On a Farther Shore (47 page)

Carson thought the speech went well.
Relaxing the next day, she got word that
Silent Spring
would be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection for October, with Justice Douglas, one of Carson’s most ardent admirers, to write the copy for the catalog.
Glad but underwhelmed, Carson wrote to Dorothy that the good thing was that now the book would find its way “to farms and hamlets all over the country that don’t know what a bookstore looks like—much less the
New Yorker
.” Sounding more than a little jaded, Carson said, “It is
perhaps not shameless to say that after three best-sellers one does not get wildly excited about such news, which is perhaps too bad, but the deep satisfaction is there.”

Carson and Roger left Silver Spring for Maine at the end of June 1962, as the early reactions to the
Silent Spring
articles were taking hold.
Among the first to weigh in was the
New York Times
, which on July 2 ran an editorial endorsing Carson’s message on chemical pesticides and the “generally unsuccessful effort to eliminate insect pests and the extent to which we are, in the process, subjecting ourselves to the hazard of slow poisoning through the pollution of our environment.” Anticipating the storm of criticism to come, the
Times
predicted that Carson would be accused of being an alarmist who reported only the arguments against the use of pesticides while ignoring their benefits. But the
Times
carefully pointed out that Carson had made it clear in
Silent Spring
that there was room for the intelligent application of pesticides in some situations. “Miss Carson does not argue that chemical pesticides must never be used, but she warns of the dangers of misuse and overuse by a public that has become mesmerized by the notion that chemists are the possessors of divine wisdom and that nothing but benefit can emerge from their test tubes.”

It’s not certain that President Kennedy read the
Silent Spring
excerpts as they appeared over three weeks in June.
But the president was alerted to the articles in early July by a local judge in Plattsburgh, New York, named Irving Goldman. Goldman had attended law school at Yale, and he wrote to the president as a fellow “Ivy Leaguer,” imploring Kennedy to involve the federal government in stricter oversight of pesticide use. Goldman said his concern was for protecting public health now and in future generations, as pesticides were so dangerous as to make the effects of radiation “seem minor by comparison.” Goldman sent copies of the letter to the USDA, the FDA, both of his U.S. senators, and his representative in the House.

The White House gave the letter careful attention. It was routed to the president with Goldman’s specific recommendation underlined: “Some action should be taken forthwith to regulate the manufacture and distribution of these chemicals,” and the secretary of health, education, and welfare was asked to comment on Goldman’s letter. Of course pesticides were already subject to regulation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the authority of FIFRA and other federal statutes—but it was clear that Goldman believed far too little was being done.

Within days, Kennedy’s special assistant, T. J. Reardon, Jr., had obtained a cautious draft response to Goldman from Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman’s office. The letter took a more sanguine tone than the president himself used in his press conference a few weeks later when he would tell the country he was ordering a broad review of pesticide use in response to Carson’s articles. Reardon told Goldman that the government had been regulating pesticides for nearly a century. He said that the rapid development and commercialization of newer pesticides that so concerned Miss Carson had already led to tighter controls to “insure the protection of the public.” Reardon mentioned the recently created Federal Pest Control Review Board—an analogue of the toothless Federal Radiation Council—as an example of the government’s diligence, and added vaguely that “all aspects of manufacture, sale, and use” of pesticides were under “constant review.” He concluded on a sharper, dismissive note, informing Goldman that chemical pesticides provided “great benefits” to the country “without any grave or undue hazard to the public.” Furthermore, Reardon said, “Your Government is making every effort to insure that these important aids to our abundance continue to be controlled in the best interests of the entire Nation.”

Put another way, at midsummer the Kennedy administration’s official position was that Rachel Carson had made much out of nothing.

Over at the USDA, where the chronically ambivalent Orville Freeman was already under siege over the radiation problems with milk, everyone seemed to understand that the concerns raised by
Judge Goldman were going to be shared by a large portion of the public—and that a firestorm was imminent.
Shirley Briggs warned Carson that the Department of Agriculture was rumored to be combing over the
New Yorker
articles in search of a cause of action for libel—or even just a mistake—so far without success.
Freeman told his senior staff he didn’t know yet whether it was going to be official policy to “fight” with Carson but that he wanted everyone to start coming up with ideas for attacking her while at the same time working out less confrontational responses—including simply saying that pesticides were useful and carefully regulated. Freeman suggested that whichever of these approaches seemed most workable could eventually become the official policy.

Freeman did not mention—probably because he didn’t have to—that farm interests, his primary constituency, were going to take exception to
Silent Spring
when it was published and were already on edge over press coverage of the articles in the
New Yorker
. He assumed more articles would come as the controversy deepened around Carson’s still-unpublished book, though it’s unlikely he imagined anything like the five-part series that began appearing in the Long Island daily
Newsday
on August 20, 1962.

The stories were written by a gifted young investigative reporter named Robert A. Caro—who would gain fame for
The Power Broker
, a biography of New York City planner Robert Moses, and for his ambitious multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Any hope Orville Freeman or anyone else in the administration had of fashioning a calm response to
Silent Spring
went out the door with Caro’s opening paragraph:

Caro reported that President Kennedy—reversing field after the cool response to Judge Goldman—was now personally engaged in the pesticides issue and had ordered science adviser Jerome Wiesner to launch an investigation. He described the problem as a growing body of evidence suggesting a connection between the widespread use of chemical pesticides and rising incidences of disease in both wildlife and human populations. Caro likened the scientists’ fears about pesticides to those over the horrific birth defects in Britain caused by the morning-sickness drug thalidomide—except that the dangers from pesticides were, if anything, worse because their possible effects on genes could play out over the course of many generations. He didn’t draw a literal parallel between pesticides and radiation, although his concern for the impact of pesticides on future generations was identical to that raised by Linus Pauling and other scientists over fallout.

