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.
Read more about this topic: Sumner Pike
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)