaborating on possible dangers, whereas a reasoned
argument that puts matters in perspective is not
seen as appealing to the public. . . . The only
brake that controls the media is that of
advertising revenue. I see plenty of
advertisements in the newspapers for cigarettes,
none for agricultural herbicides’.

Media's critics portray dioxin coverage as inaccurate, self-
serving, dependent on manipulative, politically motivated
sources, and in the long run detrimental to the public interest.
The media are seen as a crucial link between reliable scientific
knowledge about risks, on the one hand, and a public on the other
that is all too ready to develop irrational health fears. By
exaggerating dioxin's health risks and exploiting its emotional
potential, these critics believe, media created unfounded fears
about cancer and birth defects, as well as unrealistic

expectations that society can be made to be risk—free. In turn,

 

2 A. L. Young, "Social Assessment of the Agent Orange
Controversy," Agent Orange angglts Associated Dioxin: Assessment of
a Controversy ed. A. L. Young and G. M. Reggiani (Amsterdam:
Elsevier 1988): 195-6.

3 Hugh D. Crone, Chemicals and Society: A Guide to the New
Chemical Age, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1986): 181.

93

an ill-informed public exercising its power through democratic
institutions made value judgments on a faulty factual basis and
influenced the political system to reach misguided outcomes --

the removal of 2,4,5-T from the market being one example‘.

This is a broad-gauged indictment. It is also one whose
plausibility finds support in the scholarly literature of
science/technology journalism. Studies have found that
journalists do indeed tend to depend less on scientific
specialists than on administrative sources and "big names"
commenting on questions outside their field?. Research also
strongly indicates that the public depends on the media for much
of what it knows about health risk. The National Cancer
Institute, for example, reported in 1984 that 58 to 63 percent of
people got information about how to prevent cancer from the

media, and only 13 to 15 percent from their physicians‘.

 

‘ This composite assessment. is drawn from.‘Young, "Social

Assessment," 193-201, and Young and G. M. Reggiani, "Conclusions and
Implications for the Future," 322, both in Agent Orsnge snd Its
Associated Diommm, eds. Young and Reggiani; Michael Gough, Dioxin,
Agsnt Orsnge: The Facts. (New York: Plenum 1986): 7-8; Edward J.
Burger Jr., Health Risks: The Challenge of Informing the Public,
(Washington: Media Institute 1984): 1-3; and Crone, Chemicals and
Society 180-93.

5 Dorothy Nelkin, Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science
and Technology (New York: Freeman 1987): 130; Sharon Dunwoody, "The
Scientist as Source," Scientists and Journalists: Reporting Science
as News (New York: Free P 1986): 7.

‘ Nelkin, Selling Science 77.

94

Numerous studies have found discrepancies between public
perception and scientific assessment of risk7. Studies also have
found that what people believe about risk correlates with what
they are told in the media, regardless of the frequency of harm,
and that the media often fail to provide much in the way of
useful or balanced information. The media, concluded Eleanor

Singer and Phyllis Endreny,

are superb at evoking the serious outcomes
associated with a particular instance of a

hazard -- a specific car crash, nuclear reactor
accident, death from toxic shock. But they fail to
put such risks in perspective -- not only the

perspective of alternative hazards, which would be
asking a good deal, but even the perspective of how
likely such outcomes are: that is, the risk of
their occurrence“.

Indeed, research has suggested that omission of what scientists
consider to be relevant information is a major source of their

complaints about inaccuracy in science coverage”.

An additional focus of criticism is the fact, established in
numerous studies, that the amount of coverage given to a risk
often bears minimal if any relation to the historical experience
of harms. Communications researcher Vicki S. Freimuth and her

colleagues, for example, found that colon-rectum cancer, the

 

7 A useful summary by key researchers of this topic is Paul
Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff and Sarah Lichtenstein, "Rating the Risks, ”
Environment 21(3) 1979: 14-39.

3 Eleanor Singer and.Phyllis Endreny, "Reporting Hazards: Their
Benefits and Costs," Journal of Communication 37(3) 1987: 10—26,
quotation 25.

’ Nelkin, Selling Science 126.

95

second most prevalent cancer in the population in 1980, was the
sixth most prevalently mentioned in news coverage”. In their
study of coverage of a variety of risks, Singer and Endreny found
that the number of news stories devoted to a hazard appeared to
be "unrelated to the number of deaths it causes per year." That
fact alone, they argued, "poses a serious obstacle to the

accurate perception of risk."11

Many of these findings about science journalism are echoed in
criticism of dioxin coverage. Among principal conclusions of the
Media Institute study of Times Beach was that coverage
overemphasized health risks and relied excessively on government
sources, while ignoring industry and independent sources”.

Error per se and omission of relevant information were both noted
in news about defoliation by medical professor Edward J. Burger
Jr. In his 1984 case study, Burger labelled as inaccurate the
characterization of dioxin as a "cancer causing by-product of the
defoliant 2,4,5-T." And he took New Yorker writer Thomas
Whiteside to task for giving his own interpretation of 2,4,5-T

research while making

no reference to what biological mechanisms underlie
developed abnormalities, or to the scientific issues one

 

” Vicki S. Freimuth, Rachel H. Greenberg, Jean DeWitt and Rose
Mary Romano, "Covering Cancer: Newspapers and the Public Interest,"
Journal of Communication 34 (1984): 62-73.

“ Singer and Endreny, "Reporting Hazards," 14.

” Media Institute, Chemical Risgs: Fears. Facts and the Media
(Washington: Media Institute 1985): x-xi, 19-28.

96

should consider when moving from a series of animal
results to human experience”.

The institute’s Times Beach study complained that the "minute
dioxin levels" found in the community were not put into
perspective by comparison with much higher levels in the Missouri
horse arenas, or qualified by reference to "a 1983 study of

dioxin poisoning (which) shows that there were no ill health
effects related to exposure."“ Similarly, Hugh Crone observed

that a recent news item had reported 98 miners

dead in a mine disaster in Taiwan. Many more gone in one
instant than dioxin has ever claimed. Compare, always
compare. The public has to have a yardstick, something to
give meaning to quantities and numbers“.

Dioxin risks were exaggerated not only through error and lack
of context, in the view of critics of the coverage, but also by
the amount and intensity of play. Less explicitly than
complaints about error and context, concern that the volume and
intensity of dioxin coverage is disproportionate to the risk runs
as an undercurrent through the analyses. Prefacing its study of
dioxin and other chemical controversies, Media Institute

observed, for example, that

coverage of chemical health risks has become hot copy
throughout the nation’s newsrooms. . . . Our newspapers

 

” Edward, J. Burger Jr., Health Risgs: The Chsllenge of
Informing the Public Washington: Media Institute 1984): 34.

“ Media Institute, Chemical Risks 25. It is unclear what the
1983 study might be. No citation is given.

” Crone, Chemicals and Society 182.

97

devote to vinyl chloride the column inches once dedicated
only to 'natural' disasters such as volcanic eruptions“.

Discovery of each new dioxin site "sets off a wave of headlines,"
noted Michael Gough, a government scientist and author of a book-
length treatment of the dioxin controversy”. Young complained
of inaccuracies in the coverage of environmental contamination,
but also of its "intensity and duration." Media response to

episodes of contamination, in his view,

is further characterized by articles in major newspapers
or on the evening news, and these articles are usually
followed by other articles containing ’sensational’
stories in popular magazines (e. 9., Time, Reader’s
Qigest. Family Circle, Playboy and Penthouse);
Culmination of the intense and frequently inaccurate
campaign is marked by television documentaries usually
prepared to highlight significant events or chemicals”.

Also criticized for the intensity they leant to coverage were
what Media Institute called "speculative anecdotes" by ordinary
citizens. While making up only 1.2 percent of coverage, such
personal comments and narratives "seem to enhance the tone of
dramatic urgency endemic to much of the media’s reportage . . .
On television, in particular, these . . . sometimes bizarre and
unsubstantiated claims take on a prominence that cannot be
"19

conveyed adequately by merely listing their frequency.

Clearly, from the perspective of media scholars and scientists

 

” Media Institute, Chemical Risks ix.
” Gough 7.
Young, "Social Assessment," 195-6.

” Media Institute, Chemical Risks 25-28.

98

conversant with research into the health risks of dioxin,
coverage erred not only through inaccuracy per se and through the
omission of relevant context, but also through uncalled-for

volume and intensity.

These assessments of how the media conveyed risk information
about dioxin have their limitations. Gough, Young and Crone are
scientists but not media scholars. None claims to have
systematically gathered data on the coverage. As noted in the
introductory chapter, the Burger case study examined a small
sample of coverage without explaining why items were selected for
analysis, while the more systematic Media Institute content study
dealt with only one aspect -- Times Beach —- of a long, complex
controversy. Nevertheless, my examination of coverage in the Egg
York Times and selected magazines bears out their critique to
some extent, although it also found significant evidence to the

contrary.

II. Evaluating the Coverage: Error

Certainly there were instances of error per se. An article
in the Nation by Edith Schloss, identified as an American art
critic and painter living in Rome, contained numerous errors of
fact". The article implied that the cloud which escaped from

the Icmesa plant was "pure" dioxin, when in fact it was mostly

 

2° Edith Schloss, "The Poisoning of Italy," Nation 16 Oct.
1976: 362-5.

99

trichlorophenol. The article stated that trichlorophenol was

manufactured at Seveso "for defoliants,‘ when in fact the end
product was the germ-killer hexachlorophene. And it quoted a
North Vietnamese "specialist on dioxin" as saying the chemical
"causes total paralysis of the capacity for immunity in the
body,” a wild exaggeration“. A Newsweek article on Seveso
demonstrated a lack of technical understanding when it reported
that a recent animal study found dioxin to be "thousands of times
more dangerous to fetuses than teratogen, the deforming agent in

the now infamous thalidomide."“

Teratogen, of course, is not a
specific "deforming agent," but a general term for agents,

including substances or diseases, that cause malformation of a

fetus”.

Nevertheless, while there were unequivocal errors, much of
the coverage looked at here contained statements about dioxin and
its health risks that were not so much erroneous as contestable.
For example, dioxin was often referred to as "toxic," a
description that could only be disputed from an extreme position;
its acute toxicity to laboratory animals and, as a cause of
chloracne, to human beings is well established in the scientific

literature. However, when it is called "one of the most toxic

 

21

See Alastair Hay, The Chemical Scythe: Lessons of 2,4,5-T
and Dioxin (New York: Plenum 1982): 197-227.

2’ Raymond Carroll with Loren Jenkins, "Our Own Hiroshima,"
Newsweek 16 Aug. 1976: 49.

” "Teratogen,” Wepster's New World Dictionary, 3d College Ed.

100

chemicals known" and equivalent phrases, more room for dispute
appears. The characterization can be defended as accurate in the
sense that dioxin kills some laboratory animals at doses similar
to botulinum toxin. However, if the statement is taken to apply
to human toxicity, there is less scientific data to support it,
and if it is taken to refer to historical human harm from
environmental exposures, the argument that it is inaccurate is
quite strong. How the statement is taken depends in part on
one’s judgment about the relevance of animal studies to
assessments of human health risk, a live issue. Lacking context
tx: clarify just how it is to be taken, the statement could

:rightly be criticized as vague, but not as erroneous.

Similarly, references to dioxin as "carcinogenic" or "linked
1x) birth defects" are also terrain for contest over meaning“.
Dioxin in very small doses causes cancer and birth defects in
sonma laboratory animals. The implication that it is also
cartiinogenic or teratogenic to human beings is arguably accurate
Given certain assumptions about cancer causation and the
extrapolation of animal tests to human experience, but arguably
inacfrurate given other assumptions, and not supported by the

Preponderance of scientific research on historical human

\

‘“ On the idea that media are a site for struggle over meaning,
see Stuart Hall, "The Rediscovery of ’Ideology’" Return of the
Repl’-‘essed in Media Studies, " Culture#SocisQLJafnd Media, ed. Michael
Gurevitchw Tony Bennett, James Curran and.Janet.Woollacott (London:

Methuen 1982): 56-90.

101

experience with the chemical -- research which, it is important

to remember, is riddled with inconclusiveness”.

Statements that dioxin is "carcinogenic" or "one of the most
toxic substances" might be criticized for seeking to maximize
alarm by innuendo while hiding under the cover of technical
accuracy. The same objection might be raised as well against
statements tending to minimize alarm, such as the assertion by a
chemical company official that there is "absolutely no evidence
of dioxin doing any damage to humans, except something called

Chloracne. It's a rash."26

In view of exposed workers’ reported
dizziness, nausea and loss of sex drive and the observed
elevation in their heart disease risk factors, the statement is
arguably misleading if not inaccurate. Yet if "damage to humans"

is taken to mean clinical rather than subclinical manifestations

of disease, the statement is just as arguably accurate.

III. Evaluating the Coverage: Context

The importance of how statements are "taken" in the
discussion of accuracy is an index of the importance of context,

the lack of which is another major criticism of dioxin coverage.

 

” A useful discussion of the debates over cancer biology and
risk assessment is Frank B. Cross, Environmentglly Induced Cancer
and the Law: Risks. Regulatign, ang Victim Compensation (New York:
Quorum 1989), especially chapters one and three.

“ Dow Chemical Company's Paul F. Oreffice, quoted in "Dioxin
Puts Dow on the Spot," Time 2 May 1983: 62.

102

One of the tasks of context is precisely to indicate how
statements are to be read. And just as dioxin coverage did
include some instances of outright error, there were indeed
stories that contained little or no contextual information. At
the extreme, two- to four-paragraph newspaper items about
breaking news developments typically referred to dioxin only as

"poisonous" or "toxic."27

In addition, my study is biased toward
finding accurate and contextualized coverage because it examined
an elite newspaper and magazines, several of which, like Chemical
éggngineering Newsy deal regularly with technical risk issues.
Had I examined broadcast coverage or a different selection of

newspapers and magazines, I might have found even more prominent

and numerous examples of error and lack of context”.

Nevertheless, in examining a large selection of dioxin
coverage published over nearly two decades, one is struck not by
the lack of technical detail but by the presence of it. In news
item after news item, attempts are made to provide at least some
technical information, if only a technical name for dioxin, an
account of its origin as a contaminant in herbicide production,
or a suggestion of the scientific uncertainties surrounding

claims that it damages human health. Many items went beyond

 

’7 For example, "Forest Service Is Upheld in Plans to Use

Herbicide," NYT 8 Aug. 1974: 31; "24 Italian Families Return to
Contaminated Area," NYT 17 Oct. 1977: 5.

” Media Institute concluded in its Times Beach study that TV
coverage made less use of scientific data and scientific sources
than did newspapers. Media Institute, Chemical Risks 43-46.

103

that. For example, a 1975 New York Times story by Roy Reed,
recounting a controversy over spraying of Arkansas hardwood
forests with 2,4,5-T, included this technical context for the

controversy:

* The product in use is among the phenoxy herbicides;

* Tests show phenoxy herbicides have caused birth defects

and cancer in laboratory animals.

* Disputed tests say herbicide spraying might have caused

birth defects among Vietnamese.

* 2,4,5-T is a selective herbicide, which works on broad-

leaf plants by interfering with the growth process.

* Dioxin is a contaminant of 2,4,5-T. It is toxic to test
animals in small amounts and is persistent in the

environment.

* Dioxin’s presence in 2,4,5-T has been reduced sharply by
manufacturers. The total present annually in domestic
2,4,5-T is no more than eight ounces, and that is
distributed over five million acres at 50 micrograms per

acre.

* .An EPA advisory committee reported 2,4,5-T was not a
likely health hazard as currently used. It discounted
findings of the AAAS study reporting evidence of birth

defects in Vietnam.

* Some scientists say that even "purified" 2,4,5-T can

produce additional dioxin when it is burned, and that

104

studies have found dioxin in the tissue of cows and other

animals that grazed on sprayed land.

*’ Mice living in an area "drenched" with 2,4,5-T showed no
ill effects.29 Like the characterizations of dioxin as
"toxic" or "carcinogenic,” the accuracy of many of these
statements is also arguable and depends on further
context. For example, to say that dioxin persists in the
environment is to gloss over such questions as what one
means by "environment" and by "persists." While such
efforts at technical contextualization may be far from
complete in and of themselves, however, they do serve
notice that such technical concerns exist, and they offer
at least minimal guidance in seeking technical information
from other sources. Contrary to criticism that health-
risk journalism has a "tendency to simplify factually
complex issues and uncertainties into seemingly simple and
unadorned constructs,"3o such efforts also serve notice of
the existence of scientific disagreement and scientific

inconclusiveness.

In addition, numerous newspaper articles published during the
dioxin controversy focused specifically on technical background.

As part of a page-one series over three days in 1979, Richard

 

” Roy Reed, "Herbicide Use in Ozark Forests Challenged," NYT
14 July 1975: 40.

” Burger 49.

105

Severo of the New York Times recounted several major areas of
expert disagreement over herbicides' human health effects. These
included disputes over whether male exposure to teratogens could
cause birth defects in offspring; over the safe level of exposure
for humans; over the validity of animal tests as a basis for
legislation; and on the likelihood of symptoms appearing years
after exposure”. In 1982, science writer Philip M. Boffey
reviewed the status of Agent Orange research, including the Air
Force Ranch Hand study, the Centers for Disease Control
investigation of birth defects, the Veterans Administration
registry of industrial workers exposed to dioxin, and studies of
Vietnam veterans as a whole and of those most likely to have been
exposed to Agent Orange”. Additional attempts to summarize the
state of research were made the next year, at the height of
coverage of Times Beach and the EPA controversy, in the Iifléfir

the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times”.

To take the Los Angeles Times effort as an example of the
scope of technical context offered, the 2,500—word article

touched on dioxin's origin in herbicide and hexachlorophene

 

’1 Richard Severo, "Herbicides Pose a Bitter Mystery in U.S.
Decades After Discovery," NYT 29 May 1979: 1+.

” Philip M. Boffey, "Agent Orange: Despite Spate of Studies,
Slim Hope for Answers," NYT 30 Nov. 1982: C1.

” Wayne Biddle, "Dioxin’s Peril to Humans: Proof Is Elusive,"
m 23 Jan. 1983: 1; Pete Earley, "Dioxin Is Still a Mystery,"
flgshington Post 27 Feb. 1983: BS; William C. Rempel and Eleanor
Randolph, "Lethal Dioxin: Monster Guest in Chemical Lab," L_os_

Angeles Times 9 May 1983: 1+.

106

manufacturing, and its toxicity, carcinogenicity and
teratogenicity in animal tests. Dioxin was identified by its
full technical name and as one of 75 isomers of the "dioxin
family." The "trace Chemistries of fire" hypothesis was
discussed by scientists on both sides of the issue. The
contention that Chloracne is the "only confirmed health effect on
humans" was discussed and disputed, as was the topic of dioxin’s
carcinogenic and teratogenic effect on the cellular level. Nine
sources were listed by name and affiliation or address. Eight
were scientists or science administrators, including Matthew
Meselson of Harvard; Dr. James Saunders, identified as Dow
Chemical Company’s director of biomedical research; Dow research
scientist Warren Crummett; Vernon Houk, director of the Center
for Environmental Health at the federal Centers for Disease
Control; Howard Eisen of the National Institutes of Child Health;
Michael Gross of the University of Nebraska; Alan Poland of the
University of Wisconsin; and George Eadon, director of
environmental science at the New York Department of Health
laboratories. The ninth source named was Judy Piatt of Moscow
Mills, Mo., the mother of two daughters who became seriously ill
after the mother’s horse arena was sprayed with waste oil
contaminated with dioxin“. As in the earlier example, the

article identifies several technical areas as relevant, points to

 

“ Rempel and Randolph 1, 8.

f1

"‘1

107

the existence of expert disagreement, and provides useable

guidance for seeking further information.

Readily accessible magazines provided popularized technical
context for the controversy as well. One of the most extensive
projects was a 37-page section published in Chemical &
Emginssmgng News in 1983. Titled "Dioxin Report" and written at
college-level readability”, it provided historical background
and legal perspective on three aspects of the dioxin
controversy -- Times Beach, Agent Orange and the contamination of
the Tittabawassee River at Midland, Mich. -- and summarized
research into dioxin’s origins and human toxicity, as well as

prospects for disposal and regulation“.

Other general summaries of research included articles in
Environment in 1973 and 1981, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

in 1979, Science News and the non-refereed section of Science in

 

” Four randomly chosen paragraphs of the 41—paragraph article
summarizing human toxicity research were used to calculate Flesch
reading ease scores. The scores ranged from 6.341 (”very
difficult, " "college graduate") to 56.251 ("fairly difficult, " "10th
to 12th grade"). The average was 36.159, in the middle of the
"difficult," "college" range. See Werner J. Severin with James W.
Tankard, Jr., Communications Theories: Oriqifi. Methogs, Uses 2d ed.
(New York: Longman 1988): 74-5.

“ Janice R. Long and David J. Hanson, "Dioxin Issue Focuses on
Three .Major Controversies in U.S.," 23-36; Rebecca. L. Rawls,
”Dioxin's Human Toxicity Is Most Difficult Problem," 37-48; Ward
Worthy, "Both Incidence, Control of Dioxin Are Highly Complex," 51-
6; David Webber, "Dioxin Liability Is Huge Problem for Companies,
Courts," 57-60, Chemical ggEngineering News 6 June 1983.

I-sv

108

1983, and Science News in 1985”. Numerous magazine articles
discussed individual research developments as they occurred,
providing additional technical background. To take the "trace
Chemistries of fire" research as an example, it was reported and
discussed in Chemical & Engineering News, Chemical Week, the news
section of Science, the New Yorker, Science News and Chemistry”.
Chemical & Engineeming News and Chemmgal Week are indexed in
Business Periodicals Index, and the others are indexed in
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Thus the public had
reasonable access to relatively popularized accounts of technical
context for the dioxin controversy. If popular perceptions about

dioxin were not adequately informed by technical context (a

 

” Janice Crosland and Kevin P. Shea, "The Hazards of
Impurities," Environment June 1973: 35—8; W. A. Thomasson, "Deadly
Legacy: Dioxin and the Vietnam Veteran," Bulletin of the Atomms
Scientists 35 (May 1979): 15-19; David Kriebel, "Dioxins: Toxic and
Still Troublesome," Environment Jan.-Feb. 1981: 6-13; Linda Garmon,
"Dioxin Digest," ssgence News 3 Sept. 1983: 156-7; Marjorie Sun,
"Dioxin's Uncertain Legacy," Science 219: 468-9; Jeffrey L. Fox,
"Dioxin's Health Effects Remain.Puzzling," Science 221 (1983): 1161-
2; Janet Raloff, "Dioxin: Is Everyone Contaminated?" Science News
13 July 1985: 26-28.

3° ”Dioxins Formed by Normal Combustion," Chemical &
Engineering News, 20 Nov. 1978: 7; "Dow Says Dioxins Occur Naturally
From Combustion," Chemical Week 22 Nov. 1978: 36; R. Jeffrey Smith,
"Dioxins Have Been Present Since the Advent of Fire, Says Dow,"
Science, 202 (1978): 1166-7; "Notes and Comment: TCDD
Contamination," New Yorker 18 Dec. 1978: 27—8; "Dioxins, Dioxins
Everywhere," Chemistry, 52 (Jan. 1979): 3; "EPA Sharply Criticizes
Dow Dioxin Findings," Chemical Week 21 Feb. 1979: 25; "Burning
Question: From Whence Dioxin," Science News, 22 Sept. 1979: 197;
”Debate Continues Over Dow's Dioxin Theory," Chemica14§:Engineering
News, 24 Sept. 1979: 27-8.

109

question not studied here), the fault does not appear to lie with

media's failure to make such context available.

In sum, examination of a large and important segment of
dioxin news lends some support to two major criticisms of the
coverage -- that it contained inaccuracies and that it sometimes
lacked technical context. At the same time, however, the
evidence strongly suggests that these criticisms do not tell the
whole story. Much of what was written about dioxin’s health
risks was not erroneous so much as it was contestable. And while
some coverage did lack technical context, the coverage as a whole
did not. For readers who wanted to make a not unreasonable

effort, technical context was available.

IV. Evaluating the Coverage: Amount and Intensity

A third major criticism was that, regardless of what was said
EQQEE dioxin, the amount and intensity of the coverage
exaggerated its risks. My examination of the material leaves no
question that dioxin coverage was both extensive and intense.
The Nsw Ygrk Timss published more than 700 items on dioxin or
closely related issues between 1965 and 1988. During the course
of the controversy, there were several periods when coverage
intensified markedly. In January and February 1983, for example,

the newspaper published 39 items on Times Beach, five of them on

110

page one”. There were short periods in each month, Jan. 22-25
and Feb. 23-25, of even more intense clustering of coverage, with
five items in each period. Similar periods of intense coverage
can be identified for the Seveso, Agent Orange, Newark and
Midland incidents. Several of the most prominent treatments on
the controversy began with personal narratives of damage or
illness that implied dioxin was the cause -- as did this opening
to Richard Severo's three-day, page-one series in the New York

Times in 1979.

Julio Martinez is a former Marine Corps machine gunner
in Vietnam; Bob Ralston is a former cattle rancher in the
foothills of the Ozarks. The two men live 500 miles from
each other. They have never met, never heard of each
other, are a generation apart; they come from different
backgrounds, different worlds. All they have in common,
they say, is their poison“.

Yet as critics of dioxin coverage have pointed out, no single
death has ever been unequivocally traced to environmental

exposure to dioxin. The quantity and intensity of coverage were

 

” Nathaniel Sheppard Jr., "In Dioxin-Tainted Town, No
'Welcome' Signs," 111 10 Jan. 1983: 1+; Robert Reinhold, "Missouri
Now Fears 100 Sites Could Be Tainted by Dioxin,".111 18 Jan. 1983:
1+; Biddle, "Dioxin’s Peril to Humans: Proof Is Elusive," N11 23
Jan. 1983: 1+; Reinhold, ”Missouri Dioxin Cleanup: A Decade of
Little Action," N11_20 Feb. 1983: 1+; Reinhold, "U.S. Offers to Buy
All Homes in Town Tainted by Dioxin,” N11 23 Feb. 1983: 1+.

“ Severo, "Two Crippled Lives Mirror Disputes on Herbicides,"
NY_T 27 May 1979: 1+. For a similar treatment of the Seveso
contamination, see Carroll and Jenkins, "Our Own Hiroshima,"
Newsweek 16 Aug. 1976: 49. An interesting reversal of the pattern
is in "The River Rats Want to Stay," Time 10 Jan. 1983, where
speculative anecdote is used to suggest the absence of harnlat Times
Beach.

111

striking, and critics of news about health risk can well argue

that this could have resulted in public misperceptions.

However, examination of the coverage also makes clear that
the dioxin controversy was not about health risk alone, but about
a variety of contentious issues. Emerging out of a conflict
between a dominant American ideology -- industrial capitalist
democracy -- and a refocused and energized environmentalism, the
dioxin story had to do as well with conflicts among such enduring
American values as responsible capitalism, the authority of
science, small-town pastoralism, individualism, and participatory
democracy. These conflicts were reported by a press with wide-
ranging, complex functions in American society, of which the
accurate transmission of risk information is only one. If the
amount and intensity of coverage indeed created differences
between public perception and scientific assessment of risk -- an
hypothesis not studied here -- that was a complicating but
difficult-to-avoid side-effect of journalism doing its larger
job, which was to facilitate the critical revision and
preservation of values. This central argument of the

dissertation will be discussed in detail in later chapters.

Before that is done, however, a normative objection will be
considered. It may be the case, one could argue, that the dioxin
controversy as constructed in the media had more to do with value
conflicts than with risk; but shouldn’t it have been carried out

more tidily? Shouldn’t the facts about risk have been dealt with

112

separately from the value issues, so that risk questions could
have been settled by science while value issues were left to
politics? This is the thesis of fact/value separation in science
controversy, and since I am interested in my topic both
normatively and descriptively, I have had to examine the thesis
at some length. Fact/value separation is often offered
uncritically as an appropriate model for settling risk
controversies“. To avoid knocking down straw men, I examined
the case offered by two science policy scholars, William Lowrance
and Allan Mazur, who have argued for it critically and

authoritatively.

 

“ See for example, Crone, Chemicals ang Society 3.

PART III

Fact/Value Separation

CHAPTER FIVE: FACTS IN SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY CONTROVERSY

I. Lowrance and Risk Assessment

William Lowrance, a Ph.D. chemist, wrote Of Acceptable431sm
with the encouragement of the National Academy of Sciences and in
consultation with an ad hoc panel of the academy’s Committee on
Science and Public Policy‘. That the book was written with one
eye on improving media coverage is apparent from the foreword by
the panel chairman, University of Illinois chemistry professor H.
S. Gutowsky. Gutowsky wrote that the safety of the public has

become

the subject of extensive reporting in the daily press and
other media. It has been our observation that some of
this reporting is not sufficiently informed, especially as
concerns the scientific basis -- and limitations -- of the
determination of safety and of the role of scientists in
this processz.

Hoping to clarify these issues, Lowrance argued for a
fact/value distinction between the measurement of risk, which he
characterized as an "empirical, scientific activity," and the
judgment of safety, which he characterized as a "normative,

political activity." The difference between risk and safety,

 

1 William W. Lowrance, Of Acceptable Risk: Science and the
Determination of_§sfety (Los Altos, CA: Kaufmann 1976).

2 Lowrance vii-viii.

114

115

Lowrance wrote, is often forgotten, a failing that is "often the
cause of the disputes that hit the front pages." However,
Lowrance also stressed that both empirical and normative
activities, fact questions and value questions, require careful
attention from decision makers. In dealing with the risks of

modern life, he wrote,

we continually have to seek a proper balance between the
comprehensive, rigorous, rational approaches that seem so
essential, and the subjective, less quantifiable but not
necessarily less valid approaches characteristic of
political and social confrontations with the unknown’.

Nonetheless, scientists, engineers and other technically
trained people have an important, even decisive, role to play,
Lowrance argued, not only in measuring risk but in some policy
areas as well. Lowrance believed that scientific work not only
provides factual knowledge but instills habits of systematic
thinking that make technically trained people better fitted than
others to apply scientific knowledge to value-laden decisions.
Such decisions come up in what Lowrance described as the "any-
nmn’s land" of overall risk assessment, which connects the
scientific determination of risk with the political determination
of safety. Scientists who recommend exposure limits, doctors who
prescribe medicine, and engineers who design dams and toasters
are all making decisions that are "heavily, even if only

implicitly, value-laden,‘ according to Lowrance‘.

 

3 Lowrance 10-11, 75-6.

‘ Lowrance 79.

116

Noting the reluctance of some scientists to presume to make
value-judgments on behalf of society, Lowrance nevertheless
warned against defaulting "the appraisal of complex technological
issues onto non-technically trained political leaders," lest the
leaders make decisions with inadequate expertise or "fall prey to
the influence of strongly biased special interest lobbies.” In

the "any-man’s land" of judging safety, he wrote,

technical people are presumably as capable as others are,
and in many cases more so, because of their breadth of
experience, and their habit of systematic thought. Not
only can they understand the technical details and
appreciate the nature of the uncertainties, but from
experience they can often provide historical perspective
on the problem, anticipate the public’s acceptance of the
risks fairly accurately, and think of alternatives and
consequences that nontechnical people would misss.

