Your FDA Recommended Daily Allowance of Iron(y)

Here's a gem from a reading I had from my Intro to Archives class:

"It is noteworthy that during debate in the House of Representatives, one of
Representative Moss’s colleagues, a young congressman from Illinois, spoke in
favor of the bill, saying it

will make it considerably more difficult for secrecy-minded bureaucrats to
decide arbitrarily that people should be denied access to information on the
conduct of Government or on how an individual Government official is handling
his job. . . . [P]ublic records, which are evidence of official government
action, are public property, and there . . . should be a positive obligation to
disclose this information upon request.

The name of that young congressman from Illinois was Donald Rumsfeld."

Timothy L. Ericson, "Building Our Own 'Iron Curtain': The Emergence of Secrecy in American Government," American Archivist, 68 (Spring/Summer 2005): 43.

This is what I think of as a case of historical irony, where perhaps whatever was said was not originally intended with irony (in the sarcastic sense), but has proven to be ironic over time and the course of further speech and action on the part of the speaker.