Here's an anecdote.
Years ago after a massive flood, the Army Corps of Engineers decided to build a flood control dam that would have flooded the property of my family's summer camp in Massachusetts. My father researched the issue, and found an equally viahle location for the dam that wouldn't flood our property, but the Corps of Engineers refused to change the dam's location.
Finally, with no other option, he wrote a long letter detailing the issue to then Senator Kennedy. Receiving no response, he went in person to Kennedy's office and asked to speak to him. The secretary asked him if he had an appointment, and he said no. Fortunately, Kennedy came out of the office at that moment, and asked what my father wanted. Upon learning of the issue, he told her to send him in.
As it happened, Kennedy hadn't seen the letter, so he asked his secretary to retrieve it from the file. He read the letter, several pages long, at a glance -- he was famously a speed reader -- and then, according to my father, asked questions that showed a complete command of every fact and figure it contained.
Then he called the head of the Corps of Engineers. "Not that fellow Hill again!" the guy said. Kennedy asked him if the facts in the letter were true, and he admitted that they were -- whereupon Kennedy told him to change the location of the dam, and our land was spared.
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