A Public Servant to the Last

"I'm sort of an omnivore when it comes to scientific knowledge," he said. "That gave me an advantage."

In 1982, he married Peggy Weeks, whom he met through a friend. Through his former boss at State, Kennedy School professor Joseph Nye, he met Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), and for the next 14 years he advised the senator in his work on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The McGaffigans had a son, Edward, in 1984, and a daughter, Margaret, two years later. Soon after, Peggy McGaffigan developed Huntington's disease, a degenerative disease of the nervous system. Bingaman reduced McGaffigan's workload, giving him time to care for his wife and children.

"He was always very organized, always making lists," said Margaret, who goes by Meggy. Grocery lists, family appointments, the annotated Christmas shopping list his children found -- for a decade, his reams of routine have kept his household on task.

Meggy McGaffigan, a physics student, has begun an internship at the NRC, where, at least for a time, she'll work alongside her father.

"He's always told me and my brother that we can do what we want" as a career, she said. But it has been her father's dedication to public service "that kind of makes you wonder if that's something that we want to do."

Her father hopes other young idealists follow his path.

"With Kennedy, serving government was a noble cause," he said. "Now Republicans and Democrats alike bash government when it serves their purpose.

"We are going to need a massive influx of young people. The answer is not contracts." Outsourcing the work of government technicians, he said, means "there are agencies where they can't do the calculations themselves any more. "

When McGaffigan was appointed to the NRC in 1996, his government experience helped the commission unravel a tangle of poor policies "one by one."

Today, he says, the NRC is "much more efficient, much more timely, more fair I believe and more transparent." At the height of this effort, in 1999, McGaffigan was diagnosed with melanoma and underwent extensive surgery. The following year, Peggy McGaffigan died. The day after her funeral, Ed McGaffigan was testifying on the Hill. "What we do is we go on," he said. "It's part of the duty thing."

Throughout his illness, McGaffigan has rarely spent more than a few days off the job.