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:
“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)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)