POLITICIANS MAY NOT UNDERSTAND SCIENCE BUT ON THE OTHER HAND. . .
AUTHOR SALLY DENTON send us the following: "Just came upon this
precious exchange, Arthur Goldschmidt in an oral history interview in
the '70s at UC Berkeley, talking about Oppenheimer et al who were
trying to figure out a way to influence policy and make sure the
military didn't end up controlling the bomb."
ARTHUR GOLDSCHMIDT - They probably all had made more money than
they'd ever had in their lives, and they couldn't spend it out there
in Los Alamos or wherever they were hiding out, so they probably had
nice fat nest eggs. I think they did raise a little money. I remember
a group when I went to see my friend Carolyn Agger Fortas, who's a
great tax lawyer. [Spells name] Her husband [Abe] was later on the
Supreme Court. They were great friends of ours. Carol told a funny
story about several of these people, who wanted to set up an
organization, coming to her. They needed to get a lawyer to help them
draft up the charter and rules and to tell them what they could and
couldn't do.
She said, "What do you want to do? Do you want to raise money? What
is the purpose of the organization? Are you going to do lobbying?"
One of them said, "What's lobbying?"
Carol said, "Lobbying is getting Congress to do something, going up
and appearing before Congress." She explained to them what lobbying was.
And they said, "Yes, that's what we want to do." . . . As they were
leaving, one of them turned to Carol and said, "Miss Agger, could you
give us a reference to a good textbook on lobbying?" [Laughter] It
was that type of folks that was there, you see. They didn't even know
the word, much less how to go about it.