Lowrance mapped out a procedure for settling risk and safety
controversies. It could be described as a continuum along which
the task of risk and safety determination should take place,
moving more or less from one end to the other. First there are
objective, value-neutral, scientific activities -- the
measurement of risk -- carried out by technically trained people.
In this part of the continuum there are three lines of inquiry:
1) defining conditions of exposure; 2) identifying adverse
effects; and 3) relating exposure and effect. Although there are
numerous sources of potential uncertainty in the first three
lines of inquiry, Lowrance counseled researchers to rely on their

experience, make the best estimate possible and hope for better

 

5 Lowrance 110.

117

data to be produced in the future. For example, he discussed the
uncertainties of extrapolating from animal tests to humans, the
problems of inferential adequacy involved in using small numbers
of animals in laboratory tests, and the uncertainties of
extrapolating effects into the low-dose range of a dose-response
curve, where there are relatively few data points to guide the
researcher in drawing the curve. "Until the curve can be defined

better in the low range, Lowrance counseled, "the best we can do

is apply experience from related extrapolations and sketch in an
extension. . . ."‘

A fourth line of inquiry for technically trained people is
the overall assessment of risk. Located in the middle of the
continuum, overall risk assessment takes place in "any-man’s
land" and ”edges up to being political as well as scientific. . .
." The first four lines of inquiry ”need not be sequential,"

according to Lowrance, although the fourth is the "pay-off stage,

building upon all the preceding inquiries."7

On the other side of "any-man’s land" are subjective, value-
laden, political/social activities, carried out by lay people or
their representatives. It is here that safety determinations, as
opposed to risk determinations, are made. On the technical side
of the continuum the question has been, How much risk is there?

On this side it is, How much risk is acceptable. Determinations

 

‘ Lowrance 18, 38-41, 61-7.

7 Lowrance 27.

118

of safety can involve such criteria as "reasonableness,' custom
of usage, and prevailing professional practice, and often involve
balancing such considerations as the degree to which risk is

voluntarily borne, the availability of alternatives, and whether

or not the risk is encountered occupationally’.

To summarize: While allowing for uncertainties and estimates on
the technical side, for the likelihood of a non-sequential
research process, and for the existence of the "any-man’s land"
of technical participation in value-laden decisions, Lowrance's
scheme in the main recommends that fact questions be separated
from value questions, that fact questions be determined by
technically trained people, and that value questions be settled
through political processes. While he did not comment on the
dioxin controversy in Of Acceptable Risk, ordinary citizens'
speculative anecdotes of the kind which added to the intensity of

dioxin coverage would be inconsistent with his scheme.

Lowrance focused his discussion specifically on risk and
safety issues. A similar approach, expanded to include science
and technology controversy in general, was taken by Allan Mazur,

a leading proponent of the "science court" idea.

 

° Lowrance 75-94.

119

II. Mazur and the "Science Court"

Mazur, a sociologist of science and technology with a
background in engineering, presented the case for fact/value
separation in journal articles and in The Dynamics of Technical
Contpoversy. Unlike Lowrance, Mazur did not maintain that
technically trained people are better equipped to make certain
kinds of value-laden decisions by virtue of their "habit of

systematic thought.’ Indeed, he explicitly rejected that view,
asserting that scientists "are best able to deal with scientific
issues, but they are no more qualified to render value judgments

than any reasonable layman."9

But like Lowrance, Mazur proposed
a procedure to simplify science and technology controversy, the

key feature of which was separation of fact questions from value

questions.

Total separation is not necessary, Mazur argued: Values
shared by all sides or values too subtle to affect practical
decisions may be left harmlessly intertwined with factual
statements. However, when "blatant evaluative or normative
statements" are intermixed with factual statements, the result is
an unnecessarily complicated controversy. Mazur's purpose was to

"explore the practicality of simplifying these arguments by

 

’ Allan Mazur, "Science Courts," Minerva, 15 (1977): 4.

120

treating contentious scientific issues apart from the non-

scientific issues with which they are usually intermeshed."lo

One benefit of doing so is that scientists can concentrate on
doing what they are best qualified to do -- determine the
facts -- while value issues would be reserved for the political
process, whose participants presumably have both political skills
and a public mandate. Additionally, untangling matters of fact
from matters of value would permit the factual questions to be
settled properly because it would permit them to be framed in a
way which would allow "meaningful assessment through scientific
methods." For Mazur, the danger is not that adversaries in a
dispute will purposely distort facts to support their positions
(although he said it would be "naive to believe that this psysp
occurs). Rather the danger is that in the heat of controversy,
"an adversary may find it rhetorically useful to state his
factual hypotheses in terms which make them difficult to
evaluate." Particularly, adversaries going up against a
powerful, well financed establishment have a tendency to take a
defensive posture and to state their technical position "in a
manner that provides little opportunity for a clear refutation by

the other side."11 Mazur's concern here appears not to have been

with clearly identified polemics but with rhetorical tactics

 

” Allan Mazur, Dynamics of Tschnical Controversy (Washington:
Communications 1981): 8.

“ Mazur, Dynamics 36, Mazur's emphasis, 125.

121

hidden in ostensibly factual statements. While he did not
specifically apply this analysis to the dioxin controversy, it is
possible to do so. The vagueness of such characterizations of
dioxin as "carcinogenic" or "one of the most toxic substances
known“ seems precisely an example of the value—entangled tendency
to state a technical position "in a manner that provides little
opportunity for a clear refutation. . . ."

Mazur's scheme for untangling facts and values was the
"science court," similar to the "institution for scientific
judgment" proposed in 1967 by Arthur Kantrowitz. As outlined by
Mazur, a science court would work like this: Controversial
technical issues would be referred to the court, perhaps by the
legislature, by lawsuit in an ordinary court, or by referendum.

Adversaries, or "case managers,’ would be selected for each side,
and they would be asked to state and document the scientific
facts they considered most important for their case. Statements
and documentation would be exchanged and examined, and each case
manager would specify points of agreement and disagreement. A
referee acceptable to both sides would attempt to arbitrate the
differences. Agreement might be reached on some points by
changes in wording or removal of ambiguities. If both
adversaries agreed on all points, the agreed-on statements of
fact would be issued as the science court’s report. In case of

continued disagreement, an open, public hearing would be held in

which the adversaries would present their cases before a panel of

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122

expert scientists acceptable to both sides. Debate would be
restricted to matters of fact. At the conclusion of the hearing,
the panel of experts would issue its report, "attempting to
provide a relatively sophisticated and relatively unbiased
statement of these facts as they appear at that moment." It is
possible that the judges could decide that either or both of the
adversaries were wrong, Mazur wrote, or, alternately, that the
differences were legitimate and irreducible because of ambiguous
or insufficient data. The judges might also suggest research to

clarify disputed points. But Mazur emphasized that the judges

would not make a decision of policy, such as whether m
cases of cancer for y amounts of electricity are
acceptable. . . Judges’ duties would be limited solely
to clarifying the factual, strictly scientific issues and
writing a report on the decisions on those points."12

Mazur tried to test a portion of the science court idea in a
controversy in New York and Minnesota over construction of high-
voltage tramsmission lines. This he did by offering to serve
informally as a referee between two groups of experts on either
side of a dispute over whether such transmission lines pose
threats to human health not realized or acknowledged by the

utility companies.

Mazur wrote to each of the experts involved, asking their help
in putting together a list of disputed statements of fact. Only
opponents of the transmission lines responded with lists, which

asserted the following points:

 

” Mazur, "Science Courts" 4-9.

123

1. Extremely low frequency (ELF) electric (and magnetic)
fields can cause biological effects in human beings

exposed thereto.
2. It is likely that ELF electric (and magnetic) fields

associated with high-voltage transmission lines will

cause biological effects in human beings exposed thereto.
3. No biological effect that is likely to occur in human

beings exposed to the fields of high-voltage transmission
can be shown to be nonhazardous”.

Mazur sent the list to proponents, who criticized the
allegations as vague and untestable. In the first statement,
"biological effects" was criticized as too broad a term to be
empirically meaningful. The statement that the fields gsm have
biological effects and the statement that no biological effect
could be shown to be nonhazardous were held to be irrefutable
because of the impossibility of proving nonexistence. The second
statement was criticized for not containing clear criteria for
assessing whether an effect is likely. One misconception was
cleared up when opponents discovered they had "attributed to a
pro-line expert the view that it was impossible to produce
biological effects from low—intensity fields" -- a view the
expert denied having held. On other points, opponents of the line
revised their statement of facts in line with the criticism,
rephrasing their allegations "in the form of epidemiological
hypotheses with a degree of specificity that is common in

standard journals. . . . The revised list now read as follows:

People exposed for a period as short as five years to the
electromagnetic field created by a 765 kV transmission
line (as specified, for example, in "Application to the

 

” Mazur, Dynamics 38-39, Mazur's emphasis.

124

State of New York Public Service Commission for
Certificate of Environmental Compatibility and Public
Need," submitted by Rochester Light & Electric Corporation
and Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, January 1974) will
be more likely to differ from a control population not so

exposed in the following characteristics:
1. Growth, as measured by rates of change of physical

parameters (e.g., height, weight).

2. Biological stress, as measured by physiological
indicators (e.g., corticoids, serum proteins, circulating
lymphocytes, blood pressure) and incidents of stress-
related diseases (e.g., gastrointestinal and

cardiovascular disorders).
3. Functioning of the central nervous and cardiovascular

systems, as measured by neurohormone patterns, EEG, EKG,

and the ability to adapt to blood volume changes.
4. Psychological behavior, as measured by decision-making

capability, rates of acquisition of learned responses,
gross activity level, reaction time, short-term memory,
and motor coordination.“

One pro-line expert still objected, saying the revised statements
remained untestable. Another did not comment, but two others
found the revisions "sufficiently specific that they could

disagree that the allegations were true for humans."15

As a result, Mazur felt that his effort to "separate the
factual disputes of the transmission line controversy from its
value disputes" had been "largely successful." However, he drew
an additional, disquieting lesson from the experience. After the
task of fact/value separation had been accomplished, the pro-line
side refused to debate its position on the factual issues in a
science court setting. One pro—line expert objected to the idea
of an adversarial science court as "anti-science," while another

objected to one of the anti-line experts on personal grounds.

 

“ Mazur, Dynamics 40.

” Mazur, Dynamics 39-41.

125

Others refused to participate because they thought that to do so
might undermine their cause. "Why, after all," Mazur
acknowledged, "enter the debate if it is more likely to improve
the relative position of the other side than of one's own

side?"16

III. But Facts Don’t Settle Controversies

After one has "the facts," what then? That is a question
raised by several researchers, Mazur among them, who have
examined science and technology controversies and found that
facts are often less than compelling factors in the outcome. The
response of the pro-line experts, Mazur wrote, "emphasizes that
many technical controversies are primarily disputes over
political goals and only secondarily concerned with the veracity
of scientific issues which are related to these goals."17
Science and technology controversies, he wrote in an earlier

article,

often arise because of strong moral and political
convictions. . . . Controversies over nuclear power
plants, the ABM, and recombinant DNA have a similar
character, involving political and theological beliefs and
anxieties about physical survival in which the resolution
of a factual ambiguity one way or the other might be of
little significance.

 

“ Mazur, Dynamics 41-42.

” Mazur, Dynamics 42.

126

Nevertheless, Mazur argued, factual disputes should be settled,
if for no other reason than just in case anyone is willing to be
guided by the outcome. His point is normative: There are
situations, he wrote, "in which scientific knowledge will have no
influence on those who make policy, even though it should do so,

but there are also situations in which the science court might

have some impact on policy."18

This impact, Mazur wrote, is less likely to come about
through any change of heart among partisans than because
previously uncommitted people found their minds made up by the
resolution of factual matters. A sophisticated, unbiased report

on disputed factual matters, Mazur wrote,

could have an important impact on that portion of the
public which has not yet taken a side in the controversy,
but whose interests are at stake. . . . If the technical
objections raised against transmission lines or nuclear
power plants were found to lack any scientific basis, and
this was reported by a credible source, then political
power would most likely shift to the proponents of these
technologies as electricity became scarcer and more
expensive, and previously nonaligned citizens became
involved. The resolution of factual disputes may not
serve the interests of those directly involved in the
debate, but it would be in the best interests of the
public at large.19

For Mazur, political commitment limits one’s openness to
persuasion by the facts. Similarly, Nelkin suggested that

disputants' commitments to one side or the other may override

 

" Mazur, "Science Courts" 14, my emphasis.

” Mazur, Dynamics 42.

127

their willingness to be influenced by facts. There is little

evidence, she observed,

that technical arguments change anyone's mind. In the
disputes over fetal research and even in . . . various
siting controversies no amount of data could resolve value
differences. Each side used technical information mainly
to legitimate a position based on existing priorities."“

Another line of research, based in psychology, suggests that
human beings are limited in their ability to carry out difficult
cognitive tasks -- in other words, they are subject to "bounded
rationality" -- and that they employ a number of devices to
simplify matters, some of which may lead to biased perception. In
these researchers' view, facts in a dispute over risk, for
example, might be disregarded or distorted by a variety of
heuristic devices, including the tendency to "judge an event as
likely or frequent if instances of it are easy to imagine or

recall."21

In some case studies, scientific evidence seemed to have
little impact on the outcome not only because of the bounded
rationality and involvement of participants but also because the
evidence was nonexistent or incomplete. In their study of the
Michigan "bottle bill" controversy, for example, science

historians Robert Snow and David Wright found that

 

2° Dorothy Nelkin, "Science, Technology, and Political
Conflict: Analyzing the Issues," Controversy: Politics of Technical
Decisions, 2d ed., ed. Dorothy Nelkin (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage
1984): 20.

“ Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff and Sarah Lichtenstein,
"Rating the Risks," Environment, 21 (April 1979): 15.

128

such empirical evidence as existed was not crucial.
Studies were used to buttress rather than to form or
reshape opinion, partly because of an unavoidable
inadequacy in the studies themselves. There were
significant gaps in the relevant economic and
environmental data. In addition, all the studies were
based, of necessity, on challengeable assumptions about
future technological developments, economic patterns, and
consumer behavior."22

It may also be the case that the evidence is less than
compelling because it is ambiguous, arising out of research done
in differing scientific specialties or occupational contexts”.

A biochemist, for example, might be expected to produce a
completely different set of "facts" relative to a controversy
than would an industrial hygienist. Indeed, the two might not be
able to reach agreement on what constitutes a "fact." And
although gaps in knowledge may be filled and ambiguities may be
clarified in time, there are cases in which a decision to wait
until factual matters are settled even provisionally is itself a

policy decision.

For example, in the 19705 U.S. regulators decided as a policy
decision to ban Aldrin/Dieldrin, while British regulators found
the evidence that the pesticides were causing harm was
insufficient to justify a ban. Sociologists studying the

decision concluded that the British demand for evidence of

 

2’ Robert E. Snow and David E. Wright, "Analysing Symbolic
Dimensions of Technological Disputes: The Michigan Container
Controversy," Scisnce, Tschnoloqy ngumsn Values (Fall 1979): 13.

” David Robbins and Ron Johnston, "The Role of Cognitive and
Occupational Differentiation in Scientific Controversies," Social
Studies of Science, 6 (1976): 362.

129

causality concealed "that the decision to wait for definite
evidence of harm to accumulate is just as much an ethical and
political choice as the decision to treat risk determination as a
policy issue."“ In the presence of "inconclusive scientific
evidence that may be variously interpreted," communications
scholar Leon Trachtman observed of science and technology
controversies generally, "the economic, political, social and
ethical dimensions of the problem are critical. . ."”
Finally, the facts adduced in a controversy may be less than
compelling to some participants because they are wholly or
partially beside the point in regard to issues important to those
participants. Barry Casper and David Wellstone, in a study of the
same Minnesota power—line controversy discussed by Mazur, found
just such a displacement of the focus of the controversy. The
dominant concern of protesting farmers, they found, was "the
sacrifice of their land without their consent for an allegedly
greater social need whose validity they question(ed). . . ."“
While many farmers did "express a degree of concern about health

and safety problems,’ such concerns were peripheral.

 

“ Brendan Gillespie, Dave Eva and Ron Johnston, "Carcinogenic
Risk Assessment in the USA and UK: The Case of Aldrin/Dieldrin,"
.§cience in Contest: Reagings in ths Sociology of Science, eds. Barry
Barnes and David Edge (Cambridge, MIT P 1982): 330.

25 Leon A. Trachtman, "The Public Understanding of Science
Effort: A Critique," Scienss, Technologypg Humsn Values, (Summer
1981): 13.

“ Barry Casper and Paul Wellstone, "Science Court on Trial in
Minnesota," Science in Context 288.

130

Nevertheless, the protest movement itself paid "considerable

attention" to the human health effects issue,

in part, because the institutions available to the
protesters, such as environmental impact statements, . . .
channeled them in this direction; and in part, because
uncertain threats to health and safety (made) good
organizing issues for a protest movement."27

Thus the focus of the controversy was displaced from
protesters’ genuine concerns partly for tactical and partly for
institutional reasons. For their part, the pro-line electric
cooperatives also found a tactical advantage at certain points in
the proceeding in trying to limit the focus to health and safety
issues. Politicians also stood to gain. The science court idea,
Casper and Wellstone concluded, "is a politician's dream —- it
focuses public attention on peripheral technical issues and
delegates the decision to the ’experts’"28 It is an example of
what philosopher Brian Fay called the "sublimation of politics,"
or the effort to overcome the limitations and uncertainties of
politics by replacing it with positivist science. ”Questions not
accessible to a so-called technical analysis are thought to be

irrational, and therefore essentially undiscussable."29

 

" Casper and Wellstone 285.
" Casper and Wellstone 286, 288.

2’ Brian Fay, Social Thsory and Political Practice (London:
Allen 1975): 61.

131

Facts, then, can be less than compelling in science and
technology controversies not only because participants'
rationality is bounded or their passions are aroused, but also
because the facts themselves are unavailable, incomplete or
ambiguous, or because a fundamental question -- What are the
issues? -- has been answered narrowly and the facts brought
forward are irrelevant to many participants’ concerns. Appeals to
scientific authority in public disputes are often misplaced,
philosopher Philip Shepard and historian of science Christopher
Hamlin concluded, "because the question of relevance . . . is
often contentious and loaded with moral and political

n 30

implications. And because questions of relevance are often

begged, "the facts" function less as information and more as
symbols in wide-ranging disputes over deeply held cultural

values. The Michigan bottle battle, Snow and Wright found,

was fought in two different but interpenetrating contexts.
In the first, the environmental costs versus the economic
benefits and convenience of the throwaways were debated --
the same kinds of issues that had already been confronted
hundreds of times in the 19603 and 19708 in environmental
legislation and litigation. But in a larger, symbolic
context, the throwaway and its slogan, 'No Deposit, No
Return,’ had become the focus of a battle over opposing
technological styles and the values supporting them."“

 

” Philip T. Shepard and Christopher Hamlin, manuscript draft
of book tentatively' entitled "Ideology' and. the Prospects for
Consensus in U.S. Agriculture,” (East Lansing, MI: 1988): Chapter
3, p. 12.

” Snow and Wright 11.

132

Similarly, anthropologist Mary T. Douglas has argued that in
the final analysis pollution is less a matter of hygiene than a
matter of social order: A dirty pair of boots left on a clean
dining room table may not pose a threat of disease, but would
amount to a flouting of the values of order and appropriateness
of the household. Do the boots "pollute" or not? It depends, in
Douglas’ analysis, on the moral commitment one has to the values

of the household.32

It seems things are more complicated than the fact/value
separation model allows for. Having separated facts and values,
we may find ourselves with facts that do little to help us. How
does this state of affairs come about, and what are its
implications? Does it mean that science and technology
controversies are political through and through, with the victory
to the side that can maneuver "the facts" most shrewdly? If so,
what role is there for the journalist? To begin to answer these
questions we must examine the philosophical foundations of the
idea of fact/value separation in science and technology

controversy.

 

3’ Mary T. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the
Concepts of Pollution snd Tgboo (London: ARK 1984): 35-36, and
"Environments at Risk," Science in Context, 260-75.

CHAPTER SIX: WHY FACTS DON’T SETTLE CONTROVERSIES

I. Value Neutrality in Science

The possibility and desirability of separating facts from values
in science has been widely debated among philosophers of
science‘. As debate has refined the issue, it is generally
accepted that many aspects of scientific work are value-laden --
the decision to "do science" in the first place, for example, as
well as the choice of research problems and decisions about how
to apply scientific knowledge. Scientists after all are human,
and their values, preferences and biases influence their work in
numerous ways. Nevertheless, logical positivists have argued
that there remains a core aspect of science -- the "context of
validation" as opposed to the value-laden "context of
discovery" -- in which one can maintain that the correctness of

scientific inferences can be and should be assessed without

 

1 Classic arguments are presented by Thomas S. Kuhn, 1h_e
Structure of Scientific RsvolutionsL 2nd ed., enlarged (Chicago: U
of Chicago P 1970) and Israel Scheffler, Science snd Subjectivity
(Indianapolis: Bobbs 1967).

133

134

reference to scientists’ attitudes, preferences, temperament or

values’. This is the thesis of value-neutrality in science.

The thesis of fact/value separation in science and technology
controversy is related but different in important respects. The
thesis is that questions of fact and questions of value can and
should be separated in the process of trying to resolve
controversy. Science court proponent Allan Mazur says this has
been accomplished when questions of fact have been asked in such
a way that "allows meaningful assessment through scientific
methods."3 Such a separation also suggests a division of
responsibility, with fact questions best settled by technically
trained people and value questions best settled through political

processes.

Clearly the thesis of fact/value separation depends on the
value-neutrality thesis. If the latter cannot be maintained,
neither can the former: If facts and values can't be separated at
the core of science, they can’t be separated in science and
technology controversy, because separating them in the latter
depends on the possibility of the existence of value-free facts.
The value-neutrality thesis has been challenged, perhaps most

substantially by the late philosopher Richard Rudner, who tried

 

2 See Richard Rudner, "The Scientist Q s_Scientist Makes Value
Judgments," 540-6, and Isaac Levi, "Must the Scientist Make Value
Judgments?" 559-569, both in Readings in the Philosophy of Science
ed. Baruch Brody (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice 1970).

3 Allan Mazur, Dynamics of Technical Controversy (Washington:
Communications 1981): 8.

135

to demonstrate that even within the context of validation,

scientists gs scientists necessarily make value judgments.

Rudner's argument was this: It is a part of science to
accept or reject hypotheses; yet, as logical empiricists
generally agree, no hypothesis is ever completely confirmed or
disconfirmed by the evidence. Therefore, in accepting or
rejecting a hypothesis, the scientist makes a decision that the
evidence is sufficiently strong to warrant acceptance or
rejection. Such a decision, Rudner argued, required a value
judgment about the seriousness of the consequences if the
decision is wrong. For example, a scientist should require a
higher level of confidence for work involving toxicity of a drug
used by humans than for work assessing the number of defects in a

lot of belt buckles‘.

To apply Rudner's argument to the fact/value separationist
thesis, recall William Lowrance’s discussion of the uncertainties
involved in the empirical and scientific activities of measuring
risk. For example, there is uncertainty involved in
extrapolating effects into the low-dose range of a dose/response
curve, where there are relatively few data points to guide the
researcher in drawing the curve. "Until the curve can be defined

better in the low range,"Lowrance advised, "the best we can do is

 

‘ Rudner 540-6.

136

apply experience from related extrapolations and sketch in an

extension. . . ."5
To imagine this advice being applied, say a scientist has
conducted an experiment in which a suspected carcinogen, a trace
contaminant in a pesticide, is given to laboratory rats‘. Rats
given larger doses experience more cancers, but there are fewer
cancers associated with lower doses. The scientist finds that
the dose/response curve almost seems to "draw itself" in the
high-dose area, because of the plenitude of data. But in the
low-dose range, plotting the curve is less obvious because of the
paucity of data points. Applying experience from related
extrapolations -- a kind of tacit knowledge or "feel" for the
situation that nevertheless is not based on this experiment’s

data -- the scientist makes an estimate of where the curve should

be drawn. Has the estimate required a value judgment?

According to Rudner's argument, yes. The scientist might
have sketched in a curve in such a way as to minimize or maximize
the inferred response, or she might have sketched it in somewhere
between the two. Indeed, she had innummerable choices, some
preferable to others in terms of her tacit knowledge but all

equally supported by the data. At the point of making her choice,

 

5 William W. Lowrance, Of Acceptable Risk: Science and the
Determination of szety (Los Altos, CA: Kaufmann 1976): 38-41.

‘ This analysis is based on Philip T. Shepard, "Moral Conflict
in Agriculture: Conquest or Moral Coevolution?" Agriculture and
Human Values 1 (Fall 1984): 18.

137

she was required to either make or default on a value judgment

about the seriousness of estimating wrongly.

If she minimized the inferred response, for example, her
decision could have led to approval for use of the pesticide.
The value judgment required of her was the acceptability of human
cancer resulting from her estimate being in error. Alternately,
she might have maximized the inferred response. In that case,
the value judgment required was the acceptability of the
consequences if her estimate had kept the pesticide off the

market.

Fitting a curve to a set of data points is equivalent to
accepting a hypothesis, that m_will be the response at dose yL or
x = f(y). Curve-fitting estimates are therefore an example of
Rudner's problem, as is the extrapolation of animal-study results
to humans7. One implication is a breakdown in Lowrance's and
Mazur’s division of responsibility in science and technology
controversy. If value judgments are intrinsic to science, then
value questions cannot so neatly be left to the political
process, nor can scientists always stick to their empirical tasks

and eschew policy questions.

Another implication is that scientists following Lowrance’s
advice on making estimates in areas of uncertainty would be

making value judgments without consciously or critically doing

 

7 See Alvin M. Weinberg, "Science and Trans-Science," Minerva,
10 (1972): 209-22.

138

so. The pursuit of objectivity is one of science’s most precious
ideals, Rudner pointed out, and the "positive horror" which
scientists have of intrusion of values into science is
understandable. Still, he argued, for scientists to close their
eyes to the fact that "scientific method intrinsically requires

the making of value decisions" cannot bring them closer to the

ideal‘7 .

II. Doing Science vs. Doing Controversy

Rudner's challenge to the value-neutrality thesis was and
remains controversial’. Even if it is not adopted, however,
Objections can be raised to the thesis of fact/value separation
in science and technology controversy. The thesis seems
reasonable, but as we have seen, case studies raise questions
about its applicability. I turn now to an analysis of the thesis

in light of these questions.

First, it can be objected that fact/value separation is
uselesS because facts are weak compared to the power of interest
and adVocacy: Disputants' minds are made up, they are in the grip
0f their passions, and they won’t be swayed by the facts;
instead, they will use whatever facts suit their purpose as

weapons to advance their cause. Mazur answered this objection

\
8 Rudner 545.

9 .
LeVi.

139

normatively: It may often be the case that facts are drowned out
by the clamor of interest and emotion, but it shouldn’t be the
case, and by separating facts and values one is at least keeping
alive the possibility that some will attend to the facts --

particularly those who are as yet uncommitted.

Granting the validity of that response, what about those
cases in which the scientific evidence is less than compelling
not because of interest or involvement but because the evidence
is non-existent, incomplete or ambiguous? Controversies don’t
unfold neatly, with all the evidence authoritatively determined
before policy must be made or action taken. A defender of
fact/value separation, however, might respond persuasively that
the untidiness of the process of controversy is itself an
argument for fact/value separation. It’s true, she might argue,
that fact questions can be settled only provisionally, and that
action and inaction can sometimes be equally value-laden policy
decisions; all the more reason to make one's decisions armed with
the best factual data available at the time. All a scientist can

do, after all, is her damndest.

What then about those cases in which the facts seem to be
beside the point? After all, data about the human health effects
of high-voltage transmission lines are at best peripheral to the
concerns of farmers upset about land condemnation. A fact/value
separationist might respond, again normatively, that valid issues

may be ignored in particular cases, but that does not refute the

140

case for fact/value separation; deciding what the issues are is a
matter best decided in the political arena. (Even when scientists
get involved in such decisions, as they routinely do in trying to
influence federal funding for research, for example, they are
acting not as scientists, but as social and political beings).
Once the issues are defined, the fact/value separationist might
argue, the task of science is to try to ascertain facts that will

aid in their resolution.

To this argument, a critic might object that issues, like
facts, are often only provisionally determined. In her study of
the Cayuga Lake nuclear plant controversy, for example, Dorothy
Nelkin found that a controversy originally focused on thermal
pollution of the lake shifted to concern with health risks after
the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. Similarly, issues in a
Toronto airport siting controversy were found to have changed in
response to both technical and political developments”. In fluid
situations like these, how do scientists know what to
investigate, what questions to try to find factual answers to?
Granted, the fact/value separationist might respond, the
unfolding of science and technology controversy is messy and

unpredictable. Still, a provisional formulation of the issues at

 

1° Dorothy Nelkin, "Nuclear Power and Its Critics: A Siting
Dispute," 51-71, and Jerome Milch, "The Toronto Airport
Controversy," 27-49, both in Controvgsm Politjfi of Technical
Decisions 2d ed. (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage 1984).

141

least allows the scientist to get to work. If the issues change,

new research problems can be added to the old.

A critic might respond, however, that scientists do not
investigate all issues, but only certain ones. Social scientist
Mazur, for example, chose to concentrate his efforts in the
power-line controversy on the human health effects issue, even
though he acknowledged the presence of procedural and political
issues in the dispute“. A fact/value separationist might
respond that scientists do indeed pick and choose their issues,
and they do so for any number of reasons, ranging from
theoretical interest to availability of funding to political
predilection. After all, if society through the political process
-- say the election of an extremist administration -- proposed a
new generation of nuclear weapons as the nation's top scientific
priority, scientists would hardly be expected to turn
unreflectively to the task. They would, however, make their views
known as citizens, not as scientists, and it is as citizens that
they pick and choose their issues. What they do as scientists is

to warrant the validity of their research.

However, what fact/value separationists have proposed, with
fact/value separation as its centerpiece, is not an epistemology

for assessing the correctness of scientific inferences, but a

 

“ Mazur, Dynamics 37.

142

procedure for resolving science and technology controversies”.
The two are different: In the assessment of scientific inferences
(granting Rudner’s critics their case for the sake of argument),
value judgments are either irrelevant or agreed on. What is at
stake is the validity of the work, which is assessed through

rational reconstruction of empirical evidence and logic.

However, a procedure for conducting science and technology
controversy differs significantly from a rational reconstruction
of the evidence and logic supporting a scientific inference. It
is a proposal for carrying out a social/political process aimed
at resolving a controversy -— or as some have suggested,

maintaining its creative tension”.

Issues are intrinsic to controversy, and the choice and
definition of issues can have a substantial impact on the
outcome, as the power-line dispute discussed by Mazur and Casper
and Wellstone suggests. Who decides what the issues are, and on
what basis? The two fact/value separationists whose work I have
analyzed approach the question differently. For Lowrance, whose
book is explicitly concerned with risk and safety controversies,

the question of how risk and safety become issues lies outside

 

” T. Shepard, "Impartiality and Interpretive Intervention in
Technical Controversy," Technologics1,Trspsformstion: Contextual
and Conceptual Implications, eds. Edmund F. Byrne and Joseph C.
Pitt, (The Netherlands: Kluwer 1989) 47-65.

