ABSTRACT
In the polarized political context of the 21st century—where science has lost the power to command consensus and journalists are routinely accused of taking sides—what happened on April 15, 1970, seems almost unimaginable. On that day the Department of Defense announced that it was suspending immediately the use of Agent Orange (The New York Times, 1970, 29). At the time, the United States military had been spraying millions of gallons a year of the herbicide over the Southeast Asian jungle (Stellman et al., 2003), and commanders viewed it as a critical tool in fighting the Vietcong (Whiteside, 1971). But questions raised in news reports had prompted a series of Senate hearings that focused uncomfortable attention on the effects of the chemical. The active ingredient in Agent Orange was also widely used domestically, and on that same day in April 1970 the surgeon general announced that the Department of Agriculture would move to curtail the use of this chemical both on farm fields and in residential neighborhoods (Senate Committee on Commerce, 1970).
