Washington Post headline: “The physicist at the forefront of talks with Iran”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8115
“Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz,” announces a teaser blurb on the 4 May Washington Post front page, “has emerged as President Obama’s secret weapon in Iran nuclear talks.” The blurb points to an interior-page article summarized by a subhead extolling Moniz’s combination of scientific, technical, and political skills.
The uniformly positive article’s call-out line quotes a Republican congressional staffer: “He’s not a policy wonk ... drawing two-by-two matrix models on a whiteboard. He’s a physicist talking about what the technical capacities are.” A photo caption describes Moniz emerging “from a meeting with House Democrats on Capitol Hill, where he has relatively good relations, after briefing members on the progress of nuclear talks with Iran and other issues.”
A passage early in the piece cements readers’ awareness of the distinctly positive tone:
That nuclear expertise has catapulted Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a physicist from MIT, from a Cabinet backwater to center stage in the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. An unlikely breakout star, Moniz sports a long wavy mop of mostly white hair that has been compared to George Washington’s locks.
The energy secretary is providing a knowledgeable voice that the Obama administration hopes can reassure nervous members of Congress as they weigh the deal.
Reporter Steven Mufson outlines the secretary’s high-demand, high-visibility schedule. (For example: “He would have traveled to Beijing with the commerce secretary but couldn’t squeeze it in.”) He summarizes Moniz’s past Washington experience and observes that “he enjoys and is adept at dealing with Congress.” He offers an anecdote about Moniz’s successful collaboration with Republican senator John Hoeven of North Dakota to come to terms with the Democratic administration on legislation involving the export of liquefied natural gas.
Mufson contrasts Moniz with another physicist who served as energy secretary for Democratic president Obama, Steven Chu, then quotes a Republican about the comparison:
“I’d characterize him as a much better version of Chu, that he has scientific credibility but with a better attitude and political instincts and more experience in D.C.,” said one of President George W. Bush’s top Energy Department officials. “Therefore, he does much better with Congress and does a much better job of running the department and engaging employees.”
The article approvingly lists some examples of Moniz’s recruitment of officials “from a wide variety of backgrounds": “a White House lawyer, Duke Energy’s chief technology officer, the head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the arms-control expert from the National Security Council, the head of an energy institute at Stanford and the retired commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command, with control of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles and bombers.”
Emphasizing the importance of Moniz’s physics and technical expertise, the article goes on to describe in some detail the role the secretary played in the Iranian nuclear talks. Mufson sums up with a paragraph quoting President Obama:
“Now, if we are able to obtain a final deal that comports with the political agreement—and I say ‘if ' because that’s not yet final—then I’m absolutely positive that that is the best way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” Obama said in a briefing. “And that’s not my opinion, that’s the opinion of people like Ernie Moniz, my secretary of energy, who is a physicist from MIT and actually knows something about this stuff. That’s the opinion of a whole bunch of nuclear experts who examined the deal.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.