” Shepard and Christopher Hamlin, "How Not to Presume: Toward
a Descriptive Theory of Ideology in Science and Technology
Controversy," Science, Technology;& Human Values, 12 (Spring 1987):
19-28.

143
his topic. Risk issues simply "arise" or "pop up."“ For Mazur,
whose topic is the dynamics of technology controversy in general,
particular technological issues like nuclear power arise out of
general public concern over "larger issues" like the
environment”. Thus they have their origins in the value-laden
political and social realm. The prOper procedure, Mazur suggests,
is to disentangle matters of fact from the value context in which
they arise so that the controversy can be simplified, scientists
and politicians can do what they are competent to do, and factual
matters can be framed so as to allow "meaningful assessment
through scientific methods."16 In order to be consistent, a
fact/value separationist would have to argue that the process of
recasting questions so that they can be meaningfully assessed
does not in itself require value judgments. i.e., that the
process of fact/value disentanglement is value-neutral vis a vis
any issues society cares to raise. But is it? Let's look again at
the recasting of the anti-line experts' original statements of
fact that resulted from Mazur's "neutral" intervention as

referee. (The statements are on pages 123-124 above.)

The original statements are not capable of assessment by
scientific means, as Mazur points out. Nevertheless, the

recasting of them is not the only way they could be reformulated

 

“ Lowrance 102, 105.
“ Mazur, Dynamics 99.

“ Mazur, Dynamics 125.

144

so as to be capable of rational assessment”. For example,

implied in the statement that no likely biological effect from
the fields can be shown to be nonhazardous is a concern that
technological change too often takes place incautiously. That is
a value judgment, presumably the one Mazur sought to separate
from the factual question with which it was entangled. However,
the statement might also be recast this way: "Technological
change in the past has often had unforeseen negative
consequences, yet there has been a tendency to proceed as if this
were not the case, and to disrupt established social arrangements
in the process; the cooperatives urging construction of the power
lines have proceeded similarly, and this is evidence in favor of

reconsidering the project. This statement of alleged fact deals
with an issue more central to the farmers’ concerns, the

sacrifice of their land for an alleged social benefit whose
validity they questioned. Moreover, it is open, if not to

scientific assessment, then nevertheless to rational assessment,

on the grounds of logic and evidence.

The reformulation brought about by Mazur's intervention, it
now appears, was not value-neutral. Framing the factual assertion
in epidemiological terms required a value judgment that the
health effects issue was more important than the issue of
unforeseen consequences and social impacts of technological

change. Moreover, the value judgment was made implicitly,

 

” See Shepard, "Impartiality" 7—10.

145

without conscious, critical consideration. Far from simplifying
and clarifying the power-line controversy, the separation of
facts and values begged the important question of relevancy and

contributed little to the resolution of the dispute”.

III. Implications for the Dioxin Controversy

When the dioxin controversy is viewed in the light of this
analysis, a number of reasons appear for the failure of the
scientific consensus to settle the dispute quickly and neatly.
Certainly passions were aroused. Defoliation was but one element
in the fierce conflict over the Vietnam War that engaged American
society for nearly two decades. The chief engineer for ICMESA at
the time of the Seveso explosion was assassinated, apparently by
politically motivated terrorists, in 1980. At a hearing on the
distribution of the Agent Orange settlement fund in 1985, a man
was apparently overcome by news that a fellow Agent Orange
veteran had killed himself and his family. The distraught man
shouted in court, "Everyone has a book of matches. Burn

everything down!"19

Nor were passions only on one side. A
resolution by the House of Delegates of the American Medical

Association in 1983 accused the news media of conducting a dioxin

 

1" See Shepard and Hamlin, "Ideology and the Prospects for
Consensus," ch. 3 p. 12.

” Ralph Blumenthal, "Vietnam.Veterans Argue Over Agent Orange
Fund," NYT 16 March 1985: 18.

146

"witch hunt” and the public of having succumbed to ”hysteria."
An AMA representative later acknowledged to a House subcommittee
that the language was "imprudent."” As argued above, however,
the fact that passions sometimes run hot in science and
technology controversies is all the more reason for trying to

bring facts to bear.

It was also often the case that facts about the health risks
of dioxin were unavailable, incomplete or ambiguous. The
difficulty of carrying out science during war stood in the way of
assessing suspicions that birth defects in South Vietnam had
increased as a result of herbicide spraying. Adequate
information simply could not be gathered. The task of
determining which veterans had been exposed to how much dioxin in
Vietnam was blocked, among a host of reasons, because no one knew
with any certainty how contaminated the early shipments of
herbicide had been, and because blood serum tests of millions of
Vietnam veterans would have been prohibitively expensive“. The
complexity of the exposure situation at Seveso, plus the failure
to establish strict research protocols and control groups early

in the disaster, doomed later epidemiological studies to

 

” Philip J. Hilts, "AMA Votes to Fight Dioxin ’Witch Hunt,'"
Washington Post 23 June 1983: A1; Robert Reinhold, "A.M.A. Disavows
Jab at Dioxin Reports," N11; 1 July 1983: 6. See also "Dioxin
Hysteria," Wall Street Journs1, 31 May 1983: 26.

“ Janice R. Long and David J. Hanson, "Dioxin Issue Focuses on
Three Major Controversies in U.S.," Chemicalgg Engineering News 6
June 1983: 29; Hanson, "Science Failing to Back Up Veteran Concerns
About Agent Orange," Chemical s Engineering News 9 Nov. 1987: 11.

147

inconclusiveness on all but the broadest questions”.

Sociologist Bruno Latour has argued that the effectiveness of
science in the world outside the laboratory depends on organizing
the world so that meaningful collection of data is possible --
that is, it depends on turning the world into a laboratory.

Vietnam and Seveso were not laboratories”.

Sources of ambiguity include the uncertainties involved in
taking what is known about dioxin from animal studies and
applying it to human beings. Humans and animals react
differently to chemicals, for one thing. For another, animal
studies often involve high doses, and the effects at small doses
are estimated by extrapolation. Data also is available from the
experience of industrial workers, but they constitute a small
group for epidemiological purposes, their exposures are much
higher than the general population is exposed to in the
environment, and they are subject to a multitude of potentially
confounding chemical exposures“. Finally, there are ethical
boundaries that sharply limit the extent to which studies can be

done on human subjects. One of the many controversies of 1983

 

“ Paolo Bruzzi, "Health Impact of the Accidental Release of
TCDD at Seveso," Accidpntsl Exposure togDLioxins: Human Heafilth
As ects, eds. Frederick Coulston and Francesco Pocchiari (New York:
Academic 1983): 215-6.

7’ Bruno Latour, "Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the
World," Science Observed: Perspectivgsr on the Social Study of
Science (Beverly Hills: Sage 1983): 141-70.

“ Gough, 21-4, 201-19.

148

involved a revelation that Pennsylvania prison inmates had had
dioxin applied to their skin in the late 1960s, in an experiment

to test human suceptibility to dioxin-induced Chloracne”.

Despite these ambiguities and uncertainties, however, one
could plausibly argue that the preponderance of scientific
evidence had long been on the side of the view that dioxin has
relatively minor human health effects. The controversy was kept
alive, this argument would continue, by interested parties --
scientists, government regulators, lawyers, the media -- who
exploited the inevitable ambiguities and uncertainties of science
while ignoring or downplaying its substantial findings“. This
argument is consistent with the view of fact/value separationists
that scientifically determined facts should be the basis for
decision in science/technology controversies. A simpler way of
stating this view is to say that scientific knowledge may be
imperfect, but it’s the best we have, and we should use it as a
basis for settling our disputes, rather than exploiting its

imperfections as an excuse for extending them.

Yet the flaw we found in the fact/value separationist
argument was that settling disputes on the basis of facts often
begs the question of relevancy. So do imputations of insincerity

and self-interest. Assuming reasonably honest motives on all

 

” Hay 134-6; William Robbins, "Dioxin Tests Conducted in 60’s
on 70 Philadelphia Inmates, Now Unknown," NYT 17 July 1983: 16.

7‘ Various aspects of this composite view are expressed by

Gough 254-5, Crone 180-93, and Young, "Social Assessment" 193-201.

149

sides, a pertinent question is, $2222 facts are to be brought to
bear, on what issues? Examination of dioxin coverage in the E2!
York Times and selected magazines reveals that the controversy
was not about health risk alone, but about a wide variety of
issues, most of which the scientific consensus simply failed to
address. Moreover, the process at the end of which the consensus
emerged also represented a transformation of the controversy, so
that the terms in which it was cast at the end were different --
narrower, less radical and seemingly less political —— than at

the beginningN.

As summarized by Michael Gough in his book on dioxin and
Agent Orange, the consensus was that "harm has been limited to
highly exposed industrial populations and that none has been

"N Examination of the

shown from environmental exposures.
coverage shows that human health effects of herbicides were
always sm issue in the pesticide and Vietnam defoliation
controversies. Yet the issues out of which the dioxin

controversy arose also included ethical and legal concerns about

crop denial and chemical warfare, as well as those posed

 

N The importance of the terms in which controversies are cast
is discussed by Stuart Hall, "The Rediscovery of ’Ideology': Return
of the Repressed in Media Studies," gglture, §9ciety and Media eds.
Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and Janet Woollacott
(London: Methuen 1982) 80-83.

N Gough 257.

150

by the emerging belief system of ecologism”. As the controversy
developed in the press, these obviously value-laden issues
increasingly shared attention with whether dioxin exposure caused
cancer or birth defects -- questions seemingly more readily
assessable by the value-neutral processes of science. As the
spotlight of news coverage shifted from Vietnam to Seveso, then
to Agent Orange and to Times Beach, this refocusing of media
attention on dioxin and long-term health risks continued and
intensified. Eventually the health—risk issue came to
predominate. "What did the media tell the public about dioxin?"
turns out to be a less central question than "What did the media

tell the public dioxin was about?"

Introduction of dioxin into the controversy as a technical
detail in 1970 was a crucial development, marking the beginning
of the end of the defoliation and pesticide controversies as
ecologistic challenges to fundamental American beliefs and
behaviors. In its later stages, the controversy took place on
less radical, more familiar terrain. Even here, however, the
issue was not limited to long-term human health risk of
environmental exposure to dioxin. Instead, the presence of
dioxin in the environment exposed for journalist gatekeepers a
number of conflicts in a mainstream, centrist ideology, or

symbolic structure of beliefs about the way American society does

 

7’ On North Vietnamese clafims of health effects, see William
Beecher, "U.S. Will Step Up Defoliation Missions in Vietnam," 10
Sept. 1966: 2.

151

and should operate”. Much of the coverage, examination shows,
was concerned with exposing and resolving these conflicts in such
a way that revision took place while the fundamental features of
the ideology were maintained. Having argued that fact/value
separation would not after all have been a helpful strategy, I
turn now to an account of the emergence of the dioxin controversy
out of disputes over domestic use of pesticides and the

defoliation program in Vietnam.

 

N On ideologies as symbolic structures that help people deal
with complex social realities, see Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a
Cultural System," Ideology and Discontent ed. David E. Apter (New
York: Free 1973): 71-3; on journalists as gatekeepers who determine
”what information is passed along (a) chain and how faithfully it
is reproduced," see Werner J. Severin with James W. Tankard Jr.,
Communication Theories 2d ed. (New York: Longman 1988): 46.

PART IV

Emergence of the Dioxin Controversy

CHAPTER SEVEN: PESTICIDES AND THE NATURAL WORLD
I. Attitudes Toward Nature

The term dioxin began appearing in news coverage about 1970
as a technical detail in coverage of two ongoing environmental
controversies. One involved the U.S. defoliation program in
Vietnam, the other the domestic use of DDT and other pesticides.
Both were shaped in important ways by American attitudes toward
nature, attitudes which had developed over generations but took a
new direction in the early 19603. The emergence of dioxin as a
focal point of controversy can be better understood by placing it

in the context of these developments.

The place of human beings in nature is one of the fundamental
relationships in a culture's cosmos or worldview, that culturally
constructed myth which helps to impart order and unity to human
experience‘. This was as true of the inhabitants of the American
continent before European colonization as after. Native cultures
apparently tended to View humans and the natural world as part of
a common society, members of a family whose bonds were reinforced

in religious ritual and ceremony. Early European immigrants had

 

‘ David Oates, Earth Rising: Ecologicalpgslief in sn Age of
Science (Corvallis: U of Oregon P 1989): 1-3.

153

154

a sharply different view, coming as they did from a Judeo-
Christian culture that saw nature as something to be subdued to
human purposes. The native relationship to nature was
transformed, in the worldview of the Europeans, into an aspect of
"savagery," which it then became a goal of immigrant society to
reform or eradicate. Similarly, what had been a settled
continent was transformed into wilderness, which it became the
duty of the Europeans to domesticate to gardens and farms.
”Europeans did not find a wilderness" in America, writes

historian Francis Jennings: "rather, however involuntarily, they
made one. . . . The so-called settlement of America was a
‘pssettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases

and demoralization introduced by the newcomers."2

The pastoral ideal -- America as the fruitful Garden of the
World -- became one of the most powerful images of the culture.
The driving impulse of the Puritans has been characterized as a
wish to "carve a garden from the wilds; to make an island of
spiritual light in the surrounding darkness."3 Pastoralism had a
secular version as well, in the ideal of a simple, harmonious

life lived close to nature, remote from both the perils of wild

 

7 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of Amerigs: IndiansL
Colonialism ang the Csnt of Conguest (Chapel Hill: U of North
Carolina P 1975): 75; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and phe American
Mind, 3d ed. (New Haven: Yale UP 1982): 13-20; Nash, The Rights of
Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: U of Wisconsin
P 1989) 117-9; Howard P. Segal, Technologies; Utopianism in
American Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago P 1985): 75.

7 Nash, Wilderness 35.

155

nature and the corruption of political power. Yet the appeal of
industrialization was also strong. The figure of the ingenious
Yankee inventor joined that of the frontiersman and the pioneer
farmer a3 a symbol of what it meant to be an American. Common to
all three was a restless, anthropocentric individualism that

sought to impose its own purposes and order on nature‘.

The transformation of nature took place with increasing
rapidity and thoroughness in 19th century America. Wilderness
gave way steadily to the plow, the plow to the streetcar. As the
century opened, the frontier of agricultural cultivation was
already moving west from the Alleghenies. By 1865 it had reach
eastern Kansas and Nebraska, and after 1870 the edge of
settlement pushed out onto the dry plains. In 1893, Frederick
Jackson Turner delivered his famous paper, "The Significance of
the Frontier in American History,” at the Chicago World’s
Columbian Exposition. In it he formulated a thesis that the
frontier was one of the dominant forces in American history, at

the same time that he declared the frontier virtually closeds.

The nation's urban centers also developed rapidly. In 1800

only 6 percent of the nation’s five million residents lived in

 

‘ See Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The Merican West Q

Sympol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1950, reissued with a new
preface 1970); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and
the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford UP 1964); and Frank
W. Fox, "The Genesis of American Technology, 1790-1860," American
Studies 17-2 (1976): 29-48.

5 Smith 3-4, 174, 250-60.

156

places of 2,500 population or more. But as early as 1820, argues
historian Martin Melosi, industrialization and urbanization began
to be "immutably linked" in a mutually complementary matrix of
machinery, energy sources, transportation and labor. By mid-
century, "factories were concentrating in milltowns and other

urban areas at an increasingly rapid pace, with resulting severe
degradation of the urban environment. Soon new industrial cities
like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, as well as transformed mercantile
cities like New York and Boston, became places of "overcrowded
tenements, congested traffic, critical health problems, smoky
skies, mounds of putrefying wastes, polluted waterways and

unbearable noise . . . . "6

As agriculture, industrialization and urbanization changed

the face of the continent with increasing rapidity, the cultural
complex of attitudes about the relationship of humans and nature
also evolved. As wild areas disappeared, their threatening
aspect softened and they came to be perceived instead as
resources to be prized and protected. The new view of wilderness
received definitive political expression in the conservation
movement of the Progressive era, which aimed to make efficient
use of the nation's forests, waters and rangelands by managing

them as resources. Meanwhile, the image of an agrarian America

 

‘ Martin V. Melosi, "Environmental Crisis in the City: The
Relationship Between Industrialization and Urban Pollution,"
Pollgtion snd Reformgin American Citiss, 1870-1930, ed. Martin V.
Melosi (Austin: U of Texas P 1980): 3-4.

157

of sturdy yeoman farmers came to be more and more out of touch
with reality. As the country urbanized, agriculture was seen more
as a resource for feeding the cities, and less (as Thomas
Jefferson had put it) as God's "peculiar deposit for substantial
and genuine virtue." American attitudes toward nature had taken
on new manifestations, but one underlying idea remained
unchanged. Whether as a howling wilderness to be tamed or a

resource to be managed, nature was something apart from human

158

city populations grew, pesticide historian James Whorton has
argued, farms were called upon to feed them, and the rapid
development of transportation after 1820 aided the flow of food
to the cities and the commercialization of farming. Labor
continued to be scarce on the farms, however, so while
urbanization provided the demand, industrialization provided the
means to meet it. "From steel plows and seed drills, to steel-
toothed cultivators and the Hussey and McCormick reapers,
agricultural inventions by the thousands followed the call for

labor-saving machinery."8

The result was monoculture, which created ideal feeding
conditions for insects in "extensive, unbroken fields canopied by
the foliage of a single plant." The clearing of forests for
agriculture also frequently destroyed insect predators and forced
the insects themselves to seek new food supplies. In addition,
the development of a nationwide and then worldwide transportation
system brought insects into areas where no natural predators
existed. Free of natural checks, insects "were able to live and
reproduce, and destroy, with virtual impunity."9 Two examples,
the gypsy moth and the Colorado potato beetle, show the inter-
relationship of commerce, transportation and farming practices in

the development of infestations. The gypsy moth was introduced

 

3 James Whorton, Before §ilent Spring: Pesticidesiand Public
Health in Prs-DDT America (Princeton: Princeton UP 1974): 3-6.

’ Whorton 5-6.

159

to America from abroad in 1869 as part of an experiment in
commercial silkworm breeding. Twenty years later the caterpillar
devastated Medford, Massachusetts, stripping trees of leaves and
covering sidewalks, tree trunks, fences and sides of houses. (It
remains a problem in wide areas of the country today). Also in
the 18603, cultivation of the Irish potato in Colorado caused a
beetle native to the region to foresake its diet of wild leaves
for greener fields. Soon the infestation had spread eastward,
devastating crops and setting off a frantic search for remedies.
Other serious insect infestations of the time included those of
the chinch bug, the codling moth, the cotton army worm and the

Western grasshopper”.

The answer was arsenic. Apparently first used as a bug
killer in 1867, perhaps apocryphally when a farmer threw leftover
green paint on potatoes and noticed what it did to the beetles,
arsenic-based insecticides such as Paris Green (and later lead
arsenate) soon came into vogue. From the first, some farmers had
opposed the use of the arsenicals as risky. The insecticides'
popularity was pressed, however, by professional economic
entomologists, a group whose rise to power and professional
status was closely related to their research on chemical control
of insects. The arsenicals did kill insects. They also were
ingested by farmers occupationally and by consumers as residues

on food. Thus they added to the body burden of a public already

 

1° WhOrtOn 6’ 17-8, 230

160

exposed to arsenic from dyes, wallpaper and medical
prescriptions. Medical use eventually declined, and arsenic in
consumer products was prohibited. Arsenical pesticides continued
in use, however, until they were replaced with synthetic
pesticides shortly after World War II. Until then they were
widely accepted as necessary for the American agricultural

cornucopia to continue spilling its goods“.

The story of research into risks of arsenical pesticides has
a familiar ring. It was inconclusive for some of the same
reasons dioxin research was inconclusive. Although there were
numerous cases of acute arsenic poisoning on file, these were
ignored or marginalized as anecdotal. Medical examination of
exposed human beings in a Northwest fruit growing area in 1940,
for example, failed to turn up much evidence of clinical damage
to health, but the concerns about lead arsenate were not just for
clinical but also for sub-clinical and chronic problems. "The
only thing that could indicate sub-clinical damage," Wharton
notes, "was extended experimentation with animals whose internal
organs could be examined . . . (but) the agricultural industry
refused to accept data obtained from rats and guinea pigs as
applicable to people."12 The response of industry and government
was also something of a forecast of things to comes. The battle

over how much arsenic to allow on food, like the battle over

 

u Whorton 7, 20-2, 39-50, 69-70, 249.

u Whorton 245; 24-35, 102-12.

161

continued use of 2,4,5-T, lasted for years. Some government
regulators were assertive. In general, however, government took
the approach that restrictions on residues should be accomplished
gradually, as permitted by economics and evolving technology.
Risks to human health were to be balanced against benefits, and
the benefits were seen as substantial. Chemical agriculture was
lauded for improving the health and well-being of Americans by
providing more and better food, and for improving the lot of

farmers by eliminating drudgery and boosting efficiency”.

Thus there was established a characteristic pattern of
pesticide use and justification. Part of the pattern was the
short-term, sharply focused technical response to a problem that
had arisen out of broad social, economic and cultural
developments. If bugs were destroying the potato plants, in the
words of one versifying pesticide booster, then "Spray, 0

spray . n 14

Another part of the pattern was the response to
recurring worries over the health risks of arsenic. The concern
was accommodated by pointing to inconclusive scientific research,
the government’s regulatory apparatus, and the apparent benefits
of pesticide use. The argument was made that risks had been
exaggerated, that further research would clarify the situation,

and that the regulatory process stood ready to step in if clear-

cut dangers were established. Meanwhile, the argument went, jobs

 

” Whorton, 133-75, 244-5, 228-29; Bosso 21-33, 47-53.

“ E. G. Packard, quoted in Whorton 91.

in

pa‘

ti

ch

di

162

in the orchards and fields and plentiful, varied food on the
nation's tables depended on spraying, and these benefits clearly

overweighed the shadowy, unsubstantiated risks.15

Synthetic pesticides like DDT and 2,4,5—T were different in
many respects from the arsenicals in use since 1867, but the
pattern of use and justification that developed in the earlier
time carried over. Wharton pointed out the continuity in a
summary of a chapter from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, The
chapter noted that actual use of pesticides on the farm was
difficult to monitor; that it was very difficult to evaluate the
risks posed by small residues and to fix tolerances that were
both effective and enforceable; that regulatory agencies lacked
the tools to do their assigned job and were constantly opposed by
industry. "(B)y simply changing the names of the new
insecticides, wherever they occur," Wharton observed, "the
chapter can be made to read like a summary of the years of

arsenic and lead-residue regulation."16

 

N Whorton 212-47.

” Whorton 254.

163

III. Challenges to the Status Quo

The pesticide status quo was increasingly challenged in the
19603, however, especially after the publication of Silent
Spring. Often cited as a beginning point for widespread
environmental consciousness in the United States, Carson's book
had two lines of attack against what she saw as indiscriminate
use of synthetic pesticides. One was to bring together and
publish in popular form summaries of research about human health
risks of pesticides. Persistent organochlorine pesticides known
to cause cancer in laboratory animals concentrate as they move up
the food chain, and human beings are near the top, Carson
wrote“. Such warnings could be -- and were -- challenged within
the terms of the pesticide status quo by charges of inaccuracy
or, with more sophistication, charges that Carson lacked the
specialized scientific background to properly interpret the
research she drew on”. What made Carson’s book so radical was
not its compilation of human health risks from indiscriminate use
of pesticides but its second challenge to the pesticide status

quo. It refocused the topic in biocentric, ecologistic terms.

 

N Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton 1962): 21-3,

" Carson had a master's degree in biology. The counter—attack
to Silent Spring is detailed in Frank Graham, Jr., Since Silent
Spring (Boston: Houghton 1970): 55-68.

164

Pesticides, Carson wrote, endanger the web of natural inter-

relationships of which humans are a part”.

The response to this aspect of her attack suggests that it
was the more keenly felt threat. One state department of
agriculture official placed her among the "vociferous,
misinformed group of nature-balancing, organic-gardening, bird—
loving, unreasonable citizenry that has not been convinced of the
important place of agricultural chemicals in our economy." 11ms
magazine accused her of a "mystical attachment to the balance of
nature."20

Carson, of course, was not the first ecologistic writer.
Proto-ecologistic ideas in the United States have been traced
back at least to Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) and George Perkins
Marsh, whose principal work was published in 1864. In language
presaging Carson's, Marsh wrote that the interrelatedness of
nature was extremely complex, "and we never know how wide a
circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when

we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life."21

Other important figures in American ecological thought included

 

” Carson 246-8; Graham unequivocally interprets Silsnt Spring
as an "ecological book," 53-5, his emphasis; for a similar but more
qualified judgment, see Nash, Riqsts of Naturs 80. I follow David
Oates in distinguishing between the science of ecology and the
worldvieW' of ecologism” "The ecological worldview is not a
science," according to Oates: "it is a belief system extrapolated
from one." Oates 5.

N Quoted in Graham 56, 69.

N Quoted in Nash, Rights of Nsture 38.

165

John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Muir was a counterforce to the
Progressive Conservation movement in the early 20th century,
breaking with Theodore Roosevelt in an unsuccessful effort to
prevent the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park from
being dammed to provide water to San Francisco”. Leopold's 1947
essay, "The Land Ethic" was a particularly influential statement
of ecologistic principles in the pre-Carson years. "We abuse
land," he wrote, "because we regard it as a commodity belonging
to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we
may begin to use it with love and respect."23
Ecologism has been a diverse intellectual movement. David
Oates has summarized the major themes of the ecologistic
worldview as seen from the perspective of the late 19803. These
include holism, or the habit of seeing wholes rather than
focusing analytically on parts; the inter-relatedness and oneness
of nature, a unity to which human beings belong; and the concepts
of balance, stability, diversity and cooperation. A common thread
is the biocentrism of these themes, as contrasted with the
anthropocentrism, or human-centeredness, of the dominant American
view of the relationship between humans and nature. Ecologistic

thinking, according to Oates, "wishes to place the human being

Eithlp the natural world, not above it."“

 

N Nash Wilderness 160-81.
N Quoted in Nash Rights of Nature 69.

N Oates 32-101; quotation 64.

166

Carson was not a complete or consistent biocentrist: As Nash
has pointed out, much of Silent Spring was traditionally human—
centered. Carson told her editor that in writing the book it had
been her intention "to give principal emphasis to the menace to
human health." Nevertheless, she continued, she increasingly
came to believe that the threat of pesticides to "the basic
ecology of all living things . . . outweighs by far . . . any

"25

other aspect of the problem. Silent Spring and the
controversy it occasioned have been widely credited both with

enlarging public interest in the pesticide controversy and with

vigorously injecting ecologistic ideas into the debate“.

Evidence of Carson's impact can be found in news of the
controversy attending publication of Silent Spring itself. A
convenient contrast can be made between coverage of Silsnt Spring
and of the "cranberry scare" three years earlier. Shortly before
Thanksgiving 1959, the government announced that residues of
aminotriazole, a weed killer that produces tumors in laboratory
animals, had been found on cranberries headed for the market.

The resulting controversy was conducted in anthropocentric terms
typical of other residue episodes, although it was more public.
New York Times coverage, for example, dealt largely with human
health and market economic issues surrounding the contamination.

Ecological issues, such as wetlands degradation resulting from

 

3 Quoted in Nash, Rights of Nsturs 80.

N Nash, Rights,of,Nsturs 55-82; Dunlap, 98—125.

APB“

 

167

the creation of large-scale commercial cranberry bogs, were not

exploredN.

Coverage of the Silent Spring controversy, however, included
both human-centered and biocentric concepts. Within the
biocentric framework, human health and welfare were still of
concern but were placed in the context of overall damage to the

environment, the "web of life,’ or the "balance of nature."
However, while press coverage reflected these differing

conceptual frameworks, it generally did not bring their

differences to the surface for analysis or discussion.

Of a dozen New York Times items on the publication of Silent
Spring which appeared from July through September 1962, four were
dominated by biocentric concepts, treating both Silent Spring's

warnings and its critics' responses in terms of "environment,"

the "balance of nature,‘ or harm to wildlife“. One of these, a

"Critic at Large" column by Brooks Atkinson, expounded

biocentrism concepts at length. "The basic fallacy," he wrote,

-- or perhaps the original sin -- is the assumption that
man can control nature. Nature returns with a massive
assault from an unexpected quarter. For nature has

 

27 on

Some of Cranberry Crop Tainted by Weed—Killer, U.S. Warns,"
N11 10 Nov. 1959: 1; Clarence Dean, "Cranberry Sales Curbed; U.S.
Widens Taint Check," _1IY_T 11 Nov. 1959: 1; "Cranberries," m 11 Nov.
1959: 34; William M. Blair, "Pesticides Both Boon and Threat," N11
22 Nov. 1959, D8.

N "Rachel Carson's Warning," 11112 July 1962: 28; John M. Lee,
"Silent Spring Is Now Noisy Summer," N11 22 July 1962: F1; Brooks
Atkinson, "Rachel Carson’s Articles on the Danger of Chemical Sprays
Prove Effective," m 11 Sept. 1962: 30; "Bird Haven Spurs a
Pesticide War," 111 23 Sept. 1962: 71.

168

devoted millions of years to creating an order of life in

which parasites and predators control one another.
Broadcast sprays to kill the gypsy moth and you kill

birds that feed on the gypsy moth, as well as the
pollinators -- chiefly bees -- that fertilize fruits and
berries. Broadcast sprays to kill the fire ant and you
kill wildlife that feeds on the fire ant. You also may
kill domesticated animals such as horses, sheep and sows:
And you will probably introduce poison into the milk that
humans consume. The supreme irony is that you do not
eliminate the gypsy moth or fire ant”.

During the same period, three items were dominated by an
anthropocentric outlook. Two were letters arguing whether dry
cleaners’ moth—proofing of clothing with DDT was a threat to
human health. A third reported comments by the head of an
industry-supported foundation attacking Silent Spring for failing
to stress that the nation’s food supply depended on chemicals”.
Other items appeared to mix biocentrism and anthropocentrism, but
without bringing their differences to the surface. Coverage of a
meeting of the American Chemical Society characterized Carson's
message ambiguously as the threat of pesticides to "life on
earth" and of "the extinction of mankind."31 The Times’ major
book review of Silent Spring, by Louis and Margery Milne, used

ecologistic terminology but strongly emphasized human health

 

N Atkinson, "Rachel Carson’s Articles on the Danger of
Chemical Sprays Prove Effective."

” Gerald Jonas, "DDT in Dry Cleaning," ltr NYT 26 July 1962:
26; Louis A. Kinum, "DDT’s Use in Dry Cleaning," ltr NYT 6 Sept.
1962: 30; "Rachel Carson Book Is Called One-Sided," NYT 14 Sept.
1962: 37.

N Walter Sullivan, "Chemists Debate Pesticides Book," NYT 13
Sept. 1962: 34.

169

effects. A comparison of the stress placed on human health by
Atkinson and the Milnes illustrates a difference between the
traditional human-centered and biocentric frameworks. "Poisoning

people is wrong," the Milnes begin their review:

Yet for the sake of "controlling" all kinds of insects, fungi
and weed pdants, people today are being poisoned on a
scale that the infamous Borgias never
dreamed of. Cancer-inducing chemicals
remain as residues in virtually everything
we eat or drink."

