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exposures.
    In 1997 and 1999, reports by the National Cancer Institute determined that atmospheric tests at NTS had spread radioactive iodine 131 across much of the United States, particularly in 1952, 1953, 1955 (the years my family lived in Vegas), and 1957. The 1999 report concluded that although scientists thought the exposure levels had still been very low, the increased I-131 from the Nevada atmospheric tests would probably wind up producing “between 11,300 and 212,000” additional cases of thyroid cancer in the United States. The downwinders, vindicated by the panel’s belated link between cancer and the testing, noted that I-131 was only one of scores of isotopes produced by nuclear fissioning. The studies had not examinedisotopes such as strontium 90, cesium 137, zirconium, and other atomic debris, most of which had even longer half-lives than I-131. We would probably never know, wrote Preston J. Truman, who created Downwinders, an early antinuclear group, “how many innocent, unwitting, and unsuspecting Americans had died” because of the tests.

— CHAPTER 3 —
THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE TOKEN
    I got my job as a reporter in the New York Times Washington bureau in 1977 through affirmative action. It was the job of my dreams.
    It was also a job for which, by Times standards, I was unqualified. But the paper hired me anyway. It needed women.
    Three years earlier, seven Times women had filed what became a class action suit on behalf of some 550 women at the paper, accusing the Times of sex discrimination. Their case was rock solid. So was that of the plaintiffs in another suit also filed in 1974—the paper’s minority employees, who accused it of racial discrimination. The Times ’s leaders, who had always thought of themselves as liberal and enlightened, were alarmed.
    In their depositions and public statements, the paper’s lawyers had derided the women’s charges as “frivolous” and “devoid of substance and rationality”—women who protest too much were often dismissed then, and even today, as hysterical. But employment statistics did not lie, and they were devastating.
    Nan Robertson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who later chronicled the paper’s sexual discrimination, summarized the case. 1 No women appeared on the paper’s masthead of twenty-one names at the top of theeditorial page, nor were there any female vice presidents or even women in a position to advance to that post. There were no female columnists, photographers, or members of the eleven-man board. None of the twenty-two national correspondents was a woman. There was only one female foreign bureau chief: Flora Lewis, the brilliant former wife of a Times executive; she had just been appointed to Paris. Only 4 of the paper’s 31 cultural critics were women. There was only one woman sports reporter. Four of the 75 copy editors were women. The Times , which employed some six thousand people at the time, had 385 male reporters, and 40 women, 11 of whom worked in the Family/Style Section. In the largest, most prestigious bureau, Washington, only 3 of the 35 reporters were women. “There were no women in the pipeline for power,” Robertson concluded. 2
    But discrimination against women ran deeper. Although the paper was subject to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the few women who had managed to win jobs at the paper were paid substantially less than their male counterparts for the same work. The gap between the average salaries of male and female reporters was $59 a week—or some $3,000 a year.
    Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known affectionately as Punch, claimed to be shocked by the evidence that the Women’s Caucus presented at a meeting with him and other senior executives in the spring of 1972. Robertson described how the caucus confronted Punch with “hard truths” about the plight of women toiling on the Sulzberger “plantation.”