Political Quotes

“Glenn T. Seaborg is a truly great American who for 14 years has suffered outrageous treatment from bureaucrats and is in need of our assistance. Dr. Seaborg, codiscoverer of plutonium, kept a journal whilst chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971. The journal consisted of a diary written at home each evening, correspondence, announcements, minutes, and the like. He was careful about classified matters; nothing was included that could not be made public. Even as he was chairman the portions relating to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were microfilmed for public access in their respective Presidential libraries. Before leaving the AEC, Dr. Seaborg got it all cleared virtually without deletion. Then lunacy descended. Or rather, the Atomic Energy Commission became the Department of Energy and bureaucracy got going. Seaborg writes of all this in an article 'Secrecy Runs Amok' published in Science in 1994. It seems that in 1983 the chief historian of the Department asked to borrow one of two sets of the journal, some 26 volumes in all, for work on a history of the Commission. By the time the author got his journal back passage after passage was redacted, much of it explicitly public information, such as the published code names of nuclear weapons tests, some of it purely personal, as for example his description of accompanying his children on a trick or treat outing on a Halloween evening.”