If current policies are not changed, they continue, chemical
contamination "will soon exterminate much of our wildlife and man

as well."32

Both Atkinson and the Milnes dealt with harm to humans and
nature, but for the latter the human aspect was in the
foreground -— and in the lead —— whereas for Atkinson the
possibility of human harm was one detail in a complex whole.
Coverage using both concepts was taking place simultaneously.
The 11mss and other members of the media were of course providing
information about environmental risk in covering the Silent
Spring controversy. Even more importantly, however, they had
become terrain on which a struggle was being carried out over the
terms of the controversy. What did environmental pollution pose
a risk pp? Human beings directly, or human beings as a part of
the "web of life?" The stakes were high. The status quo view of

pesticides had worked out ways to accommodate direct threats to

 

N Louis Milne and Margery’Milne, ”There’s Poison All Around Us
NYT Magazine 23 Sept. 1962: 1.

Now,

170

human health, but a biocentric approach cut deeper, under more
basic assumptions. The anthropocentric worldview had been a
powerful source of legitimation for the American stress on
material and economic growth. The ecologistic perspective,
because it called the wisdom of that emphasis into question,

challenged "basic American priorities and behavior."33

 

” Nash Rights of Nature 73; see also Robert Paehlke,
Environmentalism.and the Futurs of Progressive Politics (New Haven:
Yale UP 1989).

CHAPTER EIGHT: DEFOLIATION IN VIETNAM

I. Operation Ranch Hand

A similar kind of struggle for definition took place with the
other controversy out of which the dioxin dispute emerged, U.S.
defoliation and crop destruction in Vietnam from 1961 to 1971.
The goals of the program, called Ranch Hand, were to deny food
and forest cover to the enemy. U.S. troops sprayed approximately
19 million gallons of herbicide on as much as 10 percent of the
land area of South Vietnam in 20,000 missions. Peak years for
Ranch Hand were 1967-69. A half-dozen different herbicide
formulations were used, some directed toward rice crops, others
toward forest trees. One of the most heavily used defoliants was
a half-and-half mixture of 2,4,-D and 2,4,5-T, called Agent

Orange.

Critics of the program accused Ranch Hand of using starvation
as a weapon, inflicting suffering on civilians, violating the
Geneva protocol on chemical weapons, and, most prominently,
causing long-term, perhaps irreversible damage to the ecology of
South Vietnam. Eventually health risks to the South Vietnamese

and finally to American soldiers joined the list of issues, but

171

172

the initial concerns, raised by several American scientists,

focused most strongly on ecology.

Ranch Hand apparently was first reported in the Times in
accounts of U.S. military action in 1965, where it was described
as risky for flight crew members but effective in depriving the
enemy of cover and food}. North Vietnamese claims of illness and
death from the spraying were balanced by U.S. government
reassurances that the herbicides were "non-toxic."2 Beginning in
1968, coverage began to focus on threats to Vietnam’s soil,
forests and animal, bird and insect life. These concerns had
been raised by members of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science as early as 1966, and the goverment had
commissioned Midwest Research Institute to assess the likelihood
of long-term environmental harm in Vietnam by reviewing the
literature on domestic uses of 2,4,5-T. In 1968 it was news that
the institute reported no clear indications of long-term damage

to the "balance of nature" in Vietnam’.

The report, however, failed to allay concerns within AAAS,

whose board in July urged the United Nations to sponsor a new

 

’ Jack Raymond, "Weed Killers Aid War on Vietcong," New York
Times 28 March 1965: 2; Seth S. King, "Big U.S. Fire—Bomb Raid Hits
Vietcong Near Saigon," N11_ 1 April 1965: 1+; Charles Mohr,
"Defoliation Unit Lives Perilously," NYT 20 20 Dec. 1965: 3.

7 William Beecher, "U.S. Will Step Up Defoliation Missions in
Vietnam," NYT 10 Sept. 1966: 2.

3 Walter Sullivan, "Use of Herbicides by U.S. in Vietnam
Defended," NYT 4 Jan. 1968: 2; Sullivan, "War Defoliation Studied
in Report," NYT 7 Jan. 1968: 3.

173

study‘. In September a government scientist, Fred Tschirley,
reported finding ecological damage in Vietnam but concluded it
would not be permanent5. In December, the AAAS decided to carry
out its own study of "potential risks and benefits" of using
herbicides in war, although it would be another year before a
study director was appointedi. .Meanwhile, the Society for Social
Responsibility in Science had sent its own observers to Vietnam.
Their report combined a grim account of environmental devastation
with the observation that they themselves likely would have been

killed by enemy snipers were it not for Ranch Hand7.

Spot news coverage of these developments highlighted
ecological concerns. References to "ecology," "the environment"
or "the balance of nature" were common, sometimes in the lead.

In addition, several less event-oriented items had a biocentric
focus. One examined the impact of bombing, defoliation and other
aspects of the war on Vietnamese animal life, noting that

rhinoceroses had been driven out of the country and elephants

 

‘ Jane E. Brody, ”U.N. Study Urged on Defoliation," NYT 20 July
1968: 1+.

5 Douglas Robinson, "Study Finds Defoliants Change Vietnam

Ecology," NYT 21 Sept. 1968: 10.

5 Robert Reinhold, "Scholars: Study of ’Risks and Benefits’ of
the Use of Herbicides in War Is Sought," NYT 31 Dec. 1968: 16;
"Scientists Press Study of Defoliants in Vietnam," NYT 29 Dec. 1969:
25.

7 Sullivan, "Zoologist, Back From Vietnam, Notes Defoliants’
Value and Toll," NYT 4 April 1969: 5.

174

were being shot indiscriminately, sometimes from the air“.
Another explored an environmental issue raised in the Midwest
Research Institute report, the possibility that increased erosion
attendant on defoliation could lead to "laterization" or rock-
like hardening of the soil’. Early in 1970 the World Council of
Churches urged the United States to stop using weapons "which by
long-term damage to the soil and vegetation further endanger the
life of human beings." The 11mss editorialized for an end to

"ecocide"m.

II. The Bionetics Report

What spurred the government to act, however, was not
degradation of the ecology but direct risk to human health. In
1965 the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare had
commissioned Bionetics Research Laboratories of Litton Industries
to study the carcinogenic, teratogenic and mutagenic activity of
a variety of pesticides and industrial chemicals. One of the
pesticides studied was 2,4,5-T. Bionetics found that it caused

birth defects in laboratory mice and rats. In 1969 a critic of

 

‘7 Robinson, "Rhinoceroses and Elephants Are Among the War

Victims in South Vietnam," NYT 13 Sept. 1968: 16.

5 Sullivan, "Scientists Study Defoliated Areas," NYT 18 Feb.
1968: 5.

” "World Church Body Issues Plea to 4 Sides in Vietnam," NY

21 Feb. 1970: 9; ". . . And a Plea to Ban 'Ecocide,’" editorial, NY
26 Feb. 1970: 38.

fiat-3

a!

h:

be

P:

175

U.S. herbicide spraying in Vietnam, Harvard microbiologist Mathew
Meselson, called the study to the attention of the president’s
science adviser, Lee DuBridge, who soon after announced
restrictions on use of the herbicide both domestically and in

Vietnam“.

After the Bionetics results became public, stories stressing
human health risk began to appear more frequently. "Defoliants
Used in Vietnam Linked to Birth Defects," read the headline on an
account of scientists incorporating the Bionetics findings into a
report to the World Health Organization on chemical and
biological warfare”. In the same December 1969 convention in
which AAAS named a director for its study of the ecological
impact of defoliation, the organization’s council voted to urge
an immediate halt to the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Harvard
professor J. T. Edsall argued that the issue was too urgent to
await the outcome of the ecological study. Use of the
herbicides, he was quoted as saying, is "more seriously
questionable than the use of cyclamates" (artificial sweeteners

banned in 1969 as carcinogenic in laboratory animals)”.

 

‘1 Robert M. Smith, "U.S. Curbs Use of Weed Killer That
Produces Rat Deformities," NYT 30 Oct. 1969: 80.

” Sam Pope Brewer, "Defoliants Used in Vietnam Linked to Birth
Defects," NYT 6 Dec. 1969: 3.

” Reinhold, "Scientists Call for a Ban on 2 Vietnam
Defoliants," N11 31 Dec. 1969: 10. On cyclamates, see Philip F.
Lawler, Sweet Talk: Medis Coversge of Artificial Sweeteners
(Washington: Media Institute 1986): 11.

176

A story three months later reported the U.S. government was
taking with increasing seriousness South Vietnamese accounts of
birth defects, miscarriages, fever, sneezing, weakness, dizziness
and nausea“. When the U.S. military in Vietnam announced the
suspension of defoliation in June 1970, the wire—service story
cited possible "genetic dangers" to humans and "fetal
deformities" in laboratory animals, giving no hint that
ecological concerns figured in the controversy”. And in
December 1970, when the AAAS ecological study committee reported
back with a finding of "catastrophic effect" in Vietnam, the
coverage cited deformities in laboratory animals and threats to
human health along with threats to animals, birds, fish and

plants“.

In sum, news about defoliation after October 1969
increasingly took on a bi-focal character, with some items
emphasizing ecological concerns, some anthropocentric, and some
mixed. As in the Carson controversy, coverage had become terrain
for a struggle over the terms, ecological or anthropocentric, in

which the controversy was to be waged.

 

“ Ralph Blumenthal, "U.S. Shows Signs of Concern Over Effect
of 9-Year Defoliation Program in Vietnam," NYT 15 March 1970: 14.

“ "Weed Killer Curb Is Expanded by U.S.", NYT 2 May 1970: 33.

“ Sullivan, "Sprays in Vietnam Said to Level Fifth of Mangrove
Area," NYT 30 Dec. 1970: 1.

177

III. Searchlight on 2,4,5-T

In addition to complicating the defoliation debate, the
Bionetics findings shifted the news searchlight onto domestic use
of 2,4,5-T. Here too the struggle over issue definition is
apparent, with the difference that coverage of the domestic
controversy was markedly more anthropocentric. This was true
even when the expressed concerns of some participants were

ecological.

Four months after the Bionetics results were publicized, a
story reported that Arizonans exposed to 2,4,5-T sprayed in Tonto
National Forest to clear mesquite and increase water runoff for
irrigation complained of damage to animals, birds, plants -- and
themselves. The opening paragraphs report a resident’s fears
about illness among his goats, and the story mentions possible
damage to plants, wildlife and domestic animals. It does not
explore ecological issues raised by irrigation and manipulation
of rainwater runoff. Moreover, harm to animals and plants
functions as foreshadowing for a catalog of human ailments
suspected to have resulted from the spraying, including
respiratory ailments, chest pains, swelling feet, miscarriages
and hemorrhaging. "The evidence is not conclusive," the story
reported, "but the women blame the spray." De-emphasized by its
placement at story's end was the attempt by one source, a potter,

to put health risks in a biocentric context. "The real danger,"

178

Robert McKusick was quoted as saying, "is not to us or our
animals but to the environment. We can always move in or out,

but the environment is here to stay."”.

Ironically, a brief story appearing on the same day, eight
pages further back in the paper, signalled the start of the
transformation of these issues into the dioxin controversy
proper. In a four—paragraph wire-service article headlined
"Contaminant in Pesticide Linked to Defects in Mice," the
Agriculture Department was reported as blaming birth defects in
the Bionetics experiments not on 2,4,5-T but on an unnamed
contaminant, present in normal production runs at 1 part per
million but at "27 times as much" in the sample used by
Bionetics”. The contaminant was dioxin. In a further irony,
2,4,5-T manufacturers had called attention to dioxin in defense
of their product. After discovering its presence and dangers,
they said (in what was apparently the first 11mss_story to
specifically use the term "dioxin") that they had reduced
contamination to levels their research led them to believe was

safe”. If it was meant to put an end to the controversy, the

 

‘7 Steven V. Roberts, "Deformities and Hemorrhaging Laid to
Forest Spray in Arizona," NYT 8 Feb. 1970: 60.

” "Contaminant in Pesticide Linked to Defects in Mice," NYT 8
Feb. 1970: 68.

” Jerry M. Flint, "Dow Aides Deny Herbicides Risk," NYT 18
March 1970: 72.

179

move was unsuccessful. Attention shifted rapidly toward human

health effects as the risk and dioxin as the culprit.

In a crowded three-month period in 1970, in reaction to
Senate testimony that laboratory experiments had associated even
relatively "pure" 2,4,5-T with birth defects in animals, the
government suspended the registration of some uses of 2,4,5-T,
announced plans to cancel its use on food crops, suspended its
use in Vietnam, where it had continued in use in what the
military considered unpopulated areas, and banned its use on 500-
million acres of federal land". In addition to chronicling these
decisions, the newspaper reported on a petition by conservation
and consumer groups for even stronger action, as well as
criticism of the government’s actions by the president of Dow
Chemical Company“. In all these stories anthropocentric issues
dominate. The government is portrayed as reacting to the risk of
harm to human life, specifically birth defects and miscarriage,
as indicated by "abnormal development" in laboratory offspring,
while Dow President Herbert D. Doan is reported as offering
assurances that there is no hazard to health, although there is
"unnecessary public fear." The concerns about human health are
not placed in an ecological context, as they would have been if

the impact of herbicide use on plants, animals, other wildlife or

 

N "U.S. Curbs Sales of a Weed Killer," NYT 16 April 1970: 29.

N "Federal Ban Now Is Urged on Controversial Herbicide," NYT
30 April 1970: 27; Agis Salpukas, "Dow Fights Pollution," NYT 7 May
1970: 69.

180

agriculture had been mentioned. Terms commonly found in Vietnam
defoliation stories from the 1968-70 period, like "ecology" and
"balance of nature," do not appear in the domestic stories. Even
when the news is about actions by groups with an ecological
orientation, such as Friends of the Earth, the focus is
anthropocentricly on birth defects among laboratory mice and rats

and "monstrosities . . . in plants."22

Ranch Hand coverage began increasingly to raise direct human
health concerns along with ecological issues. The lead of an
account of unauthorized use of 2,4,5-T by the Americal Division
said the defoliant had been "identified as a factor in animal
birth defects.”3 A letter from a Philadelphia man claimed
chemical weapons had caused "deaths of women and children by
starvation . . . damaged the soil for an indefinite duration and
. . . caused birth defects."“ Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin
Democrat whose efforts to ban herbicide spraying in Vietnam were
primarily ecologistic, raised human health issues indirectly by

noting that the effect on humans and animals was an unknown”.

 

N E. W. Kenworthy, "5 Groups Ask Ban on Herbicide Use," NYT 19
July 1970: 34.

N Blumenthal, "U.S. Says Unit in Vietnam Used Banned
Defoliant," NYT 24 Oct. 1970: 3.

7‘ Mark Sacharoff, "Chemical Warfare as ’Humane Warfare,”
letter NYT 2 Nov. 1970: 46.

N Smith, "Senate, 62 to 22, Rejects Herbicide Ban for
Vietnam," NYT 27 Aug. 1970: 1.

181

The controversy came to a crisis in December, with nearly
simultaneous announcement of the AAAS study results and a White
House decision to phase out Ranch Hand by spring. A story
reporting study director Meselson’s presentation to the annual
meeting of AAAS emphasized damage to mangrove forests and the
hardships imposed on civilians by crop destruction, but also
dealt at length with direct human health effects. Coverage of
the White House decision to phase out Ranch Hand noted the risk
of 2,4,5—T to animals and humans“. Domestic and Vietnam facets
of the controversy came together in 1970, with the result that
the emphasis of defoliation coverage shifted toward the
anthropocentric concerns characteristic of the domestic

controversy.

IV. The Focus of Controversy Shifts

The decision by the Nixon Administration to end Ranch Hand
did not close the controversy, but rather shifted its focus to
efforts to retrospectively evaluate damage, assess blame and
decide how to dispose of surplus stocks of Agent Orange. One
retrospective damage assessment also stands as something of a
boundary marker in dioxin's emergence as an issue in its own

right: It was the first item indexed by the New York Times under

 

“ Richard D. Lyons, "Military to Curb Use of Herbicides," NYT
27 Dec. 1970: 5; Sullivan, "Sprays in Vietnam Said to Level Fifth
of Mangrove Area," NYT 30 Dec. 1970: 1.

182

dioxin as a separate heading. The article appeared on the
newspaper’s "op ed" page. Its author, Dr. George Perera, M.D.,
was a Columbia University medical professor who had delivered
medical supplies to Hanoi as part of an American Friends Service

Committee mission.

Perera said a North Vietnamese surgeon had told him of a
fivefold increase in cases of liver cancer treated in Hanoi in
the six years after the beginning of Ranch Hand. Perera
acknowledged that questions remained, but said the case

"N The article focused on human

implicating dioxin was "strong.
illness as a direct result of dioxin exposure. There was no

suggestion that humans were interdependent with the natural world
or that human welfare was related to the integrity of the system

as a whole. Nothing in the article was inconsistent with such

concepts, but reference to ecologistic concepts was absent.

The Perera piece, however, was the exception. In other items
on the aftermath of Ranch Hand in Vietnam, health effects were
mentioned side by side with damage to the environment, and in
others ecologistic concerns predominated. A Herbert Mitgang
column on the possibility that herbicide stocks might be turned
over to South Vietnam listed the casualities of environmental

warfare in Vietnam: "Uprooted trees uproot peasants, herbicide

 

N George Perera, "Vietnam: A Medical Consequence of War," NYT
19 Sept. 1972: 33.

183

assaults lead to possible sterility, bulldozing plants harvests

fields of hunger."N

Similarly, coverage of a National Academy of Sciences
followup of Meselson's AAAS study, while concentrating on
ecology, noted that the NAS report cited anecdotal evidence of
children dying in areas where crops had been sprayed. "One theory
. . . implicates dioxin" in the children’s death, according to
the story”. Coverage of the Department of Defense response to
the Meselson report portrayed the department as responding
entirely to the ecological findings, albeit with arguments that
were economically anthropocentric: DOD argued the permanence of
damage to the mangroves could not be demonstrated, but that
defoliation may have benefitted the South Vietnamese economy by

facilitating logging”.

Even more ecologistically focused was a 1972 story disclosing
that the United States had sprayed defoliants in 1966-67 as part
of attempts to create fire storms in South Vietnamese forested
areas. The disclosure, the 11mss reported, came at a time of
"mounting concern" among scientists and government officials that

years of defoliation, bombing and burning had wreaked

 

N Herbert Mitgang, "A Dying Land -- Casualty of War," NYT 10
Oct. 1971: E2; see also Mitgang, "The Spoor of Nam," NYT 3 Dec.
1974: 41.

N John W. Finney, "Vietnam Defoliation Scars Expected to Last
a Century," NYT 22 Feb. 1974: 1+.

5° Dana Adams Schmidt, "Pentagon Disputes Study of Spraying
Devastation," NYT 9 Jan. 1971: 3.

184

irreversible damage on the Vietnamese environment”. In the same
vein was wire-service coverage of Barry Commoner's proposal for
American scientists to provide money and technical services to
help establish a North Vietnamese agricultural botany research
institute to help Indochina recover from the consequences of
environmental warfare”. In sum, although dioxin and human
health risks had become issues introduced frequently into the
controversy over effects of Ranch Hand in Vietnam, they did not
crowd out the broader ecologistic concerns, nor did they dominate
the discussion. The ecologistic conceptual framework continued

to be pertinent.

V. Domestic Coverage Was Anthropocentric

By contrast, accounts of the domestic 2,4,5-T controversy
were dominated by discussion of its potential to cause birth
defects or cancer in humans. Just as in coverage of the
Vietnamese controversy, some stories mentioned 2,4,5-T’s
ecological effects alongside human health risks. When opposition
by the Sierra Club and others forced the U.S. Forest Service to
cancel plans to spray 2,4,5-T, opponents of the spraying were

said to fear "human birth defects and miscarriages, destruction

 

N Reinhold, "U.S. Attempted to Ignite Vietnam Forests in '66-
67," NYT 21 July 1972: 1+.

N "Scientists to Help Indochina Recover From Deforestation,"
NYT 11 Nov. 1973: 5.

185

of soil organisms and genetic mutations in animals."33 In 1974,
scientists at the Federal Center for Disease Control identified
dioxin as the substance that had killed more than 50 horses and
many other animals in Missouri in 1971, as well as making

children ill“.

Stories in which the ecologistic dimension predominated were
in the minority, however. More clearly anthropocentric was
coverage when residents of the Tonto National Forest area sued
the government in June 1971, claiming herbicide spraying in the
forest in 1959 had drifted onto their ranches, damaging their
"property and personal health." Harms mentioned included
deformed animals, dead or damaged trees and shrubs, sterile
ground, and human miscarriages, infertility and birth defects”.
In an earlier story, potter Robert McKusick’s ecological concerns
were de-emphasized by their placement at the end of a story whose
headline emphasized animal deformities and human illness. A year
later the lawsuit further de-emphasized ecology by treating the

damaged animals, plants and land as human property, a shift in

 

N "Foes of Spraying Win Coast Round," NYT 11 July 1971: 20.

N "Deaths of Animals Laid to Chemical," NYT 28 Aug. 1974: 36.

N "Arizonans Sue U.S. for $4-Million Loss in Forest Spraying,"

NYT 9 June 1971: 20.

186

focus perhaps influenced by the need to allege property or

personal damage to gain legal standing”.

Even the article from this period that most thoroughly
explored ecologistic issues characterized them as less important
than human health risks. When a group of Arkansas residents and
environmentalists obtained an injunction to stop the U.S. Forest
Service from spraying herbicides in the Ozark and St. Francis
National Forests to kill native hardwoods and encourage more
marketable evergreens, the story highlighted twin concerns --
possible ecological damage from "changing the fundamental nature

of a forest,‘ and the fear of health effects from dioxin
exposure. Both concerns were given roughly equal prominence,
but the story reported, without offering specific support, that

the residents themselves were "more concerned" about health

threats than ecologistic issues”.

Health issues are unequivocally the focus in stories
chronicling efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to
regulate 2,4,5-T. Soon after the April 1970 suspension by the
Department of Agriculture of some uses of 2,4,5—T, responsibility

for regulating the product shifted to the newly created

 

N On this point see Christopher Bosso, gssticides and
Politics: The Life cycle of a Pubklic Issue (Pittsburgh: U of
Pittsburgh P 1987): 41—42;, and Barry Casper and Paul Wellstone,
"Science Court on Trial in Minnesota," Science in Context: Readings
in the Sociology of Science ed. Barry Barnes and David Edge
(Cambridge: MIT P 1982): 282-9.

N Roy Reed, "Herbicide Use in Ozark Forests Challenged," NYT
14 July 1975: 40.

187

Environmental Protection Agency. EPA announced in March 1971
that other uses of 2,4,5-T would not be suspended pending a one-
year review of its safety. Administrator William Ruckelshaus
held that the herbicide was not an "imminent" hazard to humans”.
Three years later the agency announced it was withdrawing legal
motions seeking a ban of remaining uses of 2,4,5-T, on the
grounds of insufficient scientific evidence. Coverage focused on
whether use of the herbicide posed a threat to human health”, as
did a story about testimony by an EPA research leader, Dr. Dianne
Courtney, that appears to have introduced into the controversy
what would become a widely used soubriquet. Dioxin, she told a
Senate Commerce subcommittee, is "by far the most toxic compound

known to mankind.”0

By 1975, then, something that could be identified as a
"dioxin controversy" focused on human health effects had
developed out of a complex strand of issues involving the U.S.
defoliation program in Vietnam and domestic use of herbicides.
While ecologistic concerns raised as part of these earlier issues
did not disappear after dioxin came on the scene, they

increasingly had to share the news searchlight with dioxin’s

 

7' Kenworthy, "Full DDT Ban Is Refused Pending Review of
Safety," NYT 19 March 1971: 1+.

N Boyce Rensberger, "E.P.A. Ends Drive to Ban Defoliant," NYT
27 June 1974: 8.

“ David Burnham, "Scientist Urges Congress to Bar Any Use of
Pesticide 2,4,5-T," NYT 10 Aug. 1974: 13.

188

threat to human health, and they claimed nowhere near the
spectacular media attention given to dioxin in the early 19803,
when the issues whose development is traced here were further
transformed into such controversies as Agent Orange and Times
Beach. Moreover, there was a distinct difference in the
treatment of the Vietnam and domestic aspects of the controversy,
with ecologistic issues more frequently explored in regard to

Vietnam than in regard to the United States.

VI. Significance of Dioxin's Emergence

What was the significance of the emergence of dioxin and

human health effects as focal points of controversy?

A naive interpretation would be that research had uncovered
the existence and risk of dioxin, and that the media simply
reported events as they happened. There may be some truth in
that, but the record suggests a more complex reality. The
existence of a highly toxic impurity in 2,4,5-trichlorophenol,
the manufacturing precursor of 2,4,5-T, had been known since at
least 1950, and the impurity was identified as dioxin in the open
scientific literature (although in German) in 1961“. The
Bionetics research linking 2,4,5-T to birth defects came to
public attention some time after the research was conducted,

through a series of leaks initiated by a Ralph Nader associate.

 

‘1 R. W. Bovey and A. L. Young, The Science offi2,4,5-T and
Associates Phenoxy Herbicides (New York: Wiley 1980): 5, 26 n. 3.

189

Virtually ignored in the coverage analyzed here was the record of
illness resulting from industrial exposure to 2,4,5-T and related
compounds, despite its presence in the open scientific

literature. Among the very few references to worker exposure in
the material analyzed in this chapter was reassurance from a
government research administrator that herbicides in use in
Vietnam had caused no known cases of death or serious injury,
"even in factories where large amounts" are processed”. The
emergence of the dioxin controversy represented something other

than systematic journalistic coverage of events as they happened.

A contrasting interpretation, equally naive, is that the
dioxin controversy emerged because it involved emotion-laden
threats to human health that could be treated simplistically and
exploited to sell newspapers. While there may be some truth here
as well, the record again suggests a multi-dimensional reality.
The 11mss covered the Silent Spring controversy in part in terms
of broad ecologistic concerns with less potential for
exploitation than cancer and birth defects. The Brooks Atkinson
column, in particular, was an attempt to Clearly lay out the
ecologistic framework for a lay audience. Similarly, after the
Bionetics report and the introduction of dioxin into the
controversy, coverage did not immediately leap on the human
health effects issues. Instead, the coverage oscillated between

human-centered and ecologistic frameworks.

 

“ Sullivan, "Use of Herbicides by U.S. in Vietnam Defended."

190

A more plausible interpretation is that the human health
questions raised in the Bionetics study had tactical value in the
ongoing controversies over the Vietnam war and pesticide use at
home. For opponents of defoliation in Vietnam as well as
domestic critics of spraying, bringing up human health concerns
was consistent with the research and the observed facts, and not
inconsistent with their biocentrism: Humans are, after all, a
part of the biota. In addition, herbicide critics can hardly be
blamed for having observed that the government was more
responsive to claims of harm to human health than to the balance
of nature, as evidenced by DuBridge’s quick action to limit
2,4,5—T use after the Bionetics findings were brought to his

attention.

For 2,4,5-T’s manufacturers, the introduction of dioxin into
the controversy was a move designed to defend the product.
Historically less attuned to ecologism than to the human health
issues dealt with in industrial hygiene research, industry argued
that it had successfully identified and then taken steps to limit
or eliminate the source of a problem. For government regulators,
the new focus on herbicides represented by the emergence of the
dioxin controversy was an extension of concerns about
insecticides. Controversial gypsy moth and fire ant eradication
programs and a Mississippi River fish kill traced to endrin had

put the media searchlight initially on DDT and other

191

insecticides“, but regardless of whether their targets were
insects or plants, many of the postwar synthetic chemicals were
chemically similar chlorinated hydrocarbons. Extending the
investigation of health risks to include herbicides, as HEW did
in commissioning the Bionetics study, seemed to make scientific

and regulatory sense.

For the press, the emergence of human health effects and
dioxin as the focus of controversy had several features that
dovetailed with news imperatives: direct impact on people, as
opposed to the animals, birds and insects of biocentric concern;
origination in sources considered authoritative, in contrast with
the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front claims of
human harm; and, in the leakage of the Bionetics results, the
unauthorized use of herbicides by the Americal Division, and the
disclosure of attempts to create huge firestorms in the
Vietnamese forests, elements of watchdog and investigative

journalism“.

As suggested earlier, institutions played a role in
structuring the terms in which the controversies were covered.
Much of the news about Ranch Hand concerned the AAAS and NAS

studies, the missions of which were to evaluate the environmental

 

“ Bosso, 79-108.

“ See Dorothy Nelkin, §slling Science: How ths Press Covers
Science and Technology (New York: Freeman 1987): 109-31; and Sharon
M. Friedman, "The Journalist’s World," Scientists and Journalists:
Nsporting Science ssgNews eds. Friedman, Sharon Dunwoody and Carol
L. Rogers (New York: Free P 1986).

192

impact of defoliation. By contrast, EPA’s dual mission is to
protect human health and the environment, and the law under which
pesticides are regulated requires a finding of imminent harm to
humans before a registration can be suspended“. Individual
participants in the controversies may have been anthropocentric
or ecological in their concerns, but the institutions through
which these disputes reached the press and the public exerted

their own biases.

The emergence of the dioxin controversy, with its bias
toward anthropocentrism, had ideological significance as well.
It is in this sense that the coverage served as a site for
struggle over issue definition, or what British media scholar
Stuart Hall terms "the power to signify events."“ In its stress
on human dominance over nature for human ends, anthropocentrism
has been and remains a powerful legitimator of the American
ideology of industrial capitalist democracy, with its emphasis on
material and economic growth. The ecologistic perspective calls
the wisdom of that emphasis into question. The pesticide
controversy, which had taken place largely within
anthropocentrism until the 19603, took a turn with Silent Spring

toward issues that challenged basic American priorities and

 

“ Kenworthy, "Full DDT Ban Is Refused Pending Review."

“ Stuart Hall, "The Rediscovery of ’Ideology’: Return of the
Repressed in Media Studies, " Culture, Society amg_Media eds. Michael
Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and Janet Woollacott (London:
Methuen 1982): 56-90.

193

behaviors. Introduction of dioxin into the controversy, while
providing those with ecologistic concerns with ammunition, also
offered others an opportunity to turn the pesticide controversy

back the other way.

While the domestic/2,4,5-T dispute was predominantly
anthropocentric, the Ranch Hand controversy was not. There, the
emergence of dioxin added a complicating dimension but did not
significantly recast the controversy in anthropocentric terms.
Differences in the context in which 2,4,5-T was used in the two
situations may help to explain why. Domestically, the threat
could be met with a time-honored solution, the same one offered
earlier in the century for arsenicals: Pesticides could be made
safe by ensuring they were carefully applied in accordance with
manufacturers’ directions. Since these were based on laboratory
experiments aimed at determining safe levels of human exposure,
the argument could be made that human health was protected and
criticism resulted from emotionalism and hysteria. Thus the
controversy could take place on the same familiar terrain of
hard-to-prove illness causation and inconclusive scientific
studies that had been the site of pesticide controversy since the
late nineteenth century. What anthropocentric framing of the
controversy suppressed, however, was what biocentrists saw as
entrenched patterns of ecological damage resulting from the

American way of life.

