On March 3, 1982, four years after the VA first responded to Agent Orange claims, I asked Victor Yannacone, lawyer for the 2.5 million Vietnam veterans who are suing companies that manufacture Agent Orange, whether he had seen any change in the VA’s attitude in recent months. Yannacone had been cheerfully, almost endearingly bellicose during our interview, answering my questions with the candor and compassion that have won him the trust and respect of Vietnam veterans. But when I asked about the VA he paused, rose slowly from his chair, and, facing my tape recorder as though it were a jury, shouted: “Yes, the attitude has become militantly anti-Vietnam veteran. The management has become, if anything, more inept. And the trail of broken bodies and dying veterans is getting longer.”
On October 14, 1982, Robert P. Nimmo, who just a few days before had announced his resignation as VA director, informed reporters that the VA had decided to turn over its much-delayed and controversial study of the health effects of Agent Orange to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. While denying that the VA had intentionally stalled the study, Nimmo conceded that a “broad consensus” had developed to support the “belief that it would be in the best interests of veterans to have a non-VA scientific body conduct the Agent Orange epidemiological study.”25 Two weeks later the General Accounting office released a report that had taken its auditors two and a half years to complete. The report states that the VA did not actively attempt to locate and screen veterans suffering from symptoms potentially related to Agent Orange. It also chastises the VA for its inconsistent procedures at the agency’s 172 hospitals. In its rebuttal the VA argued that the GAO’s evidence was dated and that treatment at VA hospitals has improved considerably since the GAO’s auditor did his research.
7. When You Can’t Sue the Government that Kills You
Victor Yannacone has been called flamboyant, arrogant, a genius, and, I’m sure, many less complimentary things by those whose vested interests he challenges in the name of what he calls the “public good.” Certainly he is not overly modest, calling the Agent Orange class action suit “the most important product liability case in the history of the United States.” Nor is he always gracious or polite, thundering like an evangelist, occasionally answering questions with the clipped irritability of a man who has little time for fools, because he knows only too well that they can be depended on to lose: and Yannacone doesn’t intend to lose when he goes to court on behalf of 2.5 million Vietnam veterans and their families.
He can be charming. He will bring you coffee, buy you lunch and spend the morning, perhaps even part of the afternoon, helping you sort things out, defining legal terms correcting misconceptions, and speaking always with the confidence of a man who, through his successful campaign to remove DDT from the market, has shown that the chemical industry and its multi-million-dollar Washington lobby is not invincible. Yannacone loves a good joke, a humorous story, or a satirical account of court proceedings, but he is not a cynic, and beneath the bravado it is easy to see the intense compassion he feels for the “kids” who served in Vietnam and returned home with what Yannacone calls “an aging disease.”
Victor Yannacone possesses another important attribute. To men who have been lied to, misled, maligned, treated as pariahs, psychopaths, malingerers, hypochondriacs, and disposable war matériel, he just may be the one man in America whom Vietnam veterans feel they can trust.
I am waiting for him to finish a rather long story about how he once defended a man who wanted to keep pigs in his backyard on Long Island. Somehow Yannacone managed to prove that the pigs’ ancestors had provided a valuable service to the community and, he laughs, to convince the judge that the pigs therefore had every right to be where they were. At a nearby desk Carol Yannacone sorts through mail, examines and files autopsy reports on Vietnam veterans and their children. She explains that “many times they don’t really know why the children are born dead or don’t live long after birth. Everything seems to be perfectly normal, but the child dies. So the doctor just files an autopsy report and we get them from lawyers who are working on the class action suit. It is a sad job, sometimes too sad.”
In nearby rooms typewriters clack, computers hum, and Vietnam veterans phone from all over the country seeking advice, asking for help, offering assistance. People enter the office, ask questions, leave notes, and exchange bits of information or gossip with Carol and Victor.
Although he was aware as early as 1969 that defoliants may have resulted in permanent damage to Vietnam mangrove forests, Victor Yannacone’s involvement in the Agent Orange controversy did not really begin until August 1978, when he accepted a luncheon invitation from a group of Long Island attorneys who wished to discuss the Paul Reutershan case. Reutershan, the lawyers told Yannacone, was a young Vietnam veteran who never drank or smoked; he considered himself a “health nut” but was dying of cancer. As a helicopter pilot in Vietnam he had flown through herbicidal mists on numerous occasions, and he believed that his exposure was responsible for his terminal cancer. He had filed a $10 million damage claim against Dow Chemical and two other Agent Orange manufacturers.
Yannacone left the luncheon saddened by what he had heard, but unconvinced that a large number of Vietnam veterans might be suffering from symptoms similar to those that had destroyed Paul Reutershan’s health; however, during the next few months he continued his own research into veterans’ claims that they had been poisoned by Agent Orange. By December 1978 he had learned about Maude DeVictor’s documentation of at least one hundred cases of possible dioxin poisoning; and following Reutershan’s death at age twenty-eight on December 14, 1978, Yannacone began receiving numerous calls from Frank McCarthy, a Vietnam veteran, Paul’s close personal friend and a cofounder of Agent Orange Victims International. Convinced that many of his fellow veterans were suffering from herbicide exposure, McCarthy insisted that Yannacone take legal action against companies that manufactured herbicides for use in Vietnam. On January 8, 1979, having concluded that at least four hundred veterans might have been poisoned by herbicides—but due, in large part, to McCarthy’s persistence—Yannacone filed a class action suit against Dow Chemical et al. on behalf of “all those so unfortunate as to have been and now to be situated at risk, not only during this generation but during generations to come.” The risk was exposure to dioxin, and the lawsuit demanded:
An immediate ban on all advertising, promotion, distribution, marketing and sale of the contaminated herbicides;
A declaration that the corporate defendants are trustees of the public health, safety and welfare, with a fiduciary responsibility to the public.