High Energy

When President Clinton named Hazel O’Leary as his Secretary for the Department of Energy (DOE) in December 1992, she was already a veteran of the agency, though few people had heard of her outside Minnesota, where she’d just been appointed to head a subsidiary of the Northern States Power Utility Company. But one year later, O’Leary became a national folk hero – the bureaucrat who dared to tell the truth – as her department began releasing secret files about radiation experiments on unwitting patients in the late 1940s and 1950s.