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Robert Kadlec - Wikipedia

Robert Peter Kadlec is an American physician and career officer in the United States Air Force who served as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services (Preparedness and Response) from August 2017 until January 2021. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ka…

The Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness was established in June 2002 at the request of Tommy Thompson.
Its scope of activity included preparedness for bioterrorism, chemical and nuclear attack, mass evacuation and decontamination.
The first head of OPHEP was Donald

Henderson, credited with having previously eradicated Smallpox. Soon Jerry Hauer, a veteran public health expert, took over as director, with Henderson taking a different role in the department. Hauer was removed from the job primarily for conflicts he had with Scooter Libby

over whether the risks of smallpox vaccination were worth the benefit. Hauer charged that the Office of the Vice President was pushing for the universal vaccination despite the vaccine's health risks, primarily exaggerate the risk of biological terrorism.

Tommy George Thompson

(born November 19, 1941) is an American Republican politician and the current President of the University of Wisconsin System, serving on an interim basis since July 1, 2020.
He previously served as the 42nd Governor of Wisconsin and was the 19th United States Secretary of

Health and Human Services, in the cabinet of U.S. President George W. Bush.

During his tenure as governor he was also chair of Amtrak, the nation's passenger rail service.

After his time in the Bush Administration, Thompson became a partner in the law-firm Akin Gump and

Independent Chairman of Deloitte's Center for Health Solutions.

Thompson was one of the key architects of the 2003 passage of Bush's Medicare Modernization Act, which was slated to provide public funding for prescription drugs for Medicare recipients starting in 2006.

Early in his term, Thompson faced an emergency situation with the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Thompson offered the media a "far-fetched" suggestion that the individual who died had come into contact with anthrax from drinking water from a creek. Thompson's words were criticized by a

range of experts as unwarranted, potentially undermining public confidence, and as the "kind of statements that lead to mistrust of officials and experts." Thompson was also faulted for positioning himself as the voice of the Administration to the public on this issue, having

had no formal training in medicine or public health.

Thompson resigned on December 3, 2004, in a press conference at which he issued warnings over the dangers of avian flu and the poisoning of U.S. food supplies by terrorists.

Thompson became a partner at law firm Akin Gump,

a Washington, D.C., law firm that engages in federal lobbying.

Akin Gump was founded in Dallas, Texas, in 1945 by Robert Strauss and Richard Gump. It maintains a large presence in Texas with a total of five offices in the state.

At the University of Texas Law School, he met

another student who would have a large impact on his career, John Connally. After completing his law degree, Strauss was hired as a special agent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and served in the FBI throughout World War II.
After the war, he settled in Dallas,

where he and a fellow FBI agent, Richard A. Gump, founded their own law firm.

In 1971, Republican President Richard Nixon appointed Connally as his Treasury Secretary. In this position, Connally presided over the removal of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard, an event

known as the Nixon shock.

Two of Connally's principal legal clients were the Texas oil tycoon Sid W. Richardson and Perry Bass, Richardson's nephew and partner, both of Fort Worth.

Upon Sid’s death aged 68 in 1959, Richardson, a bachelor, bequeathed a large portion of his

estate to his foundation, and left several million dollars to his nephew-partner, Perry Richardson Bass. Richardson named John B. Connally, the future Texas governor, as co-executor of the estate, a designation which provided Connally with steady income for years thereafter.

I..B Hale was married to the former Virginia Kingsbery, and the couple had at least three sons (twins Robert Allen Hale and William Hale, and Timothy Hale). Hale became a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent in Fort Worth, Texas and was a close associate of J. Edgar

Hoover. Later he became chief of security for the Convair aircraft factory and General Dynamics, and was a chairman of ASIS International.

