William Scranton
William Warren Scranton was an American politician, lawyer, diplomat, and businessman who served as a state governor.
Born on July 19, 1917, in Madison, Scranton received his early education at the Fessenden School and the Hotchkiss School before going on to study at Yale Law School. He also served as a military officer at some point during his career, adding that dimension to a professional life that spanned law, business, politics, and diplomacy.
Scranton worked across several distinct fields over the course of his adult life. He practiced law and was active in business, while also holding office as a governor and taking on roles in diplomacy as a representative of the United States. The range of his positions — military officer, lawyer, businessperson, elected official, and diplomat — reflects a career that moved across public and private life rather than settling in any single track.
He died on July 28, 2013, in Montecito, just days after his ninety-sixth birthday. His career touched on governance, legal practice, commerce, and international affairs, making him a figure whose public life is defined by that breadth of engagement across American political and diplomatic institutions.
Quotes by William Scranton
What I had said in the morning was that this is what we know has happened, but there has been no significant off-site release. Only to find out moments later that, in fact, there had been an off-site release. I still haven’t gotten over that.
I was scheduled to give my first official press conference that morning anyway, ’cause I was chairman of the Governors Energy Council and I was making a press conference with regard to energy policy.
You need a graphic understanding of a situation to make a complete judgment and we didn’t have that.
Another very strong image from the first day was giving my initial press conference in the morning – going down and finding out that everything I had said, the essence of what I had said, was wrong.
The first one, obviously, was walking into my office at eight o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, and being told there was a telephone call saying that there was an incident at Three Mile Island, and that it had shut down and that beyond that we didn’t know.
And if you’re not going to have a clear health threat, you don’t want to panic people.
You clearly have radioactive air. The situation is still not under control because there's still radioactivity coming out into the atmosphere.
I mean, obviously, people don't like to know that somebody's venting that, but you have sulfur dioxide coming out of power plants.
You're in an unfriendly, to say the least, atmosphere, so you have to be completely protected from it, from every molecule of oxygen that's there.