This work - behind the scenes and unnoticed at first - would in time make national headlines alter U.S. Over the next three years, she would play a key role in investigating - and exposing - one of the greatest environmental scandals in modern American history. But that phone call she received in late June 1977 - from Joseph McDougall in Niagara Falls - would put her on an unlikely course to achieving that ambitious dream. She marched against the war in Vietnam, and she was generally pretty sure that she was going to change the world.Ĭasper didn’t know it at the time. She wore a black armband at graduation in 1970 to honor the students gunned down at Kent State that spring - to the horror of her far-less-radical parents. She attended college at George Washington University less than a mile from the White House. While other girls had grown up reading Nancy Drew mysteries, Casper tore through Theodore White’s groundbreaking nonfiction books about presidential campaigns, The Making of the President. She and another aide took turns sharing one.īut Casper understood politics. Casper didn’t even have her own working typewriter. Her previous jobs had included teaching English in Ecuador and writing for an alternative newspaper in Vermont, and even now, as an aide to the congressman, she had no political clout. And finally, most difficult to overcome, LaFalce was a Democrat, the first liberal congressman to carry Niagara Falls since the Taft administration.Ĭasper - short and petite, at just five foot three - didn’t seem like the kind of person who could push LaFalce over the top. LaFalce might have been the incumbent, but he was still a first-termer with a thin political résumé after two years on the House banking and small business committees - committees that rarely made headlines.
But reelection the previous fall had been trickier. LaFalce (pronounced Lah-FALSE) had won his seat two years earlier riding a wave of anti-Nixon, post-Watergate sentiment to Washington. In recent months, Casper had been giving everything to her job, in part because she loved it and in part because she felt as if she had no other choice.
0 kommentar(er)
