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Questions of science rarely become major issues in presidential campaigns. But there it was: Senator Kerry stumped on stem cells and promised to be “a president for science.” The context was a year of controversy relating to the Bush administration’s purported “politicization of science,” including a February 2004 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists accusing the Bush administration of suppressing, misrepresenting, and manipulating science, and an accompanying statement signed by a bevy of Nobel laureates accusing the administration of “distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends.”
There is nothing unprecedented about scientists criticizing presidents or campaigning against politicians. But this year’s controversy was bigger and shriller than any since 1964, when many prominent scientists and engineers mobilized against Barry Goldwater, helping to brand the Arizona Senator as intellectually and temperamentally unfit for the presidency. Launched by a member of President Lyndon Johnson’s family and organized under the banner “Scientists and Engineers for Johnson-Humphrey,” the group raised half a million dollars and registered 50,000 members. They opened an office in Washington, paid for thousands of radio ads, and published a booklet called The Alternative is Frightening. The group, which included several scientists and engineers involved in the development of nuclear weapons, emphasized Goldwater’s supposedly itchy nuclear trigger finger.
But after Goldwater’s landslide defeat, some of the scientists involved were left with “serious misgivings,” as recounted by Daniel S. Greenberg in his 2001 book Science, Money, and Politics:
