by Larry Berman
Bud always saw his son as a casualty of the war. He requested that the following inscription be placed on a chair donated by the family to the Navy Memorial: IN MEMORY OF LIEUTENANT (J.G.) ELMO R. ZUMWALT III, JULY 30, 1946–AUGUST 13, 1988. A CASUALTY OF THE VIETNAM WAR.78 In Elmo’s memory, the navy later authorized the creation of a bronze frieze at the U.S. Naval Memorial in Washington, depicting his Swift Boat, PCF-35, engaging the enemy on a river in the Mekong Delta. Part of the inscription reads: “At the age of 39, the younger Zumwalt died of cancer believed to have been caused by Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the U.S. Armed Forces in Vietnam.”
Elmo’s illness caused serious problems within the family. “I recall the horror of the 5 long years watching Elmo die and the tragic problem among us that that battle caused,” Bud wrote to Mouza on February 12, 1995. Each member of the family dealt with Elmo’s struggle differently. Kathy was losing a husband; their two young children a father; Jim, Ann, and Mouzetta a brother; Mouza and Bud their firstborn son. On July 30, 1984, Bud wrote his “dearest Mouzenka” on the occasion of Elmo’s thirty-eigth birthday. “As I think about what a remarkable boy and man Elmo was and is, I have to be grateful to you for giving him to me.” Elmo was born at a time when Bud could not be with Mouza; Elmo came down with polio at a time Bud was at sea; Mouza had to manage young Elmo’s health problems while dealing with three other children, again when Bud was not there. “You instilled in him the strength that has made it possible for him to deal with his tragedy,” wrote Bud.79
Evidenced by Elmo’s many letters to Mouza from Vietnam, the bond between mother and son was especially close. As Elmo’s illness progressed, Mouza sought to protect her son, but that was now Kathy’s job. The more Mouza inserted herself into the dynamics of Elmo’s care and by default, his marriage, the more difficult the situation became for Elmo, who ultimately asked his mother to understand he was in Kathy’s care. There was little Mouza could now do other than pray for her son.
Bud always felt that as a commander of men in battle he had made the right decision to use Agent Orange, but that did not make it any easier watching his beloved Elmo slip away. “In private, Bud expressed enormous guilt feelings,” said Dr. Bill Narva.80 In “A Last Letter to a Valiant Son,” Bud wrote, “You were diagnosed in 1983 as having one form of lymphoma, and then a second in 1985. Our research, as well as that of many respected experts, revealed a high probability of a causal connection between your cancers and your exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam—a chemical used on your father’s orders . . . a tool your father opted to use only after he received representations from the chemical manufacturers and the government that its use posed no threat to human life.”81
Bud and Mouza never stopped grieving the loss of Elmo. “After Elmo’s death, my father championed a new cause—recognition by the U.S. government of Agent Orange–induced health problems and financial compensation for those Vietnam veterans affected,” explained Bud’s surviving son, Jim.82 He felt a tremendous responsibility to the veterans who served under him, to see that the government did not fail in its responsibilities. “I decided that I would focus more precisely on the problems of the less fortunate among those who had served under me in war and among our former allies. At the same time, I would work on binding up the wounds with the regime in Vietnam.” He came to see his work as a way of memorializing his son.83
Once again Bud Zumwalt needed to find a way to get into the game so that he could make a difference.
In October 1989, a year after Elmo’s death, Edward Derwinski, a former congressman who was serving as the first secretary of veterans affairs in the Bush cabinet, requested that Bud come and speak with him. Bud’s relationship with Derwinski dated back to the CNO years. The congressman had always been a strong supporter of the navy and had endorsed the changes that improved the lives of those in the service.84 Derwinski laid out the increasing scientific evidence emanating from thousands of pages of transcripts of the Committee on Environmental Health Hazards (CEHH), which had been created by Congress to advise him on scientific judgments bearing on the causes of diseases in Vietnam veterans. It was his statutory responsibility to make determinations as to whether specific diseases in Vietnam veterans were “as likely as not” the result of exposure to Agent Orange. The law only required that there be as much evidence for as against such an association in order for compensation to be provided to the affected veteran or surviving spouse and minor children. In the fourteen years since the war ended, no such finding had been made.
Derwinski lacked the staff resources and time to go through the evidence, so he asked Bud to serve as an unpaid special assistant on the Agent Orange issue. Bud never hesitated, having found a way to enter the most important phase of his life. On October 6, 1989, at the age of sixty-eight, Bud was appointed special assistant on Agent Orange matters to the secretary of veterans affairs. Mary Stout, president of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA), wrote Bud, saying, “This appointment certainly shows a new direction on the part of the Department of Veterans Affairs in addressing this very important issue for the Vietnam veterans.”85 The same man who had refused to accept Haig’s offer to serve as administrator of the Veterans Administration in 1974 was now working as an unpaid assistant in a position to help veterans.
