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Once again the White House had acted without having all the facts. The Institute of Medicine only weeks earlier had written a blistering review of the CDC's work. It urged that each of the agency's major conclusions be deleted because the evidence presented by the CDC did not support them. The White House never received this devastating report.
Houk insists that his opposition to continuing the project was based solely on rigorous scientific principles. "If we could find a population of people who were exposed in sufficient numbers, we would have proceeded with our study," he says. "We just simply could not find them." Skeptics like Congressman Weiss suspect that the CDC did not want to antagonize the Reagan Administration, which was worried about the huge liability costs if Agent Orange was shown to cause the veterans' ailments. Whatever the reasons for its failure, the decision not to complete the study leaves open a vexing problem: whether Agent Orange will exact a toll on Vietnam vets and their descendants for generations to come.