Leadership Quote by Christopher Shays

Shays’ line isn’t trying to persuade you that Agent Orange was harmful; it assumes you already know. The punch is in the repetition of “we knew,” a blunt confession that turns a long-fought veterans’ grievance into an institutional indictment. Knowledge, in his telling, isn’t the scarce resource. Accountability is.

The sentence is built like a slow march through gatekeepers: “the medical community,” “the military,” “the VA.” Each clause adds another layer of delay, implying a system designed less to discover truth than to ration recognition. The subtext is brutal: veterans didn’t face a tragedy; they faced a bureaucracy’s talent for waiting people out. By emphasizing “how long it was,” Shays smuggles in the most damning idea in Washington-speak: that time itself can be a policy tool. If you stall long enough, claims die, records disappear, public attention moves on, and the cost - financial and moral - shrinks.

Context matters here. Agent Orange became a signature scandal of the post-Vietnam era not because harm was mysterious, but because proof had to be manufactured to an impossible standard while the people most affected were treated as unreliable narrators of their own bodies. Shays, as a politician, is also triangulating: acknowledging “we” spreads blame across institutions and administrations, while positioning himself as the one willing to say the quiet part aloud. It’s a compact lesson in how democracies can injure their own soldiers twice - once in war, then again in the paperwork.