Bud was infused with energy and commitment to find answers for those still living. He worked twenty-hour days with limited staff support, writing members of Congress, asking Freedom of Information officers at the Environmental Protection Agency to provide their files pertaining to the latest available material on the toxic effects of 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, and dioxin on humans and animals.86 By his own admission, Bud hoped not to find a link, sparing himself the agony of knowing he was responsible: “When I began the formidable task assigned to me by Secretary Derwinski, I hoped against hope that I would not find a discernible association between illnesses experienced by Vietnam veterans and exposure to Agent Orange.”87 The most obvious reason was that he had approved of and ordered the extensive spraying as a proven means of reducing combat casualties and second, while he and Elmo always suspected the link, “Both he and I believed, as did many others, that there was insufficient scientific evidence to support a linkage between his illnesses and Agent Orange exposure. That was, of course, the conventional propaganda at the time.”88 It became a seven-month battle, first for the truth, then for justice, and ultimately for personal redemption.
Bud quickly enlisted the support of Dr. Robert Gray, executive director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, along with two associates, Dr. Ken Kopecky and Dr. Scott Davis. He also received support from army lieutenant colonel Richard Christian of the American Legion national staff, whose last active-duty position had been head of the Environmental Support Group in the Pentagon—the group responsible for reconstructing where military units had been located on a daily basis and the correlation with herbicide spraying. “He had shown great courage in defying the efforts of certain of his superiors to have him give misleading testimony to Congress on the Agent Orange issue,” said Bud. “He had become an expert on the government’s machinations to manipulate studies on this issue. His help became essential to me in treading through the chicanery of the government agencies involved and in critiquing my report to Derwinski.”89
Bud personally wrote his former subordinate commanders in Vietnam, Art Price and Roy Hoffmann. “My recollection is that there were occasions when we got access to Agent Orange and used it by spraying from some of our boats and helicopters.”90 Price wrote back that in Operation Giant Slingshot along the Vam Co Dong and Vam Ca Tay rivers, where the banks were heavily camouflaged with brush, they defoliated from air force planes, but missed spots were sprayed from some of “my TF-117 boats on loan for the operation.”91
The more Bud looked at the facts, the more disconcerted he became about the corruption of science by politics. He learned that several members of the Committee on Environmental Health Hazards had been receiving compensation from chemical m
anufacturers and corporations producing Agent Orange. These “company docs” always found a way to offer an “inconclusive” resolution and “negative” correlation. They were manipulating the process and, in a world of uncertainty in data and findings, chose on the side of the manufacturers and not the veterans. This manipulation led the committee to never recommend to the secretary of veterans affairs that a specific disease be correlated to exposure to Agent Orange. Bud also saw that Monsanto, a producer of Agent Orange, was relying on grossly unscientific reference studies from the 1980s that were frequently used by CEHH “company docs” as the basis for what they declared were scientifically sound studies that found no positive linkage between exposure to dioxin and diseases. Meanwhile, Bud discovered several Swedish studies that had posited the correlation between exposure and diseases, but these had been dismissed by CEHH doctors on the payroll of Monsanto.
One of the greatest obstacles in establishing chemical company liability for the effects of Agent Orange was the “contractor defense,” under which any private entity contracted by the federal government to produce military weaponry generally is not responsible for the effects of that weaponry’s use. The one caveat is that contractors must be producing items exactly to the specifications of the government. Agent Orange manufacturers, such as Dow, Monsanto, and Diamond Shamrock, held from the onset of allegations of torts that the government knew dioxins were present in Agent Orange and authorized production and inclusion in the final product. Zoltan Merszei, former chairman and chief executive of Dow Chemical who became Bud’s close personal friend, insisted that Dow produced what the government asked for.92 Unlike civilian applications, Agent Orange in Vietnam was sprayed undiluted, at six to twenty-five times the manufacturers’ suggested concentration. Manufacturers maintained that the government knew that the defoliants it was ordering contained dioxin and that workers exposed to dioxin during the production of 2,4,5-T—one of the components of Agent Orange—had experienced certain health effects, mainly a skin condition known as chloracne, and that dioxin was hazardous in pure form. The Department of Defense did not consider this sufficient to merit a warning or even mention of a danger to humans and did not advise against exposure.
The more research he conducted, the more astounding the discoveries. Bud learned that in the 1960s, chemical companies and military scientists knew that Agent Orange was harmful. “When we (military scientists) initiated the herbicide program in the 1960’s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide,” testified Dr. James Clary, an air force scientist who served in Vietnam and worked with Operation Ranch Hand. “We were even aware that the ‘military’ formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the ‘civilian’ version, due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the ‘enemy,’ none of us were overly concerned. We never considered a scenario in which our own personnel would become contaminated with the herbicide. And, if we had, we would have expected our own government to give assistance to veterans so contaminated.”93
As early as 1966, Bionetics Research Laboratories, under government contract, informed the National Cancer Institute that female lab mice injected with even small doses of 2,4,5-T gave birth in “very high ratios” to offspring with birth defects. In massive doses, 100 percent of female rats produced either stillborn or mutated young. These findings went to the surgeon general, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Dow Chemical. “Everyone agreed to sit on the report.”94 In 1969, scientist William Haseltine was privy to information suggesting that government officials were suppressing information about the teratogenicity (birth-defect causation) of 2,4,5-T—the compound that comprised half of Agent Orange. The information was based on a secret study, “2,4,5-T: Teratogenetic in Mice,” conducted by the Food and Drug Administration’s Genetic Toxicology Branch.
