The first crisis for Bill Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture came on the day of his swearing in, Jan. 22, 1993. A child died after eating government- inspected meat at a Seattle-area Jack in the Box restaurant. Two more died and hundreds of other Westerners fell ill from the contaminated food; some of them developed a life-threatening kidney syndrome. The new President, in office for only two days, expressed his shock. The Agriculture Secretary, Mike Espy, ordered an investigation to trace the outbreak's cause, a mystery never conclusively solved. In the midst of that emergency, Espy found time to intervene in an...
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