Career
A 1913 Bowdoin College graduate, Pike was a member of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 1940 to 1946 and a member of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) from 1946 to 1951.
A Republican from Lubec, Maine, Pike voted at the AEC against the hydrogen bomb on many occasions. Pike became wealthy through the oil business. In 1949, when on the Atomic Energy Commission, he stated that “only a national emergency could justify testing in the United States.” Nevertheless, nuclear bomb testing began in Nevada in 1951.
In 1950, the Joint Atomic Energy Committee of Congress voted five to four (with one Democrat joining the four Republicans on the panel) not to approve of President Harry S. Truman’s nomination of Pike as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, when he was acting as Chairman. Instead, though Pike was renominated and approved as a member, Truman picked Gordon Dean as Chairman.
When he returned to Maine from Washington, D.C., he resisted calls to run for Governor but did serve in the legislature. From 1965-75, Pike was a charter member of the board of the International Campobello Commission, which governed Roosevelt Campobello International Park, serving with Sen. Edmund S. Muskie and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)