Perhaps most disturbing for Bud was the discovery that there had been several high-level memorandums issued during the Reagan administration to government agencies working on the dioxin issue. From the discovery process, Bud learned that the policy of the U.S. government during the Reagan years had been to instruct government agencies involved in studies of Agent Orange that it would be most unfortunate if a correlation between Agent Orange and health effects was found. This was because the Reagan administration had adopted the legal strategy of refusing liability in military and civilian cases of contamination involving toxic chemicals and nuclear radiation. As a result, the government sought to suppress or minimize findings of ill health effects among Vietnam veterans that could be linked to Agent Orange exposure, because this could set a precedent for government compensation to civilian victims of toxic contaminant exposure at such places as Love Canal and Times Beach. This would have “enormous fiscal implications, potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” wrote Office of Management and Budget attorneys in their secret communications.95
One smoking-gun memo to OMB director David Stockman stated the strategy quite clearly. “Dioxin—is a major issue in this area (Love Canal and Times Beach are largely Dioxin exposure cases); we will be in the tenuous position of denying dioxin exposure compensation to private citizens while providing benefits to veterans for in many instances lower levels of exposure.”96 Bud considered these activities “disgraceful” for putting saving money and the protection of corporations from liabilities ahead of scientific accuracy.
The fact that this had occurred under Reagan’s stewardship disturbed Bud no end. Dating back to their first meeting in the early 1970s arranged by Bill Thompson, Bud and Reagan had enjoyed a solid friendship. In 1980 Bud broke with Jimmy Carter and led Democrats for Reagan. Bud believed that the final version of SALT II signed by Carter gave advantage to the USSR, giving it twice the area of destruction capability, twice the throw weight, three times the megatonnage, and five times the hard-target kill capacity. “I felt that had Mr. Carter been reelected, my children would not have lived out their lives in freedom.”97 The battle for and against ratification culminated in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings of October 1979. Bud and several members of the Committee on the Present Danger (COPD) testified against ratification. When the Senate failed to ratify the treaty, key members of the COPD—Paul Nitze, Gene Rostow, George Shultz, Richard Perle, and Ronald Reagan himself—helped produce the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) negotiations. Bud believed that Reagan would close the “window of vulnerability” so that the United States would have a true deterrent posture. In 1983 Bud correctly predicted that if Reagan served two terms, “we will have achieved the capabilities of maintaining general world stability, and that the days of the Soviet empire will be numbered.”98
Reagan had taken a special interest in Elmo’s health. On the occasion of Elmo’s fortieth birthday, celebrated in Coronado with the family, President Reagan wrote, “You proved yourself a hero in Vietnam, carrying out dangerous assignments with great courage and devotion to duty. I know how proud your father is of you. So am I. Now you’re in another battle, fighting against cancer. That also, I know, takes quite unflinching courage. Keep up the fight, Elmo, trust in God, and know that your family and friends are in your corner.”99 Elmo did not know that the government was not in his corner. Following Elmo’s death, Reagan wrote directly to Kathy in Fayetteville. “I’m certain that your husband, despite his valour and the decorations earned, would never have considered himself unique among those who have worn this country’s uniform. In him, however, and the story he told with his father of his experiences and his lack of regret, our nation does have an exceptional account of the human spirit in its triumph over pain. It is often in the crucible of suffering that a man’s character is revealed to himself and to others.”100
Bud submitted his report to Derwinski in May 1990, identifying twenty-eight diseases that met the test of the statute that they were “as likely as not” the result of exposure to Agent Orange. Bud also recommended eliminating the CEHH.101 After reviewing the scient
ific literature and the available data, he wrote, “I conclude that there is adequate evidence for the Secretary to reasonably conclude that it is at least as likely as not that there is a relationship between exposure to Agent Orange and the following health problems: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, chloracne and other skin disorders, lip cancer, bone cancer, soft tissue sarcoma, birth defects, skin cancer, porphyria cutanea tarda and other liver disorders, Hodgkin’s disease, hematopoietic diseases, multiple myeloma, neurological defects, auto-immune diseases and melanoma, pancreatic cancer, stomach cancer, colon cancer, nasal/pharyngeal/esophageal cancers, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, liver cancer, brain cancer, psychosocial effects and gastrointestinal diseases.”
Bud reached these conclusions in consultation with his informal scientific advisory board and by contesting corporate and government studies that had, in his judgment, been manipulated to avoid a positive correlation of health effects related to exposure to Agent Orange. Bud’s yearlong study was the first systematic and comprehensive effort by the government to determine the magnitude of exposure. “The sad truth which emerges from my work is not only that there is credible evidence linking certain cancers and other illnesses to Agent Orange, but that the government and industry officials credited with examining such linkage intentionally manipulated or withheld compelling information of the adverse health effects associated with exposure to the toxic contaminants contained in Agent Orange.”