Robert Allan Hale was the son of Virginia and I. B. Hale. He had a twin brother, Billy, and younger brother, Tommy. He grew up in Fort

Worth, Texas and attended Arlington Heights High School.
As an 18-year-old senior, Hale eloped in Ardmore, Oklahoma with 16-year-old Kathleen "K.K." Connally, the daughter of future Texas governor John Connally. On March 16, 1959, the couple were married in Ardmore prior to

moving into an apartment in Tallahassee, Florida. Hale worked for a boat company earning $75 per week. The couple had been married only 44 days when Kathleen died after a 20-gauge shotgun discharged behind her right ear on April 28, 1959.

On August 7, 1962, before living in

Alaska, Hale and his twin brother "Billy" Hale were observed by an FBI agent as they burgled the Los Angeles apartment of Judith Exner, who later claimed to be a mistress of President John F. Kennedy.

Judith Exner (January 11, 1934 – September 24, 1999) was an American woman

who claimed to be the mistress of U.S. president John F. Kennedy and Mafia leaders Sam Giancana and John Roselli. She was also known as Judith Campbell Exner, and Judith Campbell.

In 1960, Sinatra introduced Judith Campbell to "Sam Flood," who was actually Sam Giancana, the

leading figure in the Chicago Mafia. She also became involved with him and knew his associate John Roselli.

Judith received national media attention when she testified in 1975 before the Church Committee investigating CIA assassination attempts on Fidel Castro.

In March 1953,

all of the Convair company was bought by the General Dynamics Corporation, a conglomerate of military and high-technology companies, and it became officially the Convair Division within General Dynamics.

Chicago industrialist Henry Crown became the company's largest shareholder

and merged his Material Service Corporation with GD in 1959.

Frank Pace retired under pressure in 1962 and Roger Lewis, former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force and Pan American Airways CEO, was brought in as CEO.

General Dynamics suffered some setbacks over Lewis' tenure.

He worked to push Crown off the company's board and borrowed heavily to buy Crown's preferred stock for $100 million. The F-111 program suffered from safety concerns and the United States Navy cancelled its orders for F-111B's in 1968.

In 1971, Lewis was nominated as the first

CEO of Amtrak, taking the reins of the passenger rail operations of the major railroads.

General Dynamics purchased Liquid Carbonic Corporation in September 1957 and controlled it as a wholly owned subsidiary until being forced by a Federal antitrust ruling to spin it off to

shareholders in January 1969. Liquid Carbonic was then bought that same month by the Houston Natural Gas Company.

Houston Natural Gas Corporation (HNG) was a gas utility headquartered in Houston, Texas. The company was acquired by InterNorth Inc. in 1985, with HNG executives

taking top positions at InterNorth. Following the transaction, InterNorth was renamed Enron Corporation, and the company headquarters was moved from InterNorth's base in Omaha to the former HNG offices in Houston. The company is notable for former CEO Kenneth Lay who became CEO

of the newly formed Enron.

In 1963 HNG acquired the Valley Gas Production Company and its pipelines, with the president, Robert R. Herring, joining the company as vice-president.

Later, in 1984, the company fended off a hostile take over by rival energy company Coastal

Corporation, in a successful attempt to fend off the takeover the board hired then Transco Energy president, Ken Lay, to manage the company. A year later, in 1985, Ken Lay negotiated the acquisition of HNG by InterNorth and his president position at the new HNG InterNorth, later

known as Enron.

Ken Lay worked at Humble Oil as an economist from 1965 to 1968 in the Corporate Planning Department. In 1968, Lay entered the Officer Candidate School for the United States Navy where, from 1968 to 1971, he rose to the rank of lieutenant and was the special

assistant to the Navy Comptroller and Financial Analyst at the Office of Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Department of the Navy at The Pentagon.
He was also a member of the board of directors from 1993 to 2001 of Eli Lilly and Company and a director at Texas Commerce Bank.

Lay additionally had friendly relations with the Republican politicians Gerald R. Ford, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and James A. Baker III as well as the Democratic politicians Bill Clinton and Ann Richards.