194

Because of the exigencies of combat in Vietnam, it was more
difficult to argue -- although the military tried -- that Agent
Orange was applied discriminately and with due care for human
health and life. Moreover, Vietnam was an agricultural nation
with an environment relatively untransformed by
industrialization. To fight defoliation there was to attempt to
prevent further damage, rather than to point to Humpty-Dumpty’s
pieces at the base of the wall. The ecological perspective also
offered a way to oppose the war on grounds different from those
of the North Vietnamese, who had long claimed people were
poisoned by U.S. spraying. Most significantly perhaps, in its
Vietnamese context, ecological framing was consistent with
solutions which, if difficult and controversial, were still short
of fundamental social and economic change: The United States
could end Ranch Hand, and it could end the war, and did, without
fundamental social and economic change at home. What ecological
framing of the defoliation controversy tended to suppress was (as
in the domestic controversy) the connection between ecological

damage and fundamental aspects of the American way of life.

That issue was raised but rarely in the Times’ defoliation
coverage. A story on the 1972 United Nations Conference on Human
Environment in Stockholm detailed Swedish Premier Olaf Palme’s
criticism of U.S. "ecological warfare" in Vietnam, and then
reported questions raised by a rival, unofficial group called Dai

Dong about the "fundamental conflict between traditional concepts

195

of economic growth and the preservation of the environment." The
group called for "a technology review and surveillance system to
assure that any new technology is ecologically compatible and

will be used for human survival and fulfillment.“7

A story the next day reported the U.S. rebuke of Palme for
”politicizing . . . our environmental discussion" and its
dismissal of Dai Dong’s criticism with the argument that
technological advance was the key to cleaning up the environment.
The clash between the two perspectives was dealt with summarily
and not pursued“. As in the domestic 2,4,5—T controversy, the
way the issue was framed in news coverage raised important

questions while suppressing even more difficult ones.

 

N Gladwin Hill, "Draft Calls for Ecological Responsibility,"
NYT 7 June 1972: 3.

“ Hill, "U.S., at U.N. Parley on Environment, Rebukes Sweden
for ’Politicizing' Talks," NYT 8 June 1972: 13.

PART V

The Mature Controversy

CHAPTER NINE: SEVESO AND JOURNALISM'S ’ENDURING VALUES'

I. Ecologistic Perspectives

The controversy had taken a decisive turn in Vietnam. It had

become the "dioxin controversy,’ and its terms had become
somewhat less ecologistic, somewhat more centered on long-term
human health effects, particularly cancer and birth defects.
This transformation continued in news coverage of the Seveso
disaster of 1976 and its aftermath. News coverage of Seveso
created a richly textured controversy, by no means restricted to

the issues of cancer and birth defects, but it was also one in

which ecologistic perspectives were marginalized.

They were not entirely absent, to be sure. In his reports in
the New Yorker, for example, Thomas Whiteside emphasized that
Seveso was a community in an ecological sense -- a place where
people lived in complex and close association not only with each
other but with dogs, breeder rabbits and vegetable gardens.
Whiteside’s articles, later turned into a book, portrayed the
release of trichlorophenol not solely as a threat to human
health, but as a threat to a community inclusive of humans and of

much else besides.

197

198

Although much of the seven hundred acres on which the
visible part of the cloud seemed to have settled consisted
of market-gardening plots and fields on which crops such

as grain were raised and on which cows were grazed, the
area was inhabited by about five thousand people, most of
them artisans from southern Italy (particularly from
Sicily) and their families, generally large’.

"Bird life appeared to have been devastated," he wrote in a
memorable image of the catastrophe. "(F)ields, gardens, and
orchards were littered with the carcasses of swallows, martins,
warblers and goldfinches, also with those of thousands of rats,

mice, and moles."2

Other writers raised ecologism’s challenge to industrial
capitalism in political terms. A long article in the New York
Times Magazine by Melton S. Davis said Seveso had raised
"profound questions about modern technology and scientifically

3 The article noted that Seveso had stimulated

induced progress."
interest in environmentalism in Italy, a point also made a year
later by a U.S. News & World Report story on the continuing
"physical, economic and emotional aftermath of Italy’s worst
environmental disaster." Italian communities are "resisting

industrial projects they fear could become contaminating," the

article said, quoting the Milan newspaper, Corriera della Serra:

Seveso has shaken public opinion much more than a hundred
speeches about ecology . . . . Although (factory) chimneys

 

1 Thomas Whiteside, The Pendulum and the Tomic Cloud: The

Course of Dioxin Contamination (New Haven: Yale UP 1979): 32.
2 Whiteside, Pendulum 38.

5 Melton S. Davis, "Under the Poison Cloud," Nsw York Times
Magazine 10 Oct. 1976: 20+.

199

smell like jobs, if the stink is dioxin we now know that
no increase in employment can make up for the harm it
does."‘

The liberal weekly Nation published perhaps the most wide-
ranging ecologistic indictment of industrialization to come out
of the Seveso disaster. Drawing on two of the most powerful of
ecologistic images, American painter Edith Schloss wrote that
Italy was once the garden of Europe but had become the
continent's garbage dump. A number of environmental
depredations, intertwined with political and cultural problems,
are listed. Among them are chemical factories polluting the Po
river, high mortality rates in a town where a factory emits toxic
substances, and vineyards and orchards destroyed near rice
plantations treated with herbicides. Schloss quotes an Italian

Communist environmentalist writing in Corriere dells Serra:

The problems are not solved by promises of
decontamination, as the present government seems to
believe . . . but by a profound political change (after
which) the structure of an industry based on petroleum by-
products, created with public funds, exporting to other
countries, operating with maximum expenditure of energy,
minimum employment and a high rate of pollution, must be
radically re-evaluated. And the concept of ’progress'
must then be re-examined by institutions able to work for
the benefit of all."5

 

‘ D. B. Richardson, "Seveso -- One Year Later," U.S. News &
World Report 1 Aug. 1977: 44-5.

5 Edith Schloss, "The Poisoning of Italy," Nation 16 Oct. 1976:
362-5.

200

II. The Enduring Values of the News

For the most part, however, news about Seveso portrayed a
different kind of world, one in which responsible leaders, with
science and technology at their disposal, worked more or less
effectively to clean up and limit the damage from an admittedly
severe pollution problem, despite difficulties posed by an unruly
and sometimes even irrational public. In such a world the themes
of technological threat to ecological community, of dioxin as a
symptom of fundamental societal disarray, were virtually
irrelevant. What was relevant was the job at hand -- to clean up
the contamination, monitor the health of residents and improve
procedures so nothing similar would happen in the future. News
about Seveso was dominated, in brief, by coverage fitting the
reformist pattern of what sociologist Herbert Gans has called the

"enduring values" of the news‘.

Gans carried out participant-observer research in
professional newsrooms in the 19603 and 19703, contemporaneously
with much of the dioxin controversy. He identified a number of
values that comprise journalism’s underlying "picture of nation
and society as it ought to be," and found these values entering

into decisions about what becomes news and how it is reported.

 

‘ Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening
News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, snd Time (New York: Pantheon
1979): 41.

201

The most important, setting aside such universal norms as peace

and prosperity, were

* Moral and social order: The news reflects respect for
authority and for other enduring values, and concern for

social cohesion.

* Leadership: It values moral, competent leadership as the

way to maintain moral and social order.

* Ethnocentrism: American journalism values its own country

above others.

* .Altruistic democracy: It believes politics should be
based on the public interest and public service, and that

citizens should participate at the grass-roots level.

* Responsible capitalism: The news believes business should
compete, without exploiting workers or customers, to

create more prosperity for all.

* Small-town pastoralism: It values nature, smallness, and
old-fashioned technologies; these values, however, may be
surrogates for a more general value, respect for

tradition.

* Individualism: The news values the preservation of
individualism against the encroachments of government and

society.

202

*’ Moderatism: While it values individualism, however, it
discourages excess or extremism, both by individuals and
groups7.

These values, according to Gans, are in turn part of a
"paraideology" that is "neither entirely consistent nor well
integrated . . . but is ideology nonetheless." The somewhat old-
fashioned, centrist ideology of the news, he concludes, is
Progessive and reformist. Its resemblance to the Progressive

movement of the early twentieth century

is often uncanny, as in the common advocacy of honest,
meritocratic, and anti-bureaucratic government, and in the
shared antipathy to political machines and demagogues,
particularly of populist bent. Altruistic democracy is,
in other words, close to the Progressive ideal of
government. The notion of responsible capitalism is also
to be found in Progressivism, as is the dislike of
bigness, the preference for craftsmanship over technology,
the defense of nature, and the celebration of anti—urban
pastoral society. Journalistic paraideology and
Progressivism are further akin in their mutual support of
individualism, their uneasiness about collective
solutions, other than at the grassroots level, and their
opposition to socialism. Moreover, the preservation of an
upper-class and upper—middle-class social order, like the
need for morally and otherwise competent national
leadership, has its equivalents in Progressive thought“.

 

7 Gans Deciding What's News1_39—69; see also Werner J. Severin
with James W. Tankard Jr. , Communication Theories: Origins, Methods,
Uses, 2d ed. (New York: Longman 1988): 228-31.

° Gans Deciding What’s Negs 68-9.

203

III. Why Seveso Was News

Analysed in the light of Gans’ enduring values, Seveso was
news because the release of trichlorophenol represented a
disturbance of social order by modern technology, necessitating
evacuation, harming human health and posing the danger of even
more serious health threats. That it happened in a community
that could be represented as small and pastoral leant added news
value, as did the plight of individuals whose lives were
disrupted. It was news of moral disorder in that the accident
might have resulted from negligence and that industry had covered
up or reacted slowly. In other words, the norm of responsible

capitalism had been violated.

Leadership -- scientific, business, governmental —- was
necessary to restore order. The authority of science as a basis
for leadership was particularly important. When leadership
seemed to be lacking, as in the apparent confusion of Italian
authorities, the lack represented a threat to the norm; when
leadership was forthcoming the threat was averted. Responses of
the stereotypically portrayed Italians also allowed ethnocentric
comparisons with Americans, whose offers of help and scientific
data became news. Meanwhile, it was also necessary to report on
extremist reactions to the disaster, as well as on a populace
whose behavior was sometimes unruly -- representing, even in

Italy, a threat to the American value of altruistic democracy.

204

From a journalistic perspective, there was much more to be done
than simply to convey accurate information about risk -- and
unless one lived in the vicinity of a similar chemical plant,

risk information had little direct relevance for American readers

anyway.

IV. Social Disorder

Social disorder in the face of technological threat is a
major theme of reformist accounts of Seveso. These accounts
share some common ground with ecologistic treatments: Modern
technology is perceived as a problem in both, and both emphasize
the concept of community. In reformist accounts, however,
community is conceived in anthropocentric terms, de-emphasizing
the participation of animals and plants. Reformist accounts
likewise generally lack an explicit analysis in which the
technological problem is tied to structural features of modern
industrial capitalism. They instead portray the technological
threat as descending suddenly, as if from the outside, on
traditionally and even stereotypically conceived pastoral

communities.

This approach is often embodied in narrative techniques that
tell the story through the eyes of ordinary people. In its first
account of the disaster, for example, Newsweek emphasized the
suddenness with which dioxin intruded on a scene of traditional

domesticity.

205

In the little town of Seveso, Giuseppina Senno could
recall the precise moment on July 10 when it all began.
"Suddenly I saw a white cloud, like steam, shoot up from
the Icmesa factory, and then I smelled a nauseating odor .
. . . I called the children into the house and closed the
doors, but the smoke and smell were already in the
house."’

11mg began its account with a post-explosion scene of social
disruption, villagers loading possessions into automobiles or
hand-drawn carts and fleeing the area, leaving behind a wasteland
of dead animals, barbed wire and soldiers on guard. The account
flashes back to the explosion, then moves forward

chronologically, again through the eyes of ordinary people.

Already accustomed to smoke from the factories that
have sprung up in the region in the last decade, nearby
townspeople at first paid little attention to the white
chemical cloud. But they could not ignore it for long.
"The wind carried it here," recalls Vinicio Lazzaretti of
the small town of San Pietro. "I couldn’t breathe. It
made my eyes water. The next day all the leaves and
plants and flowers were riddled with small holes, as if
they had been struck with tiny hailstones."1°

Telling the Seveso story in this way emphasizes the contrast
between the "natural" characteristics of small-town, pastoral
existence on the one hand, and the suddenly appearing chemical
threat, which "riddles" the natural world of leaves and flowers,
on the other. A similar effect is achieved by contrasting
technical terminology with the ordinariness of the consumer
products that eventually resulted, in a sentence that also

associates the world of chemicals and technology with "Seveso's

 

5 Raymond Carroll, with Loren Jenkins, "Our Own Hiroshima,"

Newsweek 16 Aug. 1976: 49.

m "The Deadly Cloud," Time 16 Aug. 1976: 39.

 

 

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206

nightmare." The nightmare "originated at Icmesa, a chemical
plant that makes trichlorophenol, which is used in manufacturing
disinfectant soaps and deodorants." The world of the familiar is
even more starkly juxtaposed with a symbol of science—as-threat
in the comment of a regional health minister that dioxin

contamination at Seveso had become "our own little Hiroshima.”11

V. The Public Threat

These accounts draw on the enduring values of social order
and small-town pastoralism for their power as news. In other
stories the threat to social order came from another quarter -- a
mistaken or even irrational public. Though the public in this
case was European and not American, the coverage serves to warn
of a flaw in the ideology of democratic government -- the
possibility that ordinary people may be too uninformed or

irrational to govern themselves intelligently.

In an article on parent company Hoffmann-La Roche’s
liabilities in the wake of the accident, for example, Business
Egg; reported that Swiss and West German customers were refusing
to take shipments of goods from the area, "even when they
originate in parts of the region that were unaffected by the

gas." In addition, the disaster

has touched off a xenophobic attitude toward
multinationals in Italy. Lurid wall posters are showing

 

“ Carroll, Jenkins, "Our Own Hiroshima."

 

 

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207

up throughout the country, denouncing multinationals for
poisoning not only Seveso, but the world's environment”.

The article presents dioxin as a fairly serious health threat,
"known to cause extensive kidney, liver and lung damage." Yet
the text devalues the threat by contextualizing it within a theme

of public over-reaction to the chemical.

Chemical Week offers a similar illustration. Reporting on
additional cases of Chloracne that turned up among children seven
months after the explosion, the magazine suggested two possible
causes, exposure from the original fallout or "people breaking
through the flimsy fence barricading Zone A" (the evacuated zone
closest to the plant). As in the ggginess Week article, dioxin
was portrayed as a serious health threat -- but here a threat
worsened by the public’s tendency to ignore facts and disobey
authorities. Zone A was a wasteland, according to the text, yet
"its residents, still unimpressed by the dangers of dioxin, have
persisted in returning to their contaminated homes in recent

months."13

 

” "The Costly Aftermath of a Poison Cloud," Businesg;Week 11
Oct. 1976: 32-3.

13

"Toxic Effects Persist," Chemical Week 23 Feb. 1977: 22.

 

 

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208

VI. Ethnocentrism

Victims of the disaster were not the only ones portrayed as
unruly. In a story dovetailing with ethnocentric journalistic
values, the New York Times highlighted jurisdictional conflicts
between local and regional authorities, headlining the story
”Italians Wrangle Over Poison Issue."“ Several other stories
portrayed the Italians as not handling the disaster well, often
suggesting that they needed help from the United States. The New
York Times' second story on Seveso drew on a U.S. authority for
information that dioxin was the focus of concern, and reported
that a decontamination expert from the U.S. Department of

Agriculture was being dispatched”.

A month and a half after the explosion, Chemicalfi;

 

Engineering News reported that Italians were unsure of what had
happened and had fallen prey to rumors and confusion. Among the
rumors: That flamethrowers would "destroy everything within the
contaminated zone;" that the plant was making chemical warfare
agents for the United States or NATO; that the new Italian
government was floundering. "Some clarity on what happened" was

provided by two U.S. scientists who went to Italy to assess the

 

14

"Italians Wrangle Over Poison Issue," NYT 4 Aug. 1976: 9.

” ”20 More Evacuated From Area in Italy Hit by Poison," NYT 29
July 1976: 3.

209

incident, offer suggestions on decontamination and help set up a

medical program“.

The same article contrasted the Italian plant with an
"automated," "fail-safe" U.S. operation, quoting Dow Chemical Co.
official Etcyl H. Blair as saying a shut-down of trichlorophenol
manufacture because of Seveso "never even crossed our minds."
Both Sgience News and Chemical & Engineering News reported that
two U.S. scientists, Barry Commoner and Robert E. Scott, had sent
the Italians data generated in the United States on dioxin’s
toxicity, solubility and decomposition in soil. "U.S. Data on

Dioxin May Aid Italian Town," headlined the latter”.

VII. Leadership

American scientists represented one kind of leadership that
could restore order to the chaotic situation, but there were
others as well. Reflecting daily journalism's event-orientation
and its standard procedure of gathering news from government
sources, the story as told in a number of New York Times articles
in 1976 and 1977 emphasized a theme of government leaders -- and

in one instance, business leaders -- taking action. The

 

1‘ Rebecca L. Rawls and Dermot A. O'Sullivan, "Italy Seeks

Answers Following Toxic Release," Chemical 8 Engineering News 23

1" "U.S. Data on Dioxin May Aid Italian Town," Chemical 5
Engineering News 29 Nov. 1976: 4; "Dioxin Toxicity Data Sent to Aid
Italy," Science News 4 Dec. 1976: 359.

 

 

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210

newspaper's first story on the incident, a three-paragraph brief,
carried the headline "179 Italians to Be Moved from Poison Gas

Area."m Subsequent stories with this theme reported

* A meeting of the Italian prime minister and cabinet to

discuss the problem”;

* Government approval of a $48 million emergency fund for

decontamination and health measures";

* Announcement by the justice minister that pregnant women in
the area could take advantage of exceptions in the law to obtain

abortions“;

* Announcement by officials that six women have obtained
abortions and nine more are seeking them, along with the
announcement that warrants were issued for the arrest of three

company officials”.

* A decision by regional and trade union officials to close

the factory”;

 

" "179 Italians to Be Moved From Poison Gas Area," NYT 25 July
1976: 15, my emphasis.

1’ Christina Lord, "Italian Leaders Take Up Poison Chemical
Problem," NYT 31 July 1976: 3.

” "Italy Allocates Funds for Gassed Region," NYT 11 Aug. 1976:
2.

“ "Comment on Abortion," NYT 22 Aug. 1976: 2.
” "Six More Italians Undergo.Abortion," NYT 20 Aug. 1976: D17.

” ”Polluting Factory in Italy Will Close," NYT 21 Aug. 1976:

211

* A request that the government send in troops to prevent

people from returning to their homes in the evacuated area“;

* Announcement by authorities that 19 factories would be
temporarily closed for tests after new dioxin contamination was

found”;

* Announcement that 24 families were "allowed" to return home

after 14 months“.

* Announcement that Givaudan, a Hoffmann-La Roche subsidiary
that owned ICMESA, had set up a center in Milan to settle damage
claims, and that the parent company had already paid more than $2

million in damages”.

Dioxin thus was portrayed as a health threat that called on
government and business leaders, including those at the highest
levels, to enforce the law, take preventive action, provide funds
and compensation and, perhaps most prominently, manage the
populace by evacuating them, giving them limited approval to
obtain abortions, preventing them from returning home, and

finally allowing them to return.

 

“ "Italy Asked to Use Troops to Seal Polluted Region," NYT 13
Feb. 1977: 7.

5 "New Pollution Reported in Italy," NYT 21 April 1977: 4.

2‘ ”24 Italian Families Return to Contaminated Area," NYT 17
Oct. 1977: 5.

” "Toxic Effects Persist."

212

VIII. Scientific and Technical Knowledge

The most important tool available to leaders trying to cope
with the situation, judging from news coverage, was scientific
and technical knowledge. A common theme was that the dioxin
situation was a technical problem that could best be understood
and dealt with through the authority of science. The theme was
introduced early in daily newspaper coverage. In August 1976 the
New York Times reported, episodically, that doctors had found no
traces of dioxin in the blood of seven children evacuated from
the area, and that the company had announced it would soon test
an "antidote" that would "accelerate the disintegration of the

dioxin."28

Early coverage in ChemicalgggEngineering Newg, which
acknowledged the severity of the incident, also emphasized the
opportunities provided for research. Among decontamination
plans, the magazine reported, was one to fence the most severely
affected area permanently, turning it into a "scientific
observation area to study the long-term effects of TCDD exposure
on the land and on living things."29 As in those stories in
which U.S. scientists and data were sent to Italy to bring

clarity to a confused situation, science provided the

 

" "Blood Tests Favorable in Gassed Area in Italy,” NYT 17 Aug.
1976: 6; ”Antidote to Be Tested Near Italian Factory," NYT 18 Aug.
1976: 12.

” Rawls and O'Sullivan, "Italy Seeks Answers Following Toxic
Release."

213

authoritative account in the New York Times report of Hoffmann-La
Roche's June 1978 announcement that "scientific findings now
permit the ’confident assumption' that no serious and permanent

damage to health occurred.’"”

The authority of science likewise was appealed to in fixing
blame for the incident. Scientists appointed to conduct a
judicial inquiry, said Chemical Week, confirmed earlier findings
by an investigative commission that blamed Icmesa and Givaudan“.
The charge that the plant’s owners were lax also appeared with a
corollary implication —- that similar incidents could be
prevented elsewhere and in the future by running a tighter ship
in accordance with appropriate scientific, technical and
management standards. The company’s production method at Seveso
was riskier than that used by others, Chemical Week reported in
August 1978; necessary permits were not obtained for the
production of toxic substances; the owners deviated from the
patent process, didn't properly train workers, and didn’t take

appropriate security measures to guard against the explosion”.

Similarly, the solution to the existing problem at Seveso was

portrayed as a technical one -- cleanup. Here, too, the

 

” Paul Hofmann, "Company Says '76 Blast in Italy Caused Little
Injury," NYT 25 June 1978: 4.

“ "Study Blames Icmesa for Dioxin Disaster," Chemical Week 14

Feb. 1979: 13.

” "Probers Detail Dioxin Damage," Chemical Week 9 Aug. 1978:
20.

214

company’s shortcomings became the subject for a story, which
reported charges by a decontamination worker that cleaning water
had been poured down drains and paper bags holding debris broke
frequently, spreading dioxin-laden dust. Hoffmann-LaRoche denied
the charges, saying it had verification from experts and
scientific institutes that cleanup was carried out thoroughly and
successfully”. Whether the charges were true or not, the
underlying implication was that dioxin was a problem that could
be solved by cleaning it up after it had been spilled. Nearly
two years later, however, Chemical Week returned to the topic,
reporting that "the solution still has not been found for
cleaning up the area. . . ." Nevertheless, the magazine

reported,

progress was made last week when the government-appointed
Cimmino Commission responsible for directing cleanup
efforts recommended that the contaminated soil in the 0.5-
sq. km. barricaded area be scraped up, and that some of it
be used in experiments to help determine ultimate
disposal“.

IX. "The Questions Persist . . .

Several of these themes were brought together in a long

article in Science, headlined "The Questions Persist Where Dioxin

 

” "Toxic Effects Persist."

“ "Seveso Cleanup Still Not Solved," Chemical Week 18 July
1979: 23.

215

Created a Wasteland."3s The persistent questions, according to
this article, revolved around technical issues relating to clean—
up of the area and to long—term health effects of residents. The
article mentioned the confusion and bitterness felt by some
residents, positive company reactions to the situation, and the
involvement of foreign scientists, particularly Americans. The
impact of the disaster on the lives of residents whose homes
closest to the plant might have to be razed was noted as a
"poignant problem," but it was de-emphasized as a less serious
concern than the "implications for the health of those exposed to
the chemical cloud. . . ." Another serious concern was the
failure to use the disaster effectively to extend scientific
knowledge about dioxin. An American government scientist is
quoted as stating that "the world missed a golden opportunity to
get a handle on dioxin exposure and what it means to humans"

because provisions were not made early for systematic data

gathering. Scientists disappointed at the missed opportunity

recognize that emergency conditions prevailed after the
accident and that the people of Seveso made a point of not
wanting to be ’treated like guinea pigs.’ But while the
incident has focused attention in Italy on the impact of
industry on the environment and human life, and
internationally, Seveso has come to stand for the threat
of a ’chemical epidemic,’ it seems agreed that,
unfortunately, the scientific lessons which Seveso offered
have been, to a large degree, lost."“

35 John Walsh, "Seveso: The Questions Persist Where Dioxin
Created a Wasteland," Science 9 Sept. 1977: 1064-7.

“ Walsh 1064-7.

216

The example illustrates the way in which the reformist
version incorporates but subordinates aspects of Seveso that
posed challenges to fundamental assumptions about progress,
technological change and industrialization. The headline, "The
Questions Persist Where Dioxin Created a Wasteland,” draws on the
same imagery of uncertainty and devastation incorporated in more
ecologistic accounts. The questions that persist, however, are
not ecologistic but technical. To be sure, the more radical
ecologistic questions are mentioned briefly -— "the incident has
focused attention in Italy on the impact of industry on the
environment and human life" -- but they are mentioned in the
context of missed scientific opportunity, not potentional
political or cultural change. Direct impact on the everyday
lives of human beings also is mentioned in passing -- as a
"poignant problem" -- but is accorded less signficance than the
question of whether dioxin would cause significant health effects

in humans over the long term.

Hoffmann—La Roche announced in June 1978 that "scientific
findings now permit the 'confident assumption' that no serious
and permanent damage to health occurred."37 That the Seveso
story had narrowed to a concern with long-term human health
effects is illustrated by the subsequent tailing off of news

interest. Event-oriented coverage ceased in the New York Times,

’7 Hofmann, "Company Says '76 Blast in Italy caused Little
Injury."

217

which had run more than two dozen items on Seveso in three years.
The newspaper's coverage in 1979 focused not on events in Italy
but on the publication of Thomas Whiteside's book on the
disaster, The Pendulgm and the Toxic Cloud. Based on interviews
with Seveso-area residents as well as government officials and
technical experts, the book portrayed Seveso as a cultural
disaster with potentially serious human health implications. A
review of the book by Timgg science writer Philip Boffey attacked
Whiteside's case on the health effects issue as "weakened by the

"38

ambiguity of the evidence. The newspaper published letters
criticizing Boffey’s review on scientific grounds and then, the
next year, a news story on Hoffmann-LaRoche’s agreement to pay
nearly $80 million in compensation to individuals, companies and
the government”. With financial closure having been achieved to

accompany the tentative scientific closure, the Seveso story, for

all intents and purposes, was over.

X. Two Conflicting Versions

There were two conflicting versions of Seveso. In one, the
events raised ecologistically-framed questions about modern

technology-based industrial capitalism. Is technology out of

3° Philip M. Boffey, "A Dirty Business," NYT 15 April 1979:
612.

” "Toxic," NYT 10 June 1979: 653; "Owners of Chemical Plant in
Italy Paying $80 Million in ’76 Mishap," NYT 21 May 1980: 10.

218

control? Must communities, in the widest sense, be disrupted and
people's health put at risk for the sake of jobs and technology-
based consumer products? What fundamental social, political or
cultural changes are needed to prevent such disruptions from
happening in the future? These questions guided coverage by
Schloss in the Nation, Davis in the New York Times Magazine and
Whiteside in the New Yorker and his book on Seveso. In the
preponderance of news about Seveso, however, they were either

missing or incorporated at the margins.

Questions raised in the other, reformist version were of a
different sort, offering less fundamental challenges. The threat
to small, pastoral communities by modern technology, in its
reformist version, is less radical than romantic. Seveso in fact
was both highly industrialized and highly polluted, a fact fully
noted by Schloss, Davis and Whiteside but marginalized in Time
and Newsweek. A thornier question was this: How can the values
of capitalism, social order and democracy be reconciled when
social order seems threatened from two directions, negligent
capitalism and irrational democracy? Seveso remained news until

plausible answers were worked out.

These were provided largely by science and technology: The
admittedly disruptive damage could be cleaned up technically and
compensated through the law. Technical improvements could be
made to insure against a recurrence. Long-term health

Consequences could be monitored. And science could learn from

219

the experience, if only how to lay the groundwork for better
epidemiology in the future. News about Seveso had little to do
with transmitting risk information and much to do with seeing

that cracks in the structure of enduring values were repaired.

Indeed, the number of points at which Seveso touched on the
enduring values of the news suggests a possible dynamic for this
and other, similar controversies: They stay in the news at least
in part because they expose incoherence in the Progressive,
reformist ideology whose values they hold up for perusal --
stresses, strains and contradictions in the dominant picture of
society which it is an important business of the news to see
reaccommodated within a revised but essentially intact structure.
This interpretation suggests a way of understanding the fact that
health risks appear in the news disproportionately to their
scientifically assessed degree of threat. Natural cancer threats
like aflatoxins and radon, for example, may receive less coverage
than synthetic carcinogens if they are judged by journalist
gatekeepers to raise fewer, or less important, threats to the

ideology's coherence and hence credibility“.

Where the faultlines appear depends to some extent on the
facts of the controversy. Agent Orange, like Seveso, was about

social order disrupted both by capitalism and a seemingly

‘° On aflatoxins, see Hugh Crone, Chemicals and Society: A
Guide to the New Chemicaer 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1986): 94-5;
on.radon, see Frank B. Cross, Environmentally Induced Cancer gnd'the
Law: Risks, Regulation 3nd Victim.Compen§ation (New York: Quorum
1989): 31.

 

220

irrational public. In the Agent Orange controversy, however, no
geographically defined pastoral community was threatened --
Vietnam veterans were scattered across the nation, in big city
and small. Rather the threat was posed to individualism, to such
individual rights as that of soldiers to be warned of and
protected from risk, to complain of wrongs, and sue, and have
their cases heard by a jury. As at Seveso, the authority of
science was crucial. Perhaps the most intractable question was
how to deal fairly with individuals in disputes in which science

of necessity spoke the language of statistics.

At Times Beach, in contrast, a community was once more at
risk, this time with the possibilities of ethnocentrism removed
because the community was quintessentially American. Unlike
Seveso, however, Times Beach could not be saved. Order was
restored there, not by reinhabiting the town but by eliminating
it. As a result Times Beach news became in part a requiem for a

vanishing small-town pastoral way of life.

CHAPTER TEN: TIMES BEACH: REQUIEM FOR A WAY OF LIFE

I. Laying Blame

Times Beach, like Seveso, was presented in the news as a
small, pastoral community disrupted by chemical pollution.
Everywhere in the town, according to an early wire service
account in the New York Times, were "signs that the community's
life was crumbling."1 Among these signs were the closing of a
voluntary flood relief center and the activities of repair
workers clad in plastic hooded suits, rubber gloves and insulated
boots. Literal signs of damage to community were posted at the
town limits, the newspaper reported in a page-one feature

article:

Where travelers enter most cities past a "Welcome to . . .
" sign, they enter Times Beach past a barricade with a
"Keep Out" sign and pictures of a skull and crossbones’.

There were, however, important differences in the coverage of
Seveso and Times Beach. Most importantly, nothing in the
material examined here placed the Times Beach disaster in context

as symptomatic of systemic social and cultural problems in regard

 

1 "County Pulls Police Out of Poisoned Missouri Town," NYT 1

Jan. 1983: 5.

2 Nathaniel Sheppard, Jr., "In Dioxin-Tainted Town, No

'Welcome' Signs," NYT 10 Jan 1983: 1.

