John Lawson is best known around Washington, D.C. as an affable, soft-spoken yet
passionate TV lobbyist.
What he really wanted to be was a spy.
“I intended to become part of Foreign Service or the CIA,” Lawson said. “I passed
the Foreign Service exam and CIA test battery.”
Espionage and intrigue wouldn“t seem to be characteristic of a small Southern community
in the “50s, but Lawson grew up in Aiken, S.C.
“I remember JFK ordering maneuvers, and our town was overrun by soldiers,” he said.
Aiken was considered a potential target during the Cold War because of its manufacturing
base.
“In the “50s, the government started building one of the largest production projects
in the world“the Savannah River Plant“to produce plutonium for the nation“s nuclear
arsenal,” Lawson said. “It covers three counties.”
His father worked at the plant. “All I can remember is all these streams that had
steam rising from them in the summer... it was more like Las Alamos, than Selma,
Ala.”
The family left Aiken when Lawson was 10 and his dad became a golf pro at a course
in
nearby Edgefield County.
“If Aiken was a small, cosmopolitan Leave It to Beaver existence, Edgefield County
was a throwback to the Jim Crow era. It was the birthplace of one of the most segregationist
governors in history,” he said, referring to the late Strom Thurmond.
The influences of Aiken and Edgefield County ultimately led Lawson to become involved
in politics“ that, and the Fab Four.
“I really believe the Beatles, in my little neck of the woods, led to more change
than anything with the possible exception of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement.
The hallmark of life in South Carolina was a stifling conformity,” he said. “The
Beatles with their long hair sent the message that it was all right to be different.”
During graduate school, Lawson volunteered for a state senator, Richard Reilly,
who won and went on to serve as governor and Secretary of Education. He later worked
for an environmental foundation about the time the Reagan Administration proposed
to activate the Barnwell Nuclear Fuel Plant.
Preventing the activation of Barnwell was a personal matter to Lawson, who toured
the aborted facility with his father. By that time, the ramifications of the Savannah
River Plant had become apparent.
“It left 300 million gallons of high-level liquid nuclear waste,” Lawson said. “It
was leaking into the ground. This commercial plant would have been the same, only
without the same safety requirements... My father took one look at the facilities,
and realized that for routine maintenance like fixing leaking pipes, human beings
would have had to been sent down manholes. It would have been extremely dangerous
with regard to exposure. “So yeah, it was personal.”
Lawson“s father died of lung cancer at the age of 65.
“My father was proud of his work for the national defense,” Lawson said, “but he
realized the process was inherently dangerous and dirty, and to do it commercially
was insanity.”