(2 of 3)
But the study soon bogged down in a complex dispute over identifying which soldiers were likely to have been exposed to Agent Orange. The CDC considered a company of 200 men potentially exposed if it passed within 1.3 miles of a recently sprayed area. The Army had fairly detailed records on the daily positions of its companies during the fighting. There were gaps, but the Pentagon group repeatedly told the CDC that other documents, such as daily journals and situation reports, could be used to pinpoint which units had ventured into areas sprayed with the defoliant. Houk's team complained that the Pentagon data were too spotty to determine whether companies had been deployed in normal formations spread over 200 to 300 yards or dispersed over distances of up to 12 miles. It stubbornly refused to make use of the other records.
By late January 1986, Dr. Carl Keller, chairman of the White House science panel, and several other of its members concluded that Houk had already decided that the CDC study was not feasible and was trying to pin the blame on the Pentagon. To break the impasse, retired Army Major General John Murray was asked by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger to review the Pentagon records. After a four-month study, Murray thought the records were useful. But as a nonscientist he did not feel competent to rebut the objections raised by Houk and the White House scientists. He gave up, agreed that the information was inadequate and suggested cancellation of the project.
Unknown to Murray and the White House, the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, then turned in a contracted consultants' report to the CDC on the Agent Orange study. It concluded that the Pentagon group was fully capable of "determining locations and filling gaps" in the troop movements and criticized the CDC's study for excluding many of the veterans most likely to have been exposed. The CDC never turned the institute's report over to the White House.
Murray presented his conclusions at a White House meeting on May 27, 1986. The White House moved to kill the study unless other ways could be found to identify exposed soldiers. Much later, Murray learned of the institute's report and began to doubt his recommendation. "I may have been a babe in the woods," he said in an interview. "My feeling now is that this whole thing deserves another look."
Instead of killing the project outright, the White House panel accepted a proposal by Houk to take blood tests of 646 Vietnam veterans, selected on the basis of their probable exposure, to see if they had elevated blood levels of dioxin. The tests showed that none had abnormal blood levels -- not surprising, given that the exposure would have taken place 20 years earlier and that none of those tested had handled Agent Orange directly.
Though many scientists ridiculed the blood tests, Houk used them to contend again that the Pentagon records could not be used to pinpoint exposure to Agent Orange. He recommended canceling the study; the White House Science Panel agreed, and the Domestic Policy Council did so in September 1987. This was after $43 million had been spent.