221

222

to the human relationship to nature. While ecologistic issues
were marginalized in the journalism about Seveso, they were
missing altogether at Times Beach. As in the early days of the
controversy, when biocentric issues were more readily raised
about dioxin in Vietnam than domestically, ecologistic
perspectives seemed to vanish the closer the controversy got to

home.

Instead, the Times Beach disaster was occasionally presented
as a natural catastrophe, but more frequently as a matter of
careless Egg; industrial practice. The root of the dioxin
problem was located in a failure to adequately dispose of waste,
rather than in its production in an environmentally unsound
social and economic system. Much of the blame was laid on a
specific individual, waste hauler Russell Bliss. Any systemic
problems were considered to have been already solved by passage
of legislation in the late 19705 and early 19803. Paradoxically,
however, much of the blame for the ordeal at Times Beach was laid
at the door of the federal government, which was portrayed as

remote, faceless, slow to react and manipulative.

Thus compared to Seveso, Times Beach brought to the surface
different weaknesses than did Seveso in the Progressive,
reformist ideology of the news. Instead of stereotypically
emotional and irrational Italians, news about Times Beach
presented stereotypically laconic and skeptical Missourians.

Although reporters found fear and uncertainty over dioxin's

223

health effects, they also found residents reluctant to believe in
its risks and suspicious of federal government action. One major
problem at Times Beach, in the eyes of the news, was not
irrational democracy but ineffective and unresponsive government
leadership, particularly in the Environmental Protection Agency

headed by Anne Gorsuch Burford.

As at Seveso, science and technology were important sources
of leadership and authority. Cleaning up the contamination was
presented as an important solution and as a scientific and
technical problem. Science also was called upon to determine
definitively what had happened, and to calm residents’
uncertainties and fears with data. When research eventually
indicated no ascertainable clinical illnesses among exposed
residents, one aspect of the Times Beach story had reached

closure.

Another reached closure as the remaining residents of the
community sold their homes, leaving Times Beach uninhabited. An
important concern of Times Beach news was to expose, examine and
resolve stresses among important parts of journalism’s reformist
ideology -- modern, technology-based industrial capitalism and
romanticized small-town pastoralism and individualism. Unlike
Seveso, which was reinhabited after a time, the Times Beach
conflict was resolved only with the elimination of the community

and the dispersal of its residents. This process was followed

224

closely in news that became, in effect, the story of the passing

of an outmoded way of life.

II. Ecologistic Issues Unexplored

Journalistic efforts to provide context for the events at
Times Beach often presented them as the "tip of the iceberg" of a
potential nationwide threat to health. Some accounts reported a
growing list of sites thought to be contaminated’. Others cited
growing concern on the part of government officials and
scientists about the health risk of low—level, environmental
exposure.‘ But Times Beach did not have its Thomas Whiteside,
Edith Schloss or Melton Davis. Treated from the beginning as the
response to a human health threat, the community’s ordeal was not
put in a context that drew attention to it as a symptom of
fundamental problems in American society’s relationship with

nature. It was not treated as an ecologistic story.

Several characteristics of Times Beach coverage worked to
distance it from an ecologistic perspective. One was the

frequent juxtaposition of dioxin contamination, which had taken

 

3 Robert Reinhold, "Missouri Now Fears 100 Sites Could Be
Tainted by Dioxin," NYT 18 Jan. 1983: 1+; "Seven More Dioxin Sites
Are Found in Missouri," NYT_10 Feb. 1983: 18; "Dioxin Found at Day-
Care Center," m 11 Feb. 1983: B5; "Dioxin Found at Illinois
Sites," m 15 Feb. 1983: 21.

‘ Wayne Biddle, "Dioxin’s Peril to Humans: Proof Is Elusive,"
NYT 23 Jan. 1983: 1+; Philip Shabecoff, "Threat Posed by Dioxin
Subject of Growing Fear," NYT 12 Feb. 1983: 10.

225

place years earlier, with the coincidental flooding of the
Meramec River, the event that originally led officials to
evacuate the town in the final days of 1982. Although the flood
was coincidental, flood damage and dioxin contamination were

often mixed together in a single catastrophic image in the news.

"It has been a month since the rain-swollen Meramec River
overflowed its banks and swept through this St. Louis suburb,"
began a New York Times feature on Times Beach, "leaving residents
in fear that what little remained of their possessions might be
contaminated with highly toxic dioxin."5 "Dioxin in Missouri,"
read the headline in a Science News article, but the damage
described in the lead paragraph resulted from flooding, not
dioxin.

This town had been Yolanda Bohrer’s home for 17 years
until it was swallowed and spit back out by a twisting
branch of the muddy Mississippi River. Now, weeks after
the floodwaters receded, Times Beach, Mo., still does not
resemble the place she and about 2,200 other residents
were forced to evacuate on Dec. 5. "You see there where
only one wall is standing," she says; "that used to be a
church . . . And parts of this building," she says,
pointing to some semblance of an enclosed structure, "were
carried a block and a half down toward the tavern."6

The pairing of flood and dioxin could be naively defended
within the conventions of journalistic objectivity as a report of
"what happened": The river did flood. Dioxin was found. These

were unusual events, and unusual events make news, presumably

 

5 Sheppard, "In Dioxin-Tainted Town, No ’Welcome’ Signs."

‘ Linda Garmon, "Dioxin in Missouri: Troubled Times," Science
News 22 Jan. 1983: 60-2. Ellipsis in original.

226

because they attract readers’ attention. More interesting is the
way in which the juxtaposition puts dioxin contamination on a par
with flooding as a "natural" phenomenon, an act of God rather
than an outcome of human cultural, social and economic choices.
At Seveso dioxin descended on the community from a visible
industrial stack. At Times Beach it was sometimes portrayed as

having arrived with the flood.

This is not to suggest that dioxin’s origins in industrial
production and waste disposal were ignored in news coverage. Far
from it’. Times Beach was, however, portrayed as an industrial
waste disposal problem whose systemic origins had already been
remedied, in the "Superfund" law of 1980 and the federal Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976. "The Missouri situation,"
the New York Times reported, "underscores the casual way in which
extremely hazardous wastes were disposed of before waste control
laws were enacted."8 The statutes "unfortunately . . . were not
enacted in time to prevent these problems," a Missouri Department

of Natural Resources official was quoted as saying”. Except for

 

7 See for example, Michael A. Lerner with Marjorie Mandel and
John McCormick, "The Trouble at Times Beach, " Newsweek 10 Jan. 1983:
24; Sheppard "In Dioxin-Tainted Town, No ’Welcome’ Signs"; Biddle,
”Dioxin’s Peril to Humans: Proof Is Elusive"; Marjorie Sun,
"Missouri’s Costly Dioxin Lesson," Science 28 Jan. 1983: 367-9;
Janice R. Long and David J. Hanson, "Dioxin Issue Focuses on Three
Major Controversies in U.S.," Chemical ngngineering Newg 6 June
1983: 23-36.

' Reinhold, "Missouri Now Fears 100 Sites Could Be Tainted by
Dioxin."

9 Sun, "Missouri’s Costly Dioxin Lesson."

227

cleaning up the contamination and monitoring the health of
exposed residents, dioxin in Missouri was treated as a problem of

past practice.

The news also distanced itself from ecologistic issues by
focusing blame on the misdeeds of a single individual, Russell
Bliss. In the view of the news, dioxin was not brought to Times
Beach by deep-seated cultural and social disarray but by the
actions of a single ignorant, histrionic and devious man. If
someone had told Bliss dioxin was jelly, he was paraphrased as
having said, "he would have spread it on toast." Dioxin—laden
oil was dumped on the road to his own property, according to the
article, which was illustrated with a photograph of Bliss weeping
during testimony at a hearing on his waste hauler’s license”.
Subsequently the Timgg covered testimony that Bliss had been
warned of dioxin’s dangers but instructed his drivers to ignore
the problem“. To the extent Bliss was to blame, his remorse and
punishment were required to bring the narrative to completion,

and later news items reported his apology to his neighbors for

 

‘° "Business Sideline Puts Oil Dealer in the Spotlight in
Missouri’s Dioxin Case," NYT 24 Jan. 1983: 8.

“ Reinhold, "Witness Says Hauler Knew of Toxic Material," NYT
25 Jan. 1983: 19; "Witness Says Driver Lied About Spraying Dioxin,"
NYT 27 Jan. 1983: 9.

228

Splraying local roads with dioxin-laden oil, as well as his

coITviction of income tax violations”.

III. Why Times Beach Was News

Whatever ecologistic issues may have been latent in the Times
Beach controversy were not brought to the surface in the material
examined here. Times Beach did, however, intersect with and
expose conflicts among a number of Herbert Gans’ "enduring
values." Examined in their light, the story was news
fundamentally because it was about the disturbance of social
order by modern capitalist industry, and the apparent failure of
government leadership to deal with the problem. The news places
high value on social order, industry and government leadership.
When one disturbs the other and the third fails in its
responsibility, the news pays attention -— exposing the conflict
and following the story through to some plausible resolution. As
in Seveso, the intersection of events with other enduring
values -- small-town pastoralism is most important here --
increased the news interest of the story and called for
resolutions of their own. On the other hand, ethnocentrism
played little if any role, since Times Beach -— situated near Six

Flags amusement park, the "eager little town of Eureka" and

 

” "1970’s Dioxin Sprayer Apologizes at Hearing," NYT 26 June

1983: 37; "Salvage Oil Dealer Convicted in Tax Trial," NYT 24 July
1983: 16.

229

billboards for the Black Madonna shrine and Meramec Caverns13 --

was quintessentially American.

The lead paragraph of Newsweek’s initial article illustrates
how the contamination of Times Beach with dioxin intersected with
such enduring values as social order, small-town pastoralism and

rugged individualism to make news.

Even at its best, the small Missouri town of Times
Beach is not a particularly pretty place. Dilapidated
houses, mobile homes and old cottages resting atop cement-
block foundations shelter a population of 2,500, many of
whom call themselves "river rats" -- an affectionate
reference to the nearby Meramec River. But early last
month the river lashed out at Times Beach, swirling 22
feet above flood level and damaging virtually every one of
the town’s 800 dwellings. Then, just two days before
Christmas, federal agencies confirmed that hazardous
levels of the chemical dioxin had been uncovered in soil
samples from the town, and residents just moving back
after the flood were urged to evacuate once again. "This
is phenomenal," says Fred A. Lafser, director of the
Missouri Department of Natural Resources. "Very few
people in the world have dioxin problems, and very few
people in the world have flood problems. We have both."”

IV. Failure of Leadership

One of the ways in which Times Beach coverage was distanced
from ecologistic issues was by treating the episode as a problem
whose systemic features had essentially been solved with passage
of the Resource Recovery and Conservation Act and the "Superfund"

legislation. Systemic solutions still had to be applied to

 

’3 Kurt Andersen, "Times Beach, Mo: Overgrown and Ghostly,"

Time 14 Oct. 1985: 86-7.

“ Lerner, Mandel and McCormick, "The Trouble at Times Beach."

230

specific instances, however, and the apparent problems of the
government in dealing adequately with the specific situation at

Times Beach required news attention.

Some coverage showed government actions in a positive light,
to be sure. Science News, for example, characterized the buyout
as an action Times Beach residents had "fought, hoped and prayed
for. . . ."” State officials were shown exercising leadership,
as when Missouri Gov. Christopher S. Bond asked the legislature
for "new measures to cope with the growing problem of dioxin

"” To‘a much greater extent than at

contamination in the state.
Seveso, however, government was identified as the problem at
Times Beach. "They should have known more before they came to us

and disrupted our lives," one resident said of the government’s

handling of the evacuation.17

Government was portrayed as remote from ordinary citizens.
Reporters described cleanup workers wearing protective plastic,
hooded suits and rubber gloves while Times Beach residents nearby
wore street clothes”. "There’s a painful gulf in Missouri
between governors and governed," the New York Times

editorialized. Authorities knew of the presence of dioxin in the

 

” Linda Garmon, "The Buying of Times Beach: A Town Unfit for
Human Beings," Science News 26 Feb. 1983: 132-3.

“ Reinhold, "Missouri Governor Proposes Steps to Fight Dioxin
Crisis," NYT 12 Jan. 1983: 12.

” "The River Rats Want to Stay," Time 10 Jan. 1983: 21.

” ”County Pulls Police Out of Poisoned Missouri Town."

231

town for years but did little, and even after the flood were slow
to respond, the editorial charged”. Slow government response
was also the theme of news accounts pointing out that a Missouri
citizen had compiled a list of dioxin sites 11 years earlier -- a
list that had "disappeared into a black hole in the bureaucracy"

after she turned it over to the government.

For Judy Piatt, the recent news that Times Beach is
contaminated with dioxin -- perhaps the most toxic
chemical known —- came as no surprise. That the
contamination has been traced to a waste hauler came as no
surprise to her either. Eleven years ago, Piatt sent
state and federal officials a long list of sites where she
had seen the company spray waste oil to control dust.
Times Beach was on that list.’0

Similarly, the Tmmgg reported official confusion over what
should be done, and said residents were upset that the government
had provided them with "little or no information with which they
could make decisions about their lives." Instead, government

response was symbolized by the

"faceless forms behind protective white garments that look
like space suits (who) move in and out of a few of the
houses, collecting samples that they carefully place in
protective containers and load into trucks“.

The residents of Times Beach were portrayed in the news in
striking contrast to the excitable Italians of Seveso. Compared
to Guiseppina Senno, who snatched her children inside as the

trichlorophenol cloud approached, Missourians were represented as

 

” "Deadly Miasma Over Missouri," editorial NYT 3 Jan. 1983:
18.

” Sun, "Missouri’s Costly Dioxin Lesson."

“ Sheppard, "In Dioxin-Tainted Town, No ’Welcome’ Signs."

232

laconic and skeptical in the face of risk. Time’s first article
on Times Beach opens with a 60-year-old construction worker, Ira
Bennett, puttering in his yard. "I don’t know what to think

about dioxin," he says.

"I’ve lived here for 13 years. The birds are still

flying, dogs are still running around." Then he bent over
to turn up a strip of plywood, revealing a colony of worms
in the dirt. "See there. If something was wrong, do you
think they’d still be living?"22

At Times Beach the problem was not with unruly and irrational
citizens but with remote authorities who not only failed to

protect ordinary people from risk and uncertainty but would not

help them protect themselves. "It’s awful down here," said
resident Marian Hagen,
and I wish we would hear something -- that the government

will buy us out or clean up this mess. We never know
where we will spend the night. I heard the emergency
sirens a couple of days ago and thought they were going to
evacuate us again. Some nights I dream about those skulls
on the barricade”.

Yet when the government did act, its buyout decision was
represented as destroying the placidity of a middle-American
community even as it responded to the problem of dioxin’s health
risks. Time reported the buyout announcement as a hit-and-run
tactic by a remote, embattled EPA, with Anne Gorsuch Burford
stopping in Missouri only long enough to leave "the barest
outlines of the first federal purchase of a polluted city in U.S.

history." Townspeople who came to hear her

 

“ "The River Rats Want to Stay," Time 10 Jan. 1983: 21.

” Sheppard, "In Dioxin-Tainted Town, No ’Welcome’ Signs."

233

pressed against the locked glass door of a large meeting
room, their intense faces showing the strain of waiting in
vain for years for state and federal officials to decide
what to do about the potentially lethal dioxin that had
poisoned their town“.

Chemical & Engineering News used parallel sentence structure to
suggest the buyout as a third disruptive blow to the community.
"First came road spraying with dioxin-laced oil. Then, years
later, came the floods. Now the federal government has come to
relocate the residents. . . . "”.
The New York Times editorialized in favor of the buyout plan,
giving EPA credit "for moving to end the misery" of residents by
offering to "buy their now worthless homes." But the editorial
went on to suggest that action in Times Beach did not necessarily
mean the EPA would be ”more assertive about public health."26
Times Beach, in fact, became an important symbol in a rising tide
of criticism of the EPA under Burford. "When flood waters of the
Meramec River swept over this working-class hamlet in December,"

wrote Robert Reinhold in a Times commentary article datelined

Times Beach,

few residents would have predicted the wave of political
crisis that now engulfs the Environmental Protection
Agency and laps at the steps of the White House. Yet the
anguish here resonates clearly with concern in Washington

 

“ "Found: A Buyer," Time 7 March 1983: 39.

” "Dioxin-Tainted Town," Chemical & En ineerin News, 28 Feb.
1983: 6.

" ”One E.P.A. Buy-Out Is Not a Policy," editorial NYT 25 Feb.
1983: 30.

234

over whether enough is being done to safeguard the nation
from environmental hazards”.

Within two weeks, Burford had resigned as head of EPA,
surrounded by charges that her agency had politically manipulated
cleanup funds, maintained "hit lists" of political opponents and
showed favoritism toward some toxic waste dumpers”. Burford’s
resignation moved toward a resolution of the leadership issue, at
the same time that the buyout decision went some way toward
resolving residents’ uncertainty and confusion -- and hence the

social disorder brought to Times Beach by dioxin.

V. The Authority of Science and Technology

As at Seveso, however, much of the authority for restoring
the sense of social ordered was provided by science and
technology. Scientific and technical knowledge figured in the
news as the keys to cleaning up the contamination, determining
definitively what had happened, and assessing any long-range
health problems of inhabitants. Times Beach even had its silver
lining as a site for scientific research using dioxin-

contaminated soil.

As at Seveso, cleaning up the contamination was an important

topic for the news. Covered in more than a half-dozen brief

 

“ Robert Reinhold, "Dangerous Ground: Uproar at E.P.A. Blends
Politics, Pollution and Public Health," NYT 27 Feb. 1983: 1E.

“ Stuart Taylor Jr., "E.P.A. Inquires Center on Four Issues,"
NYT 13 March 1983: 36.

235

items, for example, was a dispute over where to dispose of flood
debris. The dispute was resolved by court order after EPA tests
failed to find dioxin contamination in the debris above 1 part
per billion”. Missouri’s governor made news when he sought the
creation of a state "Superfund" to supplement federal cleanup
money for future problem sites”. The extent of cleanup
necessary was put at 150,000 tons of contaminated soil statewide,

at a cost of $100 million. "What we are looking for,’ according

to a Missouri environmental official, "is the most cost-effective
technology."31
Just as cleanup was a technical problem, so science was

appealed to as the authority for determining definitively what

had happened at Times Beach. Early in the controversy, residents
were portrayed as bewildered and frustrated by the lack of solid,
scientific data on the risks they faced. A Science article on

the paucity of data begins with a vignette of a "weary-looking

Douglas King,‘ who sits near a space heater in the office of Easy

 

” "Flooded Town Is Checked for Toxic Chemicals," photo caption
NYT_6 Jan. 1983: 12; "Dioxin Debris to Remain in Times Beach, Mo.,"
EXT. 7 Jan. 1983: 10; "Judge Blocks Removal of Missouri Flood
Debris," NY: 8 Jan. 1983: 8; "Court Hearing Set Today," NYT_10 Jan.
1983: 14; "Tests Hint Debris Is Safe," NYT_12 Jan. 1983: 12; "Court
Approves Disposal Plan," NYT 12 Jan. 1983: 12; "Trucks Move Debris
Floods Left in Town With Dioxin Trouble," NYT 14 Jan. 1983: 9.

” Reinhold, "Missouri Governor Proposes Steps to Fight Dioxin
Crisis."

31

"First Attempts to Cope With Times Beach Dioxin,
Week 5 Dec. 1984: 26+.

We;

236

Living Mobile Manor and notes the mysterious deaths of four of

his dogs in 10 years.

"They looked like they starved to death," King says. "But
I ain’t blamin’ dioxin." Then he adds that he is
concerned about the future health of his two teen-age
daughters. "But what can you do?" he asks in bewilderment
and frustration”.

By the autumn, however, news accounts reported that the
accumulation of research data was beginning to clarify the
situation -- and was associated as well with the restoration of
social order to the community. One article in September, for
example, began with an account of Times Beach residents
celebrating a Christmas they had been unable to observe in the
crisis of the previous December. The residents "gathered just
outside of their onetime Meramec River town for a summer yule
party -- complete with a Santa Claus, Christmas tree and

presents."33

The article went on to report that the buyout of
the community was under way, and that dioxin contamination had
been found in other communities. Then it summarized recent
research findings on dioxin. The accumulation of scientific
knowledge and the symbolic healing at Times Beach were

associated, if not explicitly then at least by their

juxtaposition in the same article.

Times Beach had its silver lining -- the research

opportunities it provided. Scientific chances were lost at

 

” Sun, ”Dioxin’s Uncertain Legacy."

” Garmon, "Dioxin Digest,‘ Science News 3 Sept. 1983: 156—7.

237

Seveso but not in Missouri. "When one thinks of desirable real

estate," reported Chemical 8 Engineering News,

Times Beach, Mo., isn’t the first place that comes to

mind. Nevertheless, the Missouri Department of Natural
Resources has managed to rent out some of that dioxin-
tainted territory along the Meramec. In fact, it was the
dioxins that made the land attractive. Three companies,
PPM Inc., Agro-K, and Monsanto -- have leased plots in the
area, paying good money to the state for the privilege of
using the contaminated land to carry out research“.

Meanwhile, the news reported scientific assurances that, as
at Seveso, nothing very serious had happened at Times Beach after
all. News accounts reported in October that persons exposed to
dioxin in eastern Missouri showed no "meaningful" ill-health
effects. Three years later it was reported that followup studies
had found liver and immune—system abnormalities but no more
clinical illness than normal”. News audiences were reassured
that neither at Times Beach nor at Seveso had people died like

flies.

VI. Small-Town Pastoralism

What had died at Times Beach, symbolically, was an old-
fashioned way of life associated with small—town, pastoral

America. Coverage often noted the smallness of the town, its

 

3‘ "Times Beach Used for Research on Dioxins,’
Engineering News 20 Aug. 1984: 8.

Chemical §_

” "No Illness Found in Dioxin Testing," NYT 18 Oct. 1983: 16;
Philip M. Boffey, "Dioxin Link Cited in Abnormalities," NYT 18 April
1986: 13.

238

"800 dwellings," its "population of 2,500."36 The New YomkiTimes
called it a "hamlet” and described the flood damage at a "once
tranquil" address on "River Road."37 A resident’s description of
the damaged town for Science News included two stereotypical
aspects of village life: "You see there where only one wall is

standing, Yolanda Bohrer told the magazine, "that used to be a

church . . . And parts of this building . . . were carried a

block and a half down toward the tavern."38

The social relations and closeness to nature possible in the
American small town of the past were recalled nostalgically. A
Times Beach resident for nearly 35 years told a newspaper

reporter of

earlier years when she owned eight lots and grew flowers

on each, when the ladies’ club met down by the beach and
when there were dances every Saturday night. . . . "Times
Beach was a community in which people really cared for
each other and I am not sure we could create this type
community somewhere else. I sure hope so. I’m too old to
go out and make new friends"”.

Nostalgia for the past was accompanied by expressions of
relief, realism and renewal, however. The chairman of the town
board, reacting to the buyout decision, said it would allow

people to "put their lives together and start over. The question

 

” Lerner, Mandel and McCormick, "The Trouble at Times Beach."

” "One E.P.A. Buy-Out Is Not a Policy"; Sheppard, "Times Beach
Is Mixed on Buyout," NYT 24 Feb. 1983: 14B; Reinhold, "Dangerous
Ground."

” Garmon, "Dioxin in Missouri: Troubled Times."

” Sheppard, ”Times Beach Is Mixed on Buyout."

239

now is how much they will get for their property.“0 Coverage
also suggested that however pleasant life might have been, the
town was a relic of the past. "Even at its best," began a

Newsweek story,

the small Missouri town of Times Beach is not a
particularly pretty place. Dilapidated houses, mobile
homes and old cottages resting atop cement-block
foundations shelter a population of 2,500 . . . .“

Apparently the town was on its way downhill, even before the

flood and dioxin arrived. These only hastened a social
disintegration already under way, a process in which the news
took an interest. Times Beach became a story of the passing of a

slice of small-town American life.

Over the next three years the disintegration of the community
was covered in detail. Officials made news by barricading the
town from tourists and looters in April 1983. Times Beach was
hit by new flooding the next month”. The town was
disincorporated in 1985, in a decision Missouri Gov. John
Ashcroft described as a "sad but necessary step in allowing local
citizens, the state and the Federal Government to complete the
job in that area." Coverage eulogized the town as a once close-

knit community destroyed by chemical pollution, a blank spot on

 

“ Sheppard, "Times Beach Is Mixed on Buyout."
“ Lerner 24; see also "The River Rats Want to Stay" 21.

” "Times Beach, Mo., Board Moves to Seal Off Town," NYT 27
April 1983: 18; "Children Stack Sandbags by Flooding Mississippi,"
NYT 5 May 1983.

240

the map obscured by "weeds and tall grass.“3 That year only two
of the original 2,400 residents were holding out against the
buyout. An elderly couple, they were still there in April 1986,
seeking a higher price for their property. Times Beach, the news

reported, was a "ghost tOWn.n«

 

“ Andersen, "Times Beach, Mo.: Overgrown and Ghostly."

“ "Times Beach, Mo., Votes Itself Out of Existence," NYT

April 1985: 16; "Contaminated Town Is Relegated to History," NYT

1
April 1985: 26; Richard Haitch, "Dioxin Holdouts," NYT 5 May 1985
58.

3
4

CHAPTER ELEVEN: AGENT ORANGE AND THE MARGINALIZED INDIVIDUAL

I. Differences and Similarities

Early criticism of U.S. use of Agent Orange in Vietnam was
strongly ecologistic and was covered in the press in ecologistic
terms. Defoliation was opposed, in large part, because of what
it did to the Vietnamese mangrove and upland hardwood forests, to
animals, birds, fish and soil -- to the biota within which humans
lived. Early North Vietnamese claims of human illness or death
from the spraying rated only occasional mention in the news.

When dioxin was introduced into the controversy in 1970, human
health concerns were taken somewhat more seriously. They were
taken quite seriously -- and virtually removed from an
ecologistic context -- in the controversy over domestic use of
2,4,5-T. Apparently ecologistic concerns were news when dealing
with a foreign situation, but when American lives —- and/or deep-
seated American ideological commitments -- were at stake, a
different set of gatekeeping criteria seemed to emerge. This
same variety of ethnocentrism is evident in the later Agent
Orange controversy, beginning in the late 19705, over the health

effects of dioxin on U.S. troops who served in Vietnam.

241

242

Like news about Times Beach, news about Agent Orange
virtually lacked ecologistic contextualization. Some writers did
mention the controversy’s historical connection to the earlier
dispute. Environmentalist Barry Commoner described veterans’
health fears as a "new chapter” in the "tragic story" of
defoliation‘. .Another writer identified the very transformation
of the controversy that is one of the themes of this dissertation
-- its initial focus on ecological damage and its refocusing
after the Bionetics study on human health effects, especially
birth defects and cancer}. More typical, however, was the blunt
anthropocentrism of the writer who warned that Vietnam veterans
"are now being alerted to the fact that a chemical time bomb,
posing immense danger to themselves and to their children, may be

ticking away inside their bodies."3

While sharing this anthropocentrism with coverage of Seveso
and Times Beach, news about Agent Orange differed in several
respects. One was the greater prominence given to business
activity as moral disorder. There was no Russell Bliss to blame
for the exposure of U.S. soldiers to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Instead, Agent Orange’s manufacturers came under scrutiny for

 

1 Barry Commoner, "Dioxin: The Vietnam Connection," Science
Digest Oct. 1978: 58-61.

2 W. A. Thomasson, "Deadly Legacy: Dioxin and the Vietnam
Veteran," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 1979: 15-19.

3 Alan S. Miller, "2,4,5-T: Chemical Time Bomb," Environment
June 1979: 2-4.

243

failing to be more forthcoming about the health risks of dioxin.
To the extent that there was a Bliss—like scapegoat created by
coverage of the controversy, it was the Dow Chemical Company --
ironically the manufacturer who apparently had acted most in line

with the media’s own standards of responsible capitalism.

Agent Orange coverage also differed from Times Beach -- but
was similar to Seveso -- in that the exposed population was
itself seen as a significant source of moral disorder. The
veterans’ litigation, interpreted in some coverage from the start
as being of doubtful validity, was portrayed as a threat to the
chemical industry because of the billions of dollars in potential
damages. In addition, the case’s huge stakes and uncharted legal
issues were interpreted as putting strains on major sources of
authority in American society -- on the legal system and even on
science itself. Veterans were frequently characterized in

coverage as emotional, eccentric and even deranged.

Another difference was that Agent Orange did not pose a
threat to a geographically defined community, but rather to a
loosely defined and loosely organized class of individuals. This
difference had important consequences for the overall shape of
the controversy in the news. Concern about the conflict between
modern industrial capitalism and the ways of life associated with
small, pastoral communities, for example, was virtually non-
existent. Taking its place, however, were a host of issues

revolving around the place of the individual in modern society.

244

In reporting the Agent Orange controversy, the news presented
individual veterans as having been swallowed up in the mass-
produced chaos of war, then treated callously by government
bureaucracy, then marginalized -- unfortunately but perhaps
necessarily -- by a legal system that denied them an opportunity
to have their case decided by a jury. The news cares about
individualism 33g about the social order represented by
government bureaucracies and courts. When such values are in
conflict, journalism pays attention until a plausible resolution
is worked out. That, not the transmission of risk information,

was the larger business of the press in covering Agent Orange.

One way in which the media portrayed the working out of these
conflicts was through the leadership of Judge Jack B. Weinstein,
the presiding judge in the Agent Orange litigation. If Russell
Bliss was the individual villain of Times Beach, Weinstein was
the individual hero of Agent Orange, portrayed as a liberal,
innovative judge who worked out a solution that was at once
compassionate to the veterans, not unduly burdensome to the
manufacturers and -- perhaps most importantly, in accordance with

science.

For as in other dioxin controversies, the principle authority
in terms of which these conflicts were resolved was science. The
press devoted substantial coverage to the progress of research on
the health effects of dioxin. Despite occasional warnings that

central issues in the controversy were in fact trans-scientific,

245

the news portrayed science as the authority in the dispute, 3mg
basis for responsible, rational government decision. Although
veterans’ bitter complaints about the legal outcome of their case
were given an occasional forum, the court’s decision was

justified as being essentially in line with what the science of

dioxin had determined.

The irony that the veterans had themselves been marginalized

by an epidemiological science that did not -- because it could

not -- determine the merits of their individual cases was itself
marginalized to the vanishing point in news coverage. The
controversy was declared closed, and coverage entered a post-
mortem period in which the press itself began to figure as a
villain for having disseminated "a myth created by a group of
Vietnam-era protesters (and) seized upon by Viet vets."‘ This
did not occur, however, until after the press had seen the
controversy through to a closure in which the centrist values of
social order, responsible capitalism, altruistic democracy,
leadership and individualism had adjusted to the conflicts posed
by the presence of dioxin in the environment and found a new

equilibrium.

 

‘ Pulitzer-Prize-winning science writer Jon Franklin, quoted
by Richard.Harwood, "Agent.0range Myth.at.War With Science," Detroit
News 17 Oct. 1990: 11.

246

II. Moral Disorder in Government and Business

In journalism’s Progressive, reformist ideology, government
is supposed to act disinterestedly on behalf of the public, while
business is supposed to compete without crossing the line into
exploitation. Indications that both standards may have been
violated in the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam compelled
attention in the news. One pervasive theme of coverage was that

moral disorder had infected both government and business.

