President Bill Clinton offered a formal apology on October 3, 1995, for the government’s radiation experiments after a Department of Energy report laid bare the agency’s earlier transgressions. Both his statement and the DOE exposé on its past actions were unprecedented, and they would have been major news if both the media and the American public hadn’t been distracted by a more pressing story that broke just hours later: football legend O. J. Simpson was found not guilty following an eight-month murder trial.