The truth about pesticides, Caro reported, was being obscured by a massive public relations campaign to promote their safety and effectiveness—orchestrated by their manufacturers, who represented an $800 million a year industry. The pesticide makers were aided in this effort by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which “leaped aboard the pesticides bandwagon as soon as DDT was introduced” and was now running “vast” spraying campaigns of its own while encouraging the general use of pesticides by farmers. Caro said that internal reports critical of these policies were routinely suppressed and that people working in pesticide programs rarely complained about them for fear of being fired.

Caro took note of the benefits of pesticide use—rising farm productivity and sharp declines of insect-borne diseases in many parts of the world. But he reported that many scientists had been quietly warning of side effects. Now those whispers had become a scream thanks to “famed biologist and author Rachel Carson.” Caro said the
New Yorker
series had drawn one of the heaviest mail responses in the magazine’s history—and a matching flood of angry letters had arrived at the USDA, where Caro scored a coup by getting the first interview with Orville Freeman on the subject. Freeman told Caro that pesticides
were “on balance” of greater benefit than harm and that there was no cause for “panic and hysteria.” But Caro reported that department officials involved in pesticide programs had recently been ordered to stop blanket denials of any problems with pesticide use.

In subsequent installments over the next four days, Caro kept up an attack on official policy—or the lack of one—regarding pesticide use and portrayed the scientific community as divided on the issue. Caro saw the USDA and the pesticides industry as partners in what had become a massive, self-propagating enterprise, with neither willing to consider the collateral damage pesticides might do to wildlife or human health. He explored the possible link between pesticides and cancer, and skillfully explained how DDT and other organochlorine pesticides are stored in fatty tissues and how body burdens of stored pesticides can be magnified upward through food chains.

Caro had less success in getting Orville Freeman to give a coherent answer to the seemingly simple question of whether the USDA had oversold pesticides. It was clear that by the time Caro got to Freeman the secretary had decided against any public vilification of Carson and
Silent Spring
.
Ridiculously, he told Caro that his department regarded Carson as an “ally” in bringing the pesticide issue to the attention of the American people—an odd claim given the department’s long history of insisting pesticide dangers were a nonissue.

Freeman told Caro he wasn’t satisfied with what his department knew about the effects of pesticide use on wildlife or on human health—which was next to nothing—and that going forward they were going to give the matter “
strong concerted attention.” When Caro asked Freeman if that meant they would suspend large-scale spraying operations until their effects were better understood, Freeman ducked the question, saying he thought he’d already covered that. More comfortable on the shifting middle ground, Freeman reminded Caro that a scientific consensus on pesticide safety did not exist.

Caro’s
Newsday
series wrapped up just five days before President Kennedy was asked about pesticides at his news conference. The president’s
claim that several agencies were looking into the matter as a direct result of “Miss Carson’s book” may have been technically correct—if hand-wringing and confusion could be described as looking into something. Presidential science adviser Wiesner got more direct orders to investigate the situation the day after Kennedy met with the press.

Wiesner began assembling a panel to report to the president on the pesticide problem by the following spring. At about the same time, an agency the president neglected to mention was more aggressively looking into the controversy around
Silent Spring
.
The FBI had launched an investigation of Carson—though at whose request and for what reason is unknown. Apparently the agency made inquiries with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and looked into who Carson had been talking to on the phone recently—all of which suggests the FBI was curious about whether Carson was having questionable contact with foreign nationals, which, of course, she wasn’t. Not surprisingly, nothing came of the investigation. The FBI’s report on Carson, completed in mid-December, ran to only two pages. It was marked “Confidential,” filed, forgotten, and eventually destroyed.

Carson had reason to think that one agency inside the federal government, the U.S. Department of the Interior—her former home—was going to back the position she’d taken in
Silent Spring
. Even before the excerpts started appearing in the
New Yorker
, Carson had heard from a man named Paul Knight, who was an assistant to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. Udall, a staunch conservationist, was himself at work on a book about environmental problems, called
The Quiet Crisis
, that was to come out the following year.

Knight told Carson he was interested in the problems of communicating scientific ideas to the public and said America was in for “a lot of discussion” about pesticides and their effects on wildlife and human health.
In July 1962, after the
New Yorker
series had run, Knight wrote to Carson again commending her for putting the pesticide problem on the national agenda and telling her he’d already
had conversations with at least one member of Congress about how the government should respond. He told her he was speaking “off the record,” but hinted that she had started something that was going to play out in a dramatic and public way. “These comments are personal and unofficial,” Knight said, “although I expect that we will be directly involved before it is over.”

In October,
Newsday
’s Robert Caro reported that the Wiesner committee had already learned that many of Rachel Carson’s claims in
Silent Spring
were true, and the panel expected to recommend sweeping changes in federal research on pesticides and would propose legislation to curb their indiscriminate use. As for Carson’s book, Caro reported that it had sold its entire first printing of one hundred thousand copies during the two weeks it had been out.

From the beginning, Carson, Paul Brooks, and everyone at Houghton Mifflin had been concerned that the downbeat, frightening nature of
Silent Spring
would discourage a wide readership.
Carson had shrewdly seen that the way around this was to focus on showing “the futility and the basic wrongness of the present chemical program—even better than ranting against it, though doubtless I shall rant a little, too.” This was smart, but it also underscored Carson’s mature confidence in herself and her work—a conviction that she could take on a difficult subject and argue against the interests of powerful forces. Carson was comfortable in her new skin as a great woman of American letters.