I’d like to share this brief passage from Jill Lepore’s essay “The Shorebird” from her recent book “The Deadline.”

The essay concerns the writer Rachel Carson. Lepore writes:

“When Eisenhower’s new secretary of the Interior, a businessman from Oregon, replaced scientists in the department with political hacks, Carson wrote a letter to the Washington Post: ‘The ominous pattern that is clearly being revealed is the elimination from the Government of career men of long experience and high professional competence and their replacement by political appointees.’”

This has been going on for a long time and although the challenge today may be magnitudes greater it brings to mind my father-in-law’s counsel, bellowing astride his John Deere tractor, “Never weaken.”

J Paul Sokal

Panton