In the case of government, the news was a forum for charges
that the military had used Agent Orange carelessly in Vietnam and
failed to inform troops of the risks. In 1980, a writer in the
liberal Progressive focused on a government study contradicting
claims of careful use of Agent Orange. Despite military
assurances that troops were kept away from recently sprayed
areas, the Government Accounting Office found nearly 6,000
Marines who had been within a third of a mile of spraying
operations during or shortly after spraying, the article
reporteds. "I thought the enemy was throwing gas at us," one
veteran told a newspaper reporter after the 1984 litigation
settlement, only to find on his return home that "it was the

U.S.”

 

5 William Steif, "Agent Orange Disaster,‘ Progressive Feb.
1980: 8; see also Lewis M. Milford, "Justice Is Not a G. I.
Benefit," Progressive Aug. 1981: 32-5.

‘ Ralph Blumenthal, "Veterans Speak Out on Agent Orange,
York Times 9 Aug. 1984: 1B.

New

247

The government also was accused of being slow to take
veterans’ complaints seriously. "How many people must be buried
before the nation discovers what Agent Orange really does to the
human organism?" asked a writer in one liberal magazine in urging
independent research’. .A writer in the same journal later
contrasted federal sluggishness with the responsiveness of state
government in Texas‘. Science News gatekeepers decided to
publish a story when Veterans Administration physical
examinations were criticized as inadequate by the General
Accounting Office’. The most serious problem, a National
Veterans Law Center official told the New York Timgg, was the
"failure of the Veterans Administration to conduct any outreach.
All they are really doing is waiting for people to present

themselves at V.A. hospitals."10

Other news of possible moral disorder in government included
allegations that evidence of Agent Orange’s health risks had been
ignored, minimized or covered up. Government decision makers,
concluded one chemical industry trade publication in 1983,

"didn’t want to hear" what government scientists and mid-level

 

7 Steif, "The Agent Orange Scandal," Progressive 11 Dec. 1979:
11-12.

8 Rod Davis, "Cheering Vets, Progressive Sept. 1981: 18.

9 "Agent Orange Exams Criticized," Science News 6 Nov. 1982:

301.

” Richard Severo, "U.S., Despite Claims of Veterans, Says None
Are Herbicide Victims," NYT 28 May 1979: 1+.

248

managers knew in the 1960s about dioxin’s dangers“. In the
19803 the Veterans Administration, which had taken the position
that no evidence linked Agent Orange exposure to human cancer,
came under fire for failing to frankly and promptly acknowledge
contrary research findings“. The Air Force was criticized for
dismissing as "minor or undetermined” the ailments suffered by
members of the Ranch Hand crew, which included liver

complications and a high infant death rate”.

Criticism of government was also a major theme of Times Beach
coverage. One major difference between Times Beach and Agent
Orange was the extent to which moral disorder was attributed to
business -- not just to one errant businessman, Russell Bliss,
but to the corporations that had supplied Agent Orange to the
government. At issue was the 1965 meeting at which Dow Chemical
Company shared technical information with its competitors about
how to reduce dioxin contamination. In 1983, memoranda relating
to the meeting turned up in court documents which described Dow's
fear that government knowledge of dioxin’s dangers would lead to

increased government regulation of the industry. The memoranda

 

“ ”The Government Knew Plenty," Chemical Week 20 July 1983: 3.

1’ "Defoliant, Cancer: Studies Show Link," Science News 12
April 1980: 230; "Study Links Cancer Risk to Vietnam War Service,"
Chemical & Engineering ngs 14 Sept. 1987: 6; "Agencies’ Handling
of Agent Orange Studies Hit," Chemical & Engineering News 21 Sept.
1987: 8.

13

"Agent Orange: Still the Fog," Progressive April 1984: 11.

249

made front-page news in the New York Times“ and were the topic

of two articles in Time.

To the extent that there was a Russell Bliss-type scapegoat
in the Agent Orange controversy, it was the Dow Chemical Company.
Time covered the memos as an embarrassment to Dow ("Dioxin Puts

u 15

Dow on the Spot, ) and later, more harshly, as evidence that
the company failed to act on its own knowledge of dioxin’s risks.
Dow continued to "sell herbicides containing dioxin,” the
magazine reported, even though it knew "even before the mid 1960s
that exposure to dioxin might cause people to become seriously
ill."“ Actually the magazine begged the question. Dow did
indeed know that "exposure to dioxin" (at high enough levels)
"might cause people to become seriously ill." And the company
did indeed continue to "sell herbicides containing dioxin." The
company did not, however, fail to act on its knowledge. It

reduced dioxin contamination in its products to levels it was

convinced were safe.

More genuinely at issue were the responses of other chemical

companies, principally Monsanto and Diamond Alkali (later to

 

“ David Burnham, "1965 Memos Show Dow’s Anxiety on Dioxin,"
N11 19 April 1983: 1+; Ralph Blumenthal, "Files Show Dioxin Makers
Knew of Hazards," N12_6 July 1983: 1+; see also Burnham, "Dow Says
U.S. Knew Dioxin Peril of Agent Orange," NY_T 5 May 1983: 18; Michael
Winerip, "U.S. Judge Clears Way for Trial on Agent Orange," N11 13
May 1983: 12.

” "Dioxin Puts Dow on the Spot," Time 2 May 1983: 62.

16

"No Longer So Secret an Agent," Time 18 July 1983: 17.

250

become Diamond Shamrock). These continued to produce 2,4,5—T
with higher dioxin levels. Also at issue was the fact that Dow
did not act as a whistle blower within its own industry by
exposing the other companies’ lax response to the data. Notably
these topics were explored in most detail not in liberal

periodicals but in the industry trade journal, Chemical Week.

Like Time, Chemical Weekfls initial coverage of the memoranda
directed attention to the failure of 2,4,5-T producers to act on
data indicating dioxin contamination of the product”. Based on
examination of court documents, however, the magazine developed
the story in greater detail. After finding dioxin in its
commercial 2,4,5—T, Chemical Week reported, Dow initially planned
to share information with the U.S. Public Health Service and the
U.S. Department of Agriculture. Instead, however, the company
called the March 1965 meeting with competitors, a move the
magazine described as an "experiment in industry self-
regulation." The meeting, it said, was intended both to protect
the domestic herbicide market from increased regulation and to
put "producers on notice that if they failed to reduce dioxin

levels, that fact would be industry-wide knowledge."18

 

” "A New Blister Bursts in the Agent Orange Case," Chemical
Week 27 April 1983: 13-15; "Agent Orange Finally Gets Its Day in
Court," Chemical Week 18 May 1983: 44-5.

” "Agent Orange Papers: What Companies Knew," Chemical Week 13
July 1983: 24+.

251

In fact, the magazine reported, Monsanto and Diamond Alkali
did fail to reduce dioxin levels, while Dow cut dioxin
contamination of its product to undetectable levels. Dow’s share
of Agent Orange sold to the government was 31 percent, but its
share of dioxin sold to the government was only 1.3 percent,
according to Chemical Week. Monsanto, whose share of Agent
Orange sales was 27.7 percent, contributed almost 75 percent of
the dioxin total, and Diamond Shamrock, at 5.4 percent of Agent
Orange sales, contributed 22 percent of the dioxin”. Thus Dow,
which some coverage made to appear something of a villain,
actually behaved the most consistently with journalism’s own
standards for responsible capitalism, acting competitively while
seeking to avoid exploitation. The company did not, however,
blow the whistle on its colleagues in the industry, described by
Chemical Week as "at odds with itself and at war with would-be
government regulators."20 Since Dow "remained mum for five years
while its competitors continued to market 2,4,5-T high in
dioxin," the magazine concluded in an editorial, "we have to

wonder whether loyalty to the industry somehow seemed more

important than public safety."21

 

” "Dow and Toxicology Meet Again," Chemical Week 14 Dec. 1983:
13—14.

” "Agent Orange Papers."

“ "Dioxin: To Tell or Not to Tell," Chemical Week 13 July
1983: 3.

252

III. The Threat From the Veterans

News about Agent Orange also differed from Times Beach
coverage in that the exposed population -- in this case veterans
who were part of the litigation -- were portrayed as a threat to
social order. In this, Agent Orange coverage more nearly

resembled that of Seveso.

For some trade publications, the real story from the
beginning was the threat posed to manufacturers by Agent Orange
litigation. Like Agent Orange itself, the Agent Orange
litigation was reported using the terminology of war and disease.
"The number of Agent Orange—related lawsuits is mushrooming,"
began an account in Chemical Wesk early in the controversy. "The
rash of lawsuits is part of a nationwide campaign . . . ."n
Some post-settlement coverage focused on the companies’ struggle
to apportion costs, hold the government accountable for costs and
deal with the complex aftermath of the settlement -- and not, to
make the point explicit, on any struggles veterans or their
families may have had in waiting for settlement money to be

paid23 .

 

” "More Agent Orange Suits Filed in Chicago; Still Others Will
Follow," Chemical Week 28 Feb. 1979: 18.

“ "Agent, Orange Pact. Hits (Monsanto (Hardest," Chemical s

Engineering News 21 May 1984: 5-6; "Justice’s Brief on Agent
Orange," Chemical Week 19 Sept. 1984: 26+; "Bendectin Case Revived;
Agent Orange Pact Hit," Chemical & Engineering News 11 Feb. 1985:
6; "Government Relieved of Agent Orange Payments," Cherfical;
Engineering News 20 May 1985: 6. The first payments from the
settlement were not made until 1989.

253

Paralleling the portrayal of Sevesans as excitable and
irrational, the supposed emotionalism of the veterans was
juxtaposed against the supposed objectivity of the manufacturers.
"Although the veterans failed to present medical evidence that
would prove a link between Agent Orange and their present ill
health," one magazine reported in covering House subcommittee
hearings in 1979, "they presented dramatic circumstantial

evidence."“ The dispute, another reported eight years later,

still evokes considerable emotion almost a decade after it
was first raised. It is these emotions, and the politics,
that so confuse the issue. The science so far indicates
that few veterans were exposed to much Agent Orange and
that fewer still are suffering because of it”.

The veterans’ emotionalism made them vulnerable to
manipulation by lawyers, charged a 1984 New York Timss_editorial
which portrayed both veterans and companies as attorneys’
victims. ”How on earth could so tenuous a case have ended in a

$180 million settlement?" the editorial asked.

Don’t blame the veterans too much. They feel rejected,
with reason, and their illnesses are genuine, even if not
yet provably different from other people’s. Their fears
and grievances have been stoked by an avid legion of
lawyers . . . (who) shaped their suit on a shadow that
grows fainter in the light of each new health study“.

 

2‘ "Congressional Panel Hears Vietnam Vets on Agent Orange
Effects,” Chemical Week 4 July 1979: 18.

25 David J. Hanson, "Science Failing to Back Up Veterans’
Concerns About Agent Orange," Chemical g Engineering News 9 Nov.
1987: 7-11+.

“ "The Truth About Agent Orange," editorial NYT 13 Aug. 1984:
22.

254

The supposed emotionalism of the veterans sometimes shaded
over into mental illness, it was suggested. One writer in 1979
noted the "increasing agitation" among veterans on the Agent
Orange issue, which was characterized in the headline as a

"furor.“7

Another described the "lingering controversy" as
being "fanned by suspicions" about damaged health". An EPA
official was quoted as saying, "It’s hard to tell if we have
health problems, but mental anguish is a clear effect of
dioxin."29 More explicitly, the Wall Street Journal
editorialized that the "notion that dioxin is a doomsday menace
is based less on medical evidence than on some kind of
psychological phenomenon."30
This theme received extended treatment in a 1980 Business
figs; article“. The article explicitly poses an
emotionalism/objectivity contrast between veterans and
manufacturers while also implying it through the article’s

structure. Structurally, the account begins with epigraphs

quoting veterans activist Frank McCarthy and Alsea’s Bonnie Hill.

 

” Constance Holden, "Agent Orange: Furor Continues to Build,"
Science 24 Aug. 1979: 770-2.

“ "AMA Study Requests More Data on TCDD," Chemical Week 20
Jan. 1982: 18.

” Donald Barnes, quoted in Susan Begley, "Dioxin: How Great a
Threat?" Newsweek 11 July 1983: 65-6.

3° "Dioxin Hysteria," editorial Wall Street Journal 31 May

1983: 26.

“ "Fallout From Agent Orange Dogs a Herbicide," Business Week
24 March 1980: 114+.

255

The McCarthy quotation stresses veterans’ "outrage," while Hill’s
statement presents her as relying on a seemingly simplistic, lay-
observed linkage between sprayings and miscarriages. The body of
the article, in contrast, uses technical terms for 2,4,5-T and
frequent quantification to bolster the credibility of the

manufacturers’ position.
The manufacturers’ case was argued explicitly, as well.

"There is no question that TCDD is extremely dangerous
in concentrations," says John E. Donalds, general manager
of Dow’s Agricultural Products Dept. "But the
concentrations of TCDD in 2,4,5-T are so darn low, they
can’t hurt anybody." The company has reduced the TCDD
levels in 2,4,5—T to 0.2 part per million from the 10 to
12 parts per million that contaminated Agent Orange.

The issue in seeking to defend 2,4,5-T isn’t money, a Dow
attorney continued, but rather scientific principle. "We can’t

let the EPA simply ban a product in the face of science."

Meanwhile, opponents of the herbicide are portrayed as
emotional, and even as abnormal in some unspecified way. An

unnamed rancher commented:

"The bureaucrats in Washington don’t even know what the
benefits (of 2,4,5-T) are. Mostly what they listen to are
some of these emotional other—kind-of-people who don’t
have all their data and get a scare thing going."

Similarly, Dow chairman Earle B. Barnes is reported as blaming
2,4,5-T’s problems on northern California marijuana growers and
extremists. "These activists," he is quoted as saying, "have
learned the trick of the Hitler-type propaganda in Germany; that
is, if you tell a lie often enough, people will begin to believe

it." The account then ends with a return to veterans’ activist

256

McCarthy, who is quoted as saying, "We’re already exposed; we’ve
already got deformed children . . . We want to stop the suffering
in the rest of the country." The veterans’ threat to the
chemical companies thus shaded over into a larger threat —- to

science and even to democracy itself.

IV. The Individual at War and After

News about Agent Orange also differed from coverage of Seveso
and Times Beach in that there was no disrupted community in a
geographical sense. Instead, a loosely defined, loosely organized
group of individuals sought redress. This difference shaped the
controversy by bringing a different conflict to the fore.

Instead of small-town pastoralism at odds with a modern
industrial capitalist society, Agent Orange coverage examined a
range of issues having to do with the place of the individual in

that society.

The focus on the individual is suggested by the frequency
with which Agent Orange news used the device of
personalization”. The first Agent Orange story published in the
New York Timss was an account of Paul Reutershan’s funeral,

beginning with a vignette of the helicopter crew chief flying

 

” Seveso and Times Beach news also was personalized to some
extent, but physical descriptions of the towns were also available
and used frequently to help symbolize the story for readers.

257

through a "fog” of Agent Orange in Vietnam”. The ELEQE began a
three-day, page-one series in 1979 by introducing former Marine
Corps machine gunner Julio Martinez. Martinez as a boy, readers
learn, wanted to play baseball with the Chicago Cubs, but found
himself at age 26, after Vietnam service, with enlarged breasts,
fatty tumors, a lack of sex drive and children born dead,
deformed or emotionally disturbed“. Four years later, gims
introduced an update on the status of the litigation with the
story of Navy gunner Robert Sutton. Sutton inhaled fumes of
burned, sprayed vegetation in Vietnam and later found himself
stricken with ailments including "brain lesions and degenerative
joint disease."35

Reutershan, the founder of Agent Orange Victims
International, was something of a celebrity. The story of his
funeral could be said to be about him as an individual, although

it also included discussion of more general Agent Orange issues.

Martinez, Sutton and others were more clearly present in their

 

3’ Severo, "Vietnam Veteran’s Family Vows to Continue His
Fight," 311 19 Dec. 1978: 2B. Among stories on Times microfilm is
an earlier wire service item reporting that about 500 veterans had
filed disability claims. It did not appear in the Times, however,
which was on strike. See Mike Shanahan, "About 500 Vietnam War
veterans have filed . . . .", NYT strike supplement, 12 Oct. 1978:
57.

“ Severo, "Two Crippled Lives Mirror Disputes on Herbicides,"
m 27 May 1979: 1+.

” "No Longer So Secret an Agent."

258

stories as examples of larger themes. Having served their

journalistic purpose, they disappeared from the news.

The theme they embodied however briefly was of the individual
poisoned by his own side in the chaos of war, then swallowed up
in an unfeeling bureacracy, and finally marginalized by a legal
system too unwieldy to deal with him as an individual. The
opening paragraphs of an early Rolling Stone feature illustrate

aspects of the theme.

Wendy Vogt’s husband and two brothers spent the late
Sixties tramping through Vietnamese jungle. Michael Vogt,
a Navy Seabee (construction brigade), backpacked a metal
spray machine, clearing underbrush from roadsides and camp
perimeters with a chemical spray. Sometimes he could
taste the herbicide and feel it itching on his skin days
later. His brothers-in-law, army veterans Edward and John
Miller, remember trailblazing helicopters showering them

with the same acrid spray.
All three men, who have since returned to homes near

Seattle, have spent a large part of the last few years in
doctors’ offices“.

Similarly, Marine Lance Cpl. Kenneth Pullen is disabled by a
persistent illness variously diagnosed as "possible jungle rot,
possible trench foot, possible gangrene, possible vasculitis of
the lower extremities, possible vein thrombosis . . . ." He
blames his illness on Agent Orange, but his claim is not accepted
because "officially Agent Orange poisoning doesn’t exist."

Veterans like Pullen, continued Richard Severo of the Times,

are the children of the 60’s who did not stay behind to
protest the war but who went out to fight it. Now they
have become protesters, and they are central to a massive

 

3‘ Howard Kohn , "Poison Harvest : Agent Orange: A Vietnam
Legacy," Rolling Stone 24 Aug. 1978: 31-2; similarly, see J. V.
Lamar Jr., "Winning Peace With Honor," Time 21 May 1984: 39-40.

259

struggle for recognition. They contend that they are the
victims of an uncaring bureaucracy that has violated the
very tenet of the V.A., the words of Abraham Lincoln: "To
care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his
widow and his orphan.""

"I thought the Marines would take care of me" (Martinez told

Severo),
but I guess they are not interested. If I had only known

this would happen, I would have been a draft-dodger. I
would have gone to Canada with the rest of them."38

For a time the litigation became a vehicle through which
veterans carried out their struggle for recognition. They were
portrayed in the news as underdogs, individuals banding together
against a strong, organized adversary. "I feel like Goliath has
just been told he’s got to go down into the valley and meet
David," one veteran responded after Judge George Pratt ruled

veterans could sue manufacturers in federal court”.

Ironically, the massive federal class-action suit itself
turned into a Leviathan in which the veterans, as individuals,
were lost. The settlement, arrived at by lawyers in closed
meetings with representatives of Judge Jack B. Weinstein, was
greeted bitterly by some veterans. "I have no feeling for this
country anymore," a Yonkers veterans was quoted as saying. "They

have total disregard for us when they can plea-bargain behind a

 

” Severo, "U.S., Despite Claims of Veterans, Says None Are

Herbicide Victims."
” Severo, "Two Crippled Lives Mirror Disputes on Herbicides."

3’ Donald G. McNeil Jr., "Judge Allows Ill Veterans to Sue
Defoliant Makers," NYT 21 Nov. 1979: 16.

260

closed door without notice to us.“0 After the settlement,
holdouts began to appear in the New York Times not as
individualists but as what the veterans had always appeared to be
in portions of the trade press -- extremists, and even dangerous
crackpots. Veterans opposed to the settlement don’t ask for

money, said one,

"but for the truth, for someone to admit what has been
done, and to try to stop what shall prove to be the

beginning of a nation of mutations.
"Our sons and daughters shall join their mutated and

damaged chromosomes with those perfect and pretty little

offspring of you who went to law school or into corporate
employ instead of to Da Nang, An Khe and Quang Tri . . .

and we shall then be vindicated when our daily existence

becomes your greatest nightmare"“.

"Everyone has a book of matches,’ shouted another at a March
1985 hearing on the settlement distribution. "Burn everything

down!“2

V. Working Out the Conflicts

Agent Orange coverage had begun in the late 19705 with
portrayals of individuals banding together to battle a system
that had sprayed them with dioxin in Vietnam and rebuffed or
ignored their complaints at home. By the mid 19803, it was

portraying individuals as extremist holdouts against the $180

 

‘° Blumenthal, "Veterans Accept $180 Million Pact on Agent
Orange," NYT 8 May 1984: 1+.

“ Blumenthal, "Veterans Speak Out on Agent Orange.”

” Blumenthal, "Vietnaaneterans Argue Over Agent Orange Fund,"
YT 6 March 1985: 18.

 

261

million settlement, which the New Yogk Times urged veterans to
accept "before too much more truth accumulates."“ A major
portion of Agent Orange news in the intervening years was
concerned with seeing that society in some way meted out justice

to individual veterans exposed to Agent Orange.

News in those years focused on the workings of the court
system, and eventually on the leadership of Judge Jack B.
Weinstein. It also paid enormous attention to research,
portraying science as the ultimate authority with which justice
had to square. When a settlement was reached that could
plausibly be presented as consistent with science, the
controversy had reached an important point of closure for the
news. At that point, individualism took the turn toward

extremism in the New York Times.

Reflecting daily journalism’s event— and official-source
orientation, the Times covered pretrial maneuvering, the
settlement and its legal aftermath in detail. Items reported on
the filing of suits in federal or state courts and on such
pretrial procedural issues as whether the government could be

sued or whether a class action would be allowed“. When

 

“ "The Truth About Agent Orange," editorial NYT 13 Aug. 1984:
22.

“ Among items on these matters in the pre-trial period, see
for example "Makers of Defoliant Are Sued on Behalf of Vietnam
Veterans," NY! 3 Feb. 1979: 17; Donald G. McNeil Jr., "Judge Allows
Ill Veterans to Sue Defoliant Makers," N12 21 Nov. 1979: 16; Lee A.
Daniels, "5 Makers of Agent Orange Charge U.S. Misused Chemical in
Vietnam,” Ni: 7 Jan. 1980: 14; Arnold H. Lubasch, "Appeals Court

262

Weinstein took over the case from Pratt in October 1983, Chemical
‘Wssk examined the impact on the case of the new judge’s approach,
including his redirection of emphasis "from policy issues to
science" and his insistence that the government play a major

role‘5 .

The May 1984 out-of-court settlement, reached at Weinstein’s
urging on the eve of trial, was covered as the decisive event of
the Agent Orange controversy. The New York Tmmss, for example,
published 10 items directly related to the settlement in the six
days beginning May 8, including page—one coverage of the
settlement itself, sidebar reports on implications for the
government and manufacturers’ earnings, a chronology of key
events, a question-and—answer summary of key issues, an editorial
supporting the agreement, and reports on veterans’ reactions and

the key role played by Weinstein in encouraging a settlement“.

 

Upsets a Ruling for Veterans in Suit Over Defoliant,’ NY: 25 Nov.
1980: 11; James Barron, "U.S. Judge Allows Class Suit Against
Defoliant Makers," N11 30 Dec. 1980: 6; Blumenthal, "U.S. Kept as
Defendant in Agent Orange Suit," £11 20 Dec. 1983: 23.

45

"Shaking Up the Agent Orange Case," Chemical Week 2 Nov.
1983: 22-3.

“ See Blumenthal, "Veterans Accept $180 Million Pact on Agent
Orange," m 8 May 1984: 1+; Robert Pear, "U.S. Liability Not
Resolved by Veterans Suit Settlement," N12_ 8 May 1984: B4;
"Litigation Continued for Years," 311 8 May 1984: B4; Daniel F.
Cuff, "Companies Comment on Pact," NY: 8 May 1984: B4; Blumenthal,
"Agent Orange: How Fund Will Work," Egg 9 May 1984: BZ; "Justice,
Mercy and Agent Orange," editorial 322 9 May 1984: 26; David Bird,
"Veterans Divided on Damages Pact, " M2 10 May 1984: 24; Blumenthal,
"How Judge Helped Shape Agent Orange Pact," N12 11 May 1984: 1+;
“Limited Health Risks From Dioxin Reported," N11 12 May 1984: 29;
Stuart Taylor Jr., "Why the Army Has an Edge in Court," NYT 13 May

263

Editorially, the 11mss called the settlement "the best feasible
solution to an intractable problem."".
The settlement was reported as a dramatic turning point in
the controversy. Two trade journals stressed the drama by noting

its arrival in the "eleventh hour" before the trial“. Newsweek
led its story on the agreement with a vignette of Weinstein
presiding over the signing of the agreement by weary lawyers at a

3:30 a.m. meeting. The agreement, the magazine said, "settled

the largest tort case in the nation’s history. . . ."“

Additional coverage stressing the pivotal nature of the
settlement included the hammering out of a plan for distribution
of the funds50 and veterans’ efforts to obtain compensation from

the federal government, which did not participate in the 1984

 

1984: E6.

47 u

Justice, Mercy and Agent Orange," editorial NYT 9 May 1984:
26.

48

"Agent Orange Suit: Firms Agree to Pay, Deny Liability,"
Chemical & Engineering News 14 May 1984: 6-7; "The Agent Orange
Surprise," Chemical Week 16 May 1984: 24.

“ Ari Press with Ann McDaniel and Barbara Burgower, "A Fast
Deal on Agent Orange," Newsweek 21 May 1984: 56.

5° See for example Blumenthal, "Agent Orange Payments Plan

Limits the Number of Awards," 311 28 Feb. 1985: B1; Blumenthal,
"Vietnam Veterans Argue Over Agent Orange Fund," 311 6 March 1985:
18; Joseph P. Fried, "Judge Rules on Allocation of the Agent Orange
Fund," 311 29 May 1985: B3; Blumenthal, "U.S. Court Blocks Plan to
Use Agent Orange Fund," 311 28 Aug. 1986: 1+; Blumenthal, "Both
Sides Act to Strengthen Positions on StalledlAgent.Orange Plan," 311
29 Aug. 1986: B3; Lubasch, "ZOO-Million (sic) Agent Orange Award Is
Upheld by U.S. Appeals Court," 311_22 April 1987: B3; "Agent Orange
Fund Is Backed,” 311 1 July 1988: B7; Leonard Buder, "Judge
Schedules Start of Agent Orange Payments," 311 6 July 1988: 24.

264

settlement“. Some lawyers acting for the veterans tried to
scuttle the plan a year later because it failed to distribute
money on the basis of problems most closely associated with Agent
Orange exposure. Lawyer Victor Yannacone commented that most
veterans "do not want a welfare giveaway where Chump change is
distributed to shut them up."52 Nevertheless, the focus on the
working out of the agreement in the courts emphasized the theme
that democracy was working, even in the face of the difficulties

posed by the Agent Orange case.

VI. The Authority of Science

If the news portrayed the courts as the forum where
individual justice could be done, however, it looked to science
as the basis of authority for that justice. Repeatedly,
scientific research was presented as the key to answering the
questions raised by Agent Orange. The New York Timss alone
published more than 35 items principally focused on research
between May 1979 and May 1984, when the settlement agreement was
reached. Many items announced that new studies would be

undertaken or were getting under way”. Research results

 

“ See for example Fried, "Judge Says U.S. Need Not Aid Agent
Orange Fund," NYT 10 May 1985: 1+.

52 Blumenthal, "U.S. Court Blocks Plan to Use Agent Orange
Fund," NYT 28 Aug. 1986: 1+.

5’ David Binder, ”Administration Widening Investigation of
Herbicide Effects on Veterans,” NYT 29 May 1979: 18; Martin

265

continued to be heavily covered even after the May 1984
agreement, with at least nine articles focusing on research
through 1988“. At times, research techniques upstaged results,
as when scientists were described as using "tools of breathtaking
sensitivity" to find persistent traces of dioxin in human

tissue”.

Similarly, the theme of numerous magazine articles was the
advance of scientific knowledge about Agent Orange and Vietnam
veterans. Some coverage had what might be called a "science
marches on" motif, often embodied in the characterization of
science as the gradual accretion of small bits of knowledge.

Reporting on a re-evaluation of the cause of death of a West

 

Tolchin, "Carter Vows to Focus on Vietnam Veterans Rights," 311 31
May 1979: 16; "Coalition to Study Effect of Agent Orange on
G.I.’s," 3Y_T 17 July 1979: 10; "U.S. Is Opening Registry on
Herbicide Exposure," 3L1: 3 Aug. 1979: 10; "Australia to Study
Effects of Chemical on Its Veterans," 3g 8 Jan. 1980: 5; "U.C.L.A.
Researchers Given Pact for V.A. Study of Agent Orange," 311 6 May
1981: 26; "Australia to Study Effects of Agent Orange," 311,15 May
1983: 5; "Jersey to Conduct Study of Dioxin," 311 11 Feb. 1984: 30;
"VA to Study 30,000 Veterans Who Are Twins," 311 12 Feb. 1984: 23.

5‘ Richard D. Lyons, "Study of Vietnam Veterans Finds No
Increased Risk of Birth Defects," 311 17 Aug. 1984: 1+; "No Death
Rate Impact Found in U.S. Study of Agent Orange," 311,12 Feb. 1985:
810; "Researchers Report Finding Telltale Sign of Agent Orange,"
311 18 Sept. 1986: 28; "Dioxin Levels Found in Vietnam Veterans
Termed Not Unusual," 311 25 July 1987: 8; "Air Force Study Finds
No Unusual Health Problems Among Agent Orange Handlers, " 311', 10 Oct.
1987: 12; Warren E. Leary, "Vietnam Veterans’ Health: No Worse Than
Others," 311 13 May 1988: 13; "Tests Say Dioxin Level High Among
Sprayers in Vietnam, " m 27 May 1988: D19; Ben A. Franklin, "Study
Finds Vietnam Combat Affecting Veterans’ Health," 311,12 Nov. 1988:
7.

” Erik Eckholm, "Highly Sensitive Test Can Detect Dioxin Years
After Exposure,” NYT 14 Oct. 1986: C1.

266

German chemical worker and on the first Ranch Hand study results,
one account concluded that although "neither development is
particularly enlightening or unexpected, each adds to the
accumulating data that may help determine what danger, if any, is

present."“

News did point out the limitations and difficulties of
science in dealing with Agent Orange issues. Stories on the
difficulties of doing dioxin science included reported
suggestions about which institutions should carry out research
and what should be studied”, or complaints or suspicions about
the way it was carried out”. It was news that a scientific
panel concluded that the Ranch Hand study would be inconclusive
in answering questions about the health of Vietnam veterans
exposed to Agent Orange. The study as designed was not
statistically sensitive enough to "identify the adverse health
effects due to exposure" among veterans in general, National

Academy of Science President Philip Handler was quoted as telling

 

“ "Agent Orange: More Data Help Define Dioxin Danger,"

Chemical 8 Engineering News 11 July 1983: 4.

57

Severo, "H.E.W. Is Urged to Study Problem Over a Herbicide
Used in Vietnam," 311 27 June 1979: 14; "Science Unit’s Leader
Proposes Global Study of Exposure to Dioxin," 311 17 Sept. 1980:
B14; "U.S. Panel Asking a Broad Study of Toxic Agents of Vietnam
War," 311 18 May 1981: 17; "Americans in Hanoi Urge Defoliant
Study," 311,31 May 1982: 2; Boffey, "Congressman Asks Agent Orange
Be Studied on International Basis," 311 21 Jan. 1984: 14.

