A bit late covering story, but it's pretty neat, from Yahoo!: Obama the first Asian-American president?:
[Journalist and scholar Helen Zia] said there was "poetic justice" that one of the Asian-American members of the Obama cabinet, Steven Chu, heads the Department of Energy.
In 1999, the then energy secretary, Bill Richardson, accused Taiwanese-born scientist Wen Ho Lee of stealing secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory -- the birthplace of the atomic bomb -- to give to communist China.
Lee spent nine months in solitary confinement before the government dropped all charges against him other than carelessness with sensitive documents.
To the dismay of some Asian-Americans, Obama initially named Richardson to be commerce secretary. Richardson bowed out due to an unrelated controversy and Obama replaced him with Gary Locke, a Chinese-American.
1 comments:
With Chu, Shinseki, and Locke, Asian-Americans are the best represented minority in Obama's cabinet, outstripping African-Americans or Latinos.
Thanks for posting this. I didn't know that about Richardson and Lee.
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