5‘ Barron, "Veterans Criticize Agent Orange Tests," NYT 18

March 1980: 19; Severo, ”Veterans, Fearful. of .Bias, Challenge
Defoliant Study," NYT 8 May 1980: 16; Severo, "Furor Looms at
Herbicide Hearing," NYT 18 Nov. 1981: 25.

267

the Air Force”. Later, the ambiguity of the Ranch Hand study
results was pointed out in accounts in which both sides claimed

vindication of their position“.

Numerous articles also covered design problems and delays in
the VA’s planned major epidemiological study of exposed veterans,
the decision to turn the project over to the Center for Disease
Controls, and the eventual scrapping of the project“. The
study, eventually transferred to the Center for Disease Controls,
was never carried out. Although 20,000 to 60,000 ground troops
were estimated by a 1987 scientific review panel to have had
"significant" exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, the number was

not large enough to allow a meaningful study to be designed

 

” "Air Force Under Fire for Agent Orange Study, Chemical Week
21 May 1980: 18; see also "Suit Aims at Blocking Agent Orange
Study," Chemical & Engineering News 12 May 1980: 5; and R. J. Smith,
"Proposals to Study Veterans Criticized, " Science 30 May 1980: 1015.

5° B. Drummond Ayres Jr., "Air Force Reports No High Death
Rates Among Defoliant Sprayers," M1 2 July 1983: 9; "No Major
Diseases Cited in Agent Orange Sprayers," 311 25 Feb. 1984: 12;
Kenneth B. Noble, "Defoliant Study Sets Off Debate," 311 26 Feb.
1984: 33.

“ "Agent Orange Study Won’tBe Completed Until ’89, V.A. Says,"
m, 1 Sept. 1982: 21; Severo, "V.A. Assailed on Delayed Agent
Orange Study," 311 16 Sept. 1982: 25; "Science Office Chief Says
V.A. Is Stalling Agent Orange Study," 311 14 Oct. 1982: 23; Philip
M. Boffey, "Panel Sees Problemlin Study'of Effects of Agent Orange,"
311 10 Nov. 1982: 26; "Agency to Yield on Herbicide Issue," 311,16
Oct. 1982: 6; Iver Peterson, "Study of Effects of Agent Orange on
Veterans Is Stalled in Dispute, " 311 19 May 1986: 1+; Boffey, "Lack
of Military Data Halts Agent Orange Study," 311 1 Sept. 1987: 1+.

268

without seeking out exposed troops through individual blood

tests, a prohibitively expensive procedure“.

The fact that at least some Agent Orange research was most
likely an attempt to provide a scientific answer to a trans—
scientific problem was rarely acknowledged. One exception was
Science’s coverage in 1981 of the contract award to UCLA for the
epidemiological study of veterans exposed to Agent Orange. The
headline, "UCLA Designing Big Agent Orange Study,” suggests that
the work will be not only extensive but important in resolving
the controversy on the substantive level. The project’s
difficulties are quickly noted, however, the principal researcher
pointing out that "it may never be possible to get definitive
answers on the damage done by Agent Orange. A major and
insurmountable problem is that there is no way to determine who

has been exposed to the herbicide." The author continues,

No one expects science to lay the issue to rest. But as a
political problem, Agent Orange may be expected to subside
considerably if veterans can be persuaded that the
scientific questions are being approached honestly”.

More often, however, the difficulties of doing Agent Orange
research were seen merely as obstacles to the forward march of
science. Other coverage of the contract award to UCLA suggested

a sense of restrictions overcome and real work about to begin.

 

“ Boffey, "Lack of Military Data Halts Agent Orange Study,"
NYT 1 Sept. 1987: 1+.

” Constance Holden, "UCLA Designing Big Agent Orange Study,"
Science 22 May 1981: 905, my emphasis; see also Holden, "Reviewers
Pan Agent Orange Study Plan," Science 4 Dec. 1981: 1107.

269

"After a year—long delay," one magazine reported, ”the Veterans
Administration has awarded a contract to design a study to find
what, if any medical effects result from exposure to Agent
Orange."“ Another reported the awarding of the contract as a

"long-anticipated step toward resolving the Agent Orange issue. .
. "65
Similarly, "scientists are moving far faster than is widely

recognized to investigate the riddle of Agent Orange,’ wrote 3ss,
York Times science writer Philip Boffey in a 1982 research
roundup. The U.S. government, he reported, is conducting or
sponsoring more than 50 studies at a cost of more than $100

million. While few people expect the studies to provide

unequivocal results or clear guides to policy, he continued,

"It is gradually becoming clear that there is a vast
gulf between the expectations of veterans who believe they
were harmed by the herbicide and the informed judgments of
many scientists charged with investigating their
complaints."“

In sum, news about Agent Orange science played a much more
complex role in the controversy than simply to transmit risk
information. In particular, the volume of Agent Orange news was
inescapably out of proportion to the scientific consensus’

assessment of risk because of the complexity of the task, which

 

“ "VA Contracts for Design of Agent Orange Study, Chemical &

Engineering News 11 May 1981: 6.

“ "VA: Curious Orange," Science News 23 May 1981: 325.

“ Boffey, "Agent Orange: Despite Spate of Studies, Slim Hope
for Answers," NYT 30 Nov. 1982: 1C.

270

was to expose, examine and resolve conflicts among the enduring
values of the news. Science coverage became an important source
of authority and credibility for the settlement. Developments in
science, including its many difficulties, had to be covered along
with the complex legal process to present a credible picture of a

controversy working itself through to resolution.

With the settlement backed up by science, holdouts and
protesters could be portrayed not as heroic victims struggling
against the system but as irrational cranks. The democratic
system could be portrayed as one which resolved the controversy
with reasonable fairness to individuals, yet consistently with
science. Violations of the norm of responsible capitalism,
meanwhile, could be presented as having been punished with the
$180 million settlement. The major values of its Progressive,
reformist ideology having been readjusted into equilibrium once
more, the press turned to other controversies. Except for the
occasional follow-up as new research results were disclosed, the

Agent Orange story was over.

CHAPTER TWELVE: EPILOGUE

The dioxin controversy did not begin as a controversy about
dioxin at all. It began as a controversy over the impact of
human beings -- militarily and agriculturally -- on the natural
world. Posed in ecologistic terms, the original controversy put
forward the idea of the natural world as a complex web of inter-
relationships, and of humankind as a subordinate part of that
web. It challenged American warfare in Vietnam and American
chemical agriculture at home, not simply for risking human life
but for risking human life and much else by placing the web
itself at risk. Thus it posed a radical challenge to long-
established American ways of thought and behavior, based as they
were on a conviction that nature could be -- indeed had to be --
forced into hospitability to a dominant humankind. The radical
challenge of ecologism has not disappeared, as attested by such
controversies as species loss, ozone depletion and global warming
and such phenomena as Earth First! and the Animal Rights and

Green political movements.

However, the introduction of dioxin into the dispute in 1970
as a technical explanation of the Bionetics research began the

process of refocusing a major part of the controversy in less

271

272

radical and more familiar terms. And a major part it was made to
be. The American media expended enormous resources over two
decades to cover the multitudinous aspects of the dioxin
controversy, resources out of all proportion to the scientific
assessment of dioxin’s risks to human health. This disparity has
contributed evidence to a critique of the coverage as
sensationalistic and misleading. How could the media, it is
asked, devote so much coverage to an environmental health risk so
marginal that not a single death has been demonstrated to have

resulted from it?

Part of the answer, we have seen, is that the scientific
consensus about the risk of dioxin remains open to challenge.
Even had there been many "single deaths" resulting from dioxin
exposure, research would not have turned them up, because the
question of individual causation of disease or death from
environmental exposure remains trans-scientific. Nevertheless,
the case is the same with other environmental risks -- radon, for
example —- that in the best scientific judgment pose greater
cause for concern than dioxin. The question remains, why did

dioxin become the issue that radon did not?

The larger answer is that coverage of dioxin was concerned
only marginally with transmitting risk information to the public.
The central business of dioxin news, this examination of the
material indicates, was to expose and repair flaws and weaknesses

in a widely accepted picture of the way American society operates

273

and is supposed to operate -- the Progressive, reformist ideology
that Herbert Gans described in terms of the "enduring values" of
the news. The news —- and as Gans points out, a large portion of
its public -- values the United States, democracy, capitalism,
individualism, leadership, small-town pastoralism, moderatism and

respect for authority.

Even while the news deradicalized the defoliation and
pesticide controversies, it saw dioxin in the environment as
threatening these values and even exposing some as inconsistent.
A central business of dioxin coverage was to see these values
reintegrated in such a way that democratic processes, consistent
with the authority of science, could be seen to have dealt
appropriately with individuals and small-town communities exposed
to dioxin, while errant capitalism and faulty government
leadership were punished and corrected. The ideology is a
complicated one, and the process of reintegration was long and
difficult. Hence the quantity of coverage. When the

reaccommodation was achieved, the dioxin story faded.

Tending the nation’s ideology -- exposing flaws and
publicizing the processes of correction and repair -- is a
function of the news long acknowledged in media studies, but
seldom examined in studies of science/technology controversyl.

It is roughly analogous to media sociologist Charles R. Wright’s

 

1 The notable exception is the work of Dorothy Nelkin, cited
above.

274

"correlation" and "socialization" functions of mass
communication, whereas "factual" transmission of risk information
is analogous to his "surveillance" function. Surveillance, for
Wright refers to the "distribution of information concerning

events,’ and correlation to the "interpretation of the

information . . . prescriptions about what to do about it, and
attempts to influence" interpretations, attitudes and behaviors.
Socialization, or transmission of the social heritage, concerns
the process "by which society’s store (or part of its store) of

values, social norms, knowledge and other cultural components is

made known to and instilled in members and potential members."2

Wouldn’t the news do better, though, to adopt a more tightly
focused -- and humbler -— role? Shouldn’t its main business be
the transmission of factual risk information, leaving the tending
of the nation’s ideology elsewhere, or nowhere? These questions
are implied in the critique that the quantity of coverage was
disproportionate to the scientific assessment of risk. Yet, as
the chapters on fact/value separation suggest, any such effort to
deal separately with fact and value matters in public controversy
runs a substantial risk of begging the question of relevance. A
purely "factual" transmission of risk information in such a

controversy is likely to remain ideological, but with its value

 

2 Charles R. Wright, Mass Communication: A Sociological
Pegspective 3d ed. (New York: Random 1986): 4-5. Wright’s work on
functions of the media is based on that of Harold Lasswell, carried
out in the 19405.

275

commitments left implicit and unacknowledged. As long as the
media cover controversy at all, they have a role in the processes
of ideological criticism, reform and stabilization. The question

is, how can they best play that role in a democratic society.

Answers are beyond the scope of this study, which
nevertheless suggests that the centrism and durability of the
news’ enduring values make it a force strongly for stability if
not stagnation. Nearly three decades after Silent Spring
redirected and energized environmentalism, there seems to have
been a widespread adoption of environmental rhetoric, but much
less fundamental change in American energy, agriculture,
transportation or industrial thinking, policy or practice. This
study suggests one contributing factor may be the tendency of the
news to marginalize radical ideas by refocusing controversy in
terms of tried-and-true enduring values. Criticized as
sensationalistic and demagogic, dioxin news could more accurately
be described as painstakingly conservative in its role as
caretaker of one aspect of the nation’s slowly evolving picture

of itself.

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. "1965 Memos Show Dow’s Anxiety on Dioxin." NYT 19 April

1983: 1+.

. "Scientist Urges Congress to Bar Any Use of Pesticide 2,4,5-

T." NYT 10 Aug. 1974: 13.

Burros, Marian. "Mayor Says U.S. Should Inspect Fish." NYT 28

March 1983: B8.

”Business Sideline Puts Oil Dealer in the Spotlight in Missouri’s

Dioxin Case," 311 24 Jan. 1983: 8.

“Carter Veto Cites Procedure on Study of Defoliant." 311 3 Jan.
1980: 17.

"Children Stack Sandbags by Flooding Mississippi." 311 5 May

1983: 16.

Clines, Francis X. "Reagan Asks Doctors to Support Freeze in

Their Medicare Returns." NYT 24 June 1983: D14.

"Coalition to Study Effect of Agent Orange on G.I.'s." 311 17
July 1979: 10.

"Comment on Abortion." 311 22 Aug. 1976: 2.

Commoner, Barry. "Transmuting Trash." 311 15 Jan. 1983: 23.

"Contaminant in Pesticide Linked to Defects in Mice." 311 8 Feb.
1970: 68.

"Contaminated Town Is Relegated to History." 311 14 April 1985:
26.

"County Pulls Police Out of Poisoned Missouri Town." 311 1 Jan.
1983: 5.

"Court Approves Disposal Plan," NYT 12 Jan. 1983: 12.

298

"Court Hearing Set Today," NYT 10 Jan. 1983: 14.
"Cranberries." editorial NYT 11 Nov. 1959: 34.
Cuff, Daniel F. "Companies Comment on Pact." NYT 8 May 1984: B4.

Daniels, Lee A. "5 Makers of Agent Orange Charge U.S. Misused

Chemical in Vietnam." NYT 7 Jan. 1980: 14.
"Deadly Miasma Over Missouri." NYT 3 Jan. 1983: 18.

Dean, Clarence. "Cranberry Sales Curbed; U.S. Widens Taint

Check." NYT 11 Nov. 1959: 1+.
"Deaths of Animals Laid to Chemical." NYT 28 Aug. 1974: 36.

Dionne, E.J. "Europe’s Dioxin Drama: A Slaughterhouse Finale."

NYT 13 June 1983: 2.

"Dioxin Debris to Remain in Times Beach, Mo." NYT 7 Jan. 1983:

10.
"Dioxin Found at Day-Care Center." 311 11 Feb. 1983: BS.
"Dioxin Found at Illinois Sites." 311 15 Feb. 1983: 21.
"Dioxin Hysteria." editorial Wall Street Journal 31 May 1983: 26.
"Dioxin Level Down in State Building." 311 13 Jan. 1983: B2.

"Dioxin Levels Found in Vietnam Veterans Termed Not Unusual." NYT

25 July 1987: 8.

"Dispute Over the Risks of 2,4,5—T Continues Despite a Federal

Ban." NYT 27 May 1979: 42.

"Dow Chemical Urging Got EPA to Soften 1981 Dioxin Water Report,

Officials Say." Wall Street Journal. 16 March 1983: 4.

Earley, Pete. "Dioxin Is Still a Mystery." Washington Post 27

Feb. 1983: BS.

Eckholm, Eric. "Highly Sensitive Test Can Detect Dioxin Years

After Exposure." NYT 14 Oct. 1986: C1.

299

Federal Ban Now Is Urged on Controversial Herbicide." NYT 30

April 1970: 27.

Finney, John W. "Vietnam Defoliation Scars Expected to Last a

Century." NYT 22 Feb. 1974: 1+.

Flint, Jerry M. "Dow Aides Deny Herbicides Risk." NYT 18 March

1970: 72.

"Flooded Town Is Checked for Toxic Chemicals," photo caption, NYT

6 Jan. 1983: 12.
"Foes of Spraying Win Coast Round." NYT 11 July 1971: 20.

"Forest Service Is Upheld in Plans to Use Herbicide." NYT 8 Aug.

1974: 31.

Franklin, Ben A. "Study Finds Vietnam Combat Affecting Veterans’

Health." NYT 12 Nov. 1988: 7.

Fried, Joseph P. "Judge Rules on Allocation of the Agent Orange

Fund." NYT 29 May 1985: B3.

"Judge Says U.S. Need Not Aid Agent Orange Fund." NYT 10 May

1985: 1+.
Haitch, Richard. "Dioxin Holdouts." NYT 5 May 1985: 58.

Harwood, Richard. "Agent Orange Myth at War With Science."

Detroit News 17 Oct. 1990: 11.

Hill, Gladwin. "Draft Calls for Ecological Responsibility." NYT

7 June 1972: 3.

---. "U.S., at U.N. Parley on Environment, Rebukes Sweden for

’Politicizing’ Talks." NYT 8 June 1972: 13.

Hilts, Philip J. "AMA Votes to Fight Dioxin ’Witch Hunt.’"

Washington Post 23 June 1983: A1.

 

300
Hofmann, Paul. "Company Says ’76 Blast in Italy Caused Little
Injury." 311 25 June 1978: 4.
"Italians Wrangle Over Poison Issue." 311 4 Aug. 1976: 9.

"Italy Allocates Funds for Gassed Region." NYT 11 Aug. 1976: 2.

"Italy Asked to Use Troops to Seal Polluted Region." NYT 13 Feb.

1977: 7.
"Jersey to Conduct Study of Dioxin." NYT 11 Feb. 1984: 30.

Jonas, Gerald. "DDT in Dry Cleaning." Letter. NYT 26 July 1962:

26.

"Judge Blocks Removal of Missouri Flood Debris." NYT 8 Jan. 1983:

8.
"Justice, Mercy and Agent Orange." Editorial. NYT 9 May 1984: 26.

Kenworthy, E. W. "5 Groups Ask Ban on Herbicide Use." NYT 19

July 1970: 34.

---. "Full DDT Ban Is Refused Pending Review of Safety." NYT 19

March 1971: 1+.

King, Seth 8. "Big U.S. Fire—Bomb Raid Hits Vietcong Near

Saigon." NYT 1 April 1965: 1+.

Kinum, Louis A. "DDT’s Use in Dry Cleaning." Letter. NYT 6

Sept. 1962: 30.

Kurtz, Howard. "Dow Got to Suggest Dioxin Report Changes.”

Washington Post. 16 March 1983: A1+.

Labaton, Stephen. "Five Years After Settlement, Agent Orange War

Lives On." NYT 5 Aug. 1989: D1+.

Leary, Warren E. "Vietnam Veterans’ Health: No Worse Than

Others." NYT 13 May 1988: 13.

301

Lee, John M. "Silent Spring Is Now Noisy Summer." NYT 22 July

1962: C1.
"Limited Health Risks From Dioxin Reported." NYT 12 May 1984: 29.
"Litigation Continued for Years." NYT 8 May 1984: B4.

Lord, Christina. "Italian Leaders Take Up Poison Chemical

Problem." NYT 31 July 1976: 3.

Lubasch, Arnold H. "Appeals Court Upsets a Ruling for Veterans in

Suit Over Defoliant." NYT 25 Nov. 1980: 11.

. "ZOO-Million (sic) Agent Orange Award Is Upheld by U.S.

Appeals Court." NYT 22 April 1987: BB.

Lyons, Richard D. "Military to Curb Use of Herbicides." NYT 27

Dec. 1970: 5.

. "Study of Vietnam Veterans Finds No Increased Risk of Birth

Defects." NYT 17 Aug. 1984: 1+.

Maitland, Leslie. "E.P.A. Aides Charge Superiors Forced Shift in

Dow Study." NYT 19 March 1983: 1+.

"Makers of Defoliant Are Sued on Behalf of Vietnam Veterans." NYT

3 Feb. 1979: 17.

McFadden, Robert D. "New York Area Callers Seek Reassurance on

Eating Carp." NYT 29 March 1983: B3.

McGill, Douglas C. "Kean Orders 3d Dioxin Site Shut." NYT 11 June

1983: 1+.
---. "Kean Tours Area Near Dioxin Site." NYT 5 June 1983: 1+.
---. "Tests at Newark Show More Dioxin." NYT 8 June 1983: 1+.

McNeil, Donald G. Jr. "Judge Allows Ill Veterans to Sue Defoliant

Makers." NYT 21 Nov. 1979: 16.

302
Mitgang, Herbert. "A Dying Land--Casualty of War." NYT 10 Oct.
1971: D2.

---. "The Spoor of Nam." NYT 3 Dec. 1974: 41.

Mohr, Charles. "Defoliation Unit Lives Perilously." NYT 20 Dec.

1965: 3.
"New Pollution Reported in Italy." NYT 21 April 1977: 4.

"1970’s Dioxin Sprayer Apologizes at Hearing," NYT 26 June 1983:

37.

Noble, Kenneth B. "Defoliant Study Sets Off Debate." NYT 26

Feb. 1984: 33.

"No Death Rate Impact Found in U.S. Study of Agent Orange." NYT

12 Feb. 1985: B10.
"No Illness Found in Dioxin Testing," NYT 18 Oct. 1983: 16.

"No Major Diseases Cited in Agent Orange Sprayers." NYT 25 Feb.

1984: 12.

Nordheimer, Jon. "Dioxin's Effects in Italy Less Severe Than Had

Been Feared." NYT 31 Jan. 1983: 13.

"One E.P.A. Buy-Out Is Not a Policy." Editorial. NYT 25 Feb.

1983: 30.

"179 Italians to Be Moved From Poison Gas Area." NYT 25 July

1976: 15.

”Owners of Chemical Plant in Italy Paying $80 Million in ’76

Mishap." NYT 21 May 1980: 10.

Pear, Robert. "U.S. Liability Not Resolved by Veterans Suit

Settlement." NYT 8 May 1984: B4.

Perera, George. "Vietnam: A Medical Consequence of War." NYT 19

Sept. 1972: 53.

303
Peterson, Iver. "Reduced Levels of Dioxin Found in Michigan

Fish." NYT 17 July 1983: 1+.

---. "Study Of Effects of Agent Orange on Veterans Is Stalled in

Dispute." 311 19 May 1986: 1+.
"Polluting Factory in Italy Will Close." 311 21 Aug. 1976: 6.
"Rachel Carson Book Is Called One-Sided." 311 14 Sept. 1962: 37.
"Rachel Carson’s Warning." 311 2 July 1962: 28.

Raymond, Jack. "Weed Killers Aid War on Vietcong." NYT 28 March

1965: 2.

Reed, Roy. "Herbicide Use in Ozark Forests Challenged." NYT 14

July 1975: 40.

Reinhold, Robert. "A.M.A. Disavows Jab at Dioxin Reports." NYT

1 July 1983: 6.

. "Dangerous Ground: Uproar at E.P.A. Blends Politics,

Pollution and Public Health." NYT 27 Feb. 1983: D1.

---. "E.P.A.’s Dow Tests Find High Toxicity." NYT 1 April 1983:
1+.

---. "Missouri Dioxin Cleanup: A Decade of Little Action." NYT 20

Feb. 1983: 1+.

---. "Missouri Governor Proposes Steps to Fight Dioxin Crisis."

NYT 12 Jan. 1983: 12.

---. "Missouri Now Fears 100 Sites Could Be Tainted by Dioxin."

NYT 18 Jan. 1983: 1+.

---. "New York Area Is Receiving Carp From Toxin-Tainted Michigan

Bay." NYT 28 March 1983: 1+.

. "Scholars: Study of ’Risks and Benefits’ of the Use of

Herbicides in War Is Sought." NYT 31 Dec. 1968: 16

304

--—. "Scientists Call for a Ban on 2 Vietnam Defoliants." NYT

31 Dec. 1969: 10.

---. "U.S. Attempted to Ignite Vietnam Forests in ’66-67." NYT

21 July 1972: 1+.

---. "U.S. Offers to Buy All Homes in Town Tainted by Dioxin."

NYT 23 Feb. 1983: 1+.

---. "Witness Says Hauler Knew of Toxic Material," NYT 25 Jan.

1983: 19.

Rempel, William C. and Eleanor Randolph. "Lethal Dioxin: Monster

Guest in Chemical Lab." Los Angeles Times 9 May 1983: 1+.

Rensberger, Boyce. "E.P.A. Ends Drive to Ban Defoliant." NYT 27

June 1974: 8.

"Researchers Report Finding Telltale Sign of Agent Orange.” NYT

18 Sept. 1986: 28.

Robbins, William. "Dioxin Tests Conducted in 60’s on 70

Philadelphia Inmates, Now Unknown." NYT 17 July 1983: 16.

Roberts, Steven V. "Deformities and Hemorrhaging Laid to Forest

Spray in Arizona." NYT 8 Feb. 1970: 60.

. "Poisonous Cloud's Effects Still Baffle Italy’s Officials."

NYT 13 Aug. 1976: 3.

Robinson, Douglas. "Rhinoceroses and Elephants Are Among the War

Victims in South Vietnam." NYT 13 Sept. 1968: 16.

. "Study Finds Defoliants Change Vietnam Ecology." NYT 21

Sept. 1968: 10.

Russell, E. R. "U.S. Government’s Early Knowledge of Dioxin in

Agent Orange." ltr NYT 15 July 1983: 22.

305

Sacharoff, Mark. "Chemical Warfare as ’Humane Warfare.’"

Letter. NYT 2 Nov. 1970: 46.
Salpukas, Agis. "Dow Fights Pollution." NYT 7 May 1970: 69.

"Salvage Oil Dealer Convicted in Tax Trial," NYT 24 July 1983:

16.

Schmeck, Harold M. Jr. "U.S. Review Urged on Chemical War." NYT

15 Feb. 1967: 1+.

Schmidt, Dana Adams. "Pentagon Disputes Study of Spraying

Devastation." NYT 9 Jan. 1971: 3.

"Science Office Chief Says V.A. Is Stalling Agent Orange Study."

NYT 14 Oct. 1982: 23.

"Science Unit’s Leader Proposes Global Study of Exposure to

Dioxin." NYT 17 Sept. 1980: 814.

"Scientists Press Study of Defoliants in Vietnam." NYT 29 Dec.

1969: 25.

"Scientists to Help Indochina Recover From Deforestation." NYT 11

Nov. 1973: 5.

"Seven More Dioxin Sites Are Found in Missouri," NYT 10 Feb.

1983: 18.

Severo, Richard. "Furor Looms at Herbicide Hearing." NYT 18 Nov.

1981: 25.

---. ”Herbicides Pose a Bitter Mystery in U.S. Decades After

Discovery." NYT 29 May 1979: 1+.

---. "H.E.W. Is Urged to Study Problem Over a Herbicide Used in

Vietnam." NYT 27 June 1979: 14.

---. "Two Crippled Lives Mirror Disputes on Herbicides." NYT 27

May 1979: 1+.

306

---. "U.S., Despite Claims of Veterans, Says None Are Herbicide

Victims." NYT 28 May 1979: 1+.

. "V.A. Assailed on Delayed Agent Orange Study." NYT 16 Sept.

1982: 25.

---. "Veterans, Fearful of Bias, Challenge Defoliant Study." NYT

8 May 1980: 16.

. "Vietnam Veteran’s Family Vows to Continue His Fight." NYT

19 Dec. 1978: BZ. "Seveso Disaster." NYT 19 Aug. 1976: 34.

Shabecoff, Philip. "Dow Has Refused to Give E.P.A. Data.” NYT 17

March 1983: 1+.

---. "Environmental Agency: Deep and Persisting Woes." NYT 6

March 1983: 1+.

---. "Scheuer Says E.P.A. Aide Let Dow Delete Dioxin Tie in Draft

Report." NYT 16 March 1983: 1+.

---. "Threat Posed by Dioxin Subject of Growing Fear." NYT 12

Feb. 1983: 10.

Shanahan, Mike. "About 500 Vietnam War veterans have filed . . .

." strike supplement, NYT 12 Oct. 1978: 57.

Sheppard, Nathaniel Jr. "In Dioxin-Tainted Town, No ’Welcome’

Signs." NYT 10 Jan. 1983: 1+.
---. "Times Beach Is Mixed on Buyout." NYT 24 Feb. 1983: B14.
”Six More Italians Undergo Abortion." NYT 20 Aug. 1976: D17.

Smith, Robert M. "Senate, 62 to 22, Rejects Herbicide Ban for

Vietnam." NYT 27 Aug. 1970: 1+.

---. "U.S. Curbs Use of Weed Killer That Produces Rat

Deformities." NYT 30 Oct. 1969: 80.

307

"Some of Cranberry Crop Tainted by Weed-Killer, U.S. Warns." NYT

10 Nov. 1959: 1+.

Stein, Mark A. "Dow Ends Bid to Market Herbicide." Los Angeles

 

Times 15 Oct. 1983: 1+.

Sullivan, Joseph F. "High Level of Dioxin Found at Jersey Site;

Food Center Is Shut." NYT. 3 Jan. 1983: 1+.

Sullivan, Walter. "Chemists Debate Pesticides Book." NYT 13

Sept. 1962: 34.
---. "Scientists Study Defoliated Areas." NYT 18 Feb. 1968: 5.

---. "Sprays in Vietnam Said to Level Fifth of Mangrove Area."

NYT 30 Dec. 1970: 1+.

---. "Use of Herbicides by U.S. in Vietnam Defended." NYT 4

Jan. 1968: 2.

---. "War Defoliation Studied in Report." NYT 7 Jan. 1968: 3.

--—. "Zoologist, Back From Vietnam, Notes Defoliants’ Value and
Toll." NYT 4 April 1969: 5.
Taylor, Stuart Jr. "E.P.A. Inquiries Center on Four Issues."

NYT 13 March 1983: 36.
---. "Why the Army Has an Edge in Court." NYT 13 May 1984: E6.
"Tests Hint Debris Is Safe." NYT 12 Jan. 1983: 12.

"Tests Say Dioxin Level High Among Sprayers in Vietnam." NYT 27

May 1988: 019.
"The Truth About Agent Orange." Editorial. NYT 13 Aug. 1984: 22.

"Times Beach, Mo., Board Moves to Seal Off Town." NYT 27 April

1983: 18.

"Times Beach, Mo., Votes Itself Out of Existence." NYT 3 April

1985: 16.

308

Tolchin, Martin. ”Carter Vows to Focus on Vietnam Veterans

Rights." NYT 31 May 1979: 16.
“Toxic." NYT 10 June 1979: G53.

"Trucks Move Debris Floods Left in Town With Dioxin Trouble," NYT

14 Jan. 1983: 9.
"The Truth About Agent Orange." Editorial. NYT 13 Aug. 1984: 22.

"20 More Evacuated From Area in Italy Hit by Poison." NYT 29

July 1976: 3.

"24 Italian Families Return to Contaminated Area." NYT 17 Oct.

1977: 5.

"U.C.L.A. Researchers Given Pact for V.A. Study of Agent Orange."

NYT 6 May 1981: 26.
"U.S. Curbs Sales of a Weed Killer." NYT 16 April 1970: 29.

"U.S. Is Opening Registry on Herbicide Exposure." NYT 3 Aug.

1979: 10.

"U.S. Panel Asking a Broad Study of Toxic Agents of Vietnam War."

NYT 18 May 1981: 17.

"V.A. to Study 30,000 Veterans Who Are Twins." NYT 12 Feb. 1984:

23.

"Veterans Link Wide Variety of Illnesses to Defoliant Use." NYT

28 May 1979: D8.

Webster, Bayard. "A.M.A. Plans Drive to Counter Reports of Dioxin

as Hazard." NYT 23 June 1983: B11.

"Weed Killer Curb Is Expanded by U.S." NY 2 May 1970: 33.

Weinraub, Bernard. "New Bill Would Aid Vietnam Veterans." NYT

11 Oct. 1979: 9.

 

309

Winerip, Michael. "U.S. Judge Clears Way for Trial on Agent

Orange." NYT 13 May 1983: 12.

"World Church Body Issues Plea to 4 sides in Vietnam." NYT 21

Feb. 1970: 9.