The Solomon Scandals novel vs. online gossip about Skyline Towers and the intel community
The Solomon Scandals is a novel, but two actual events helped inspire it and are the topics of online gossip today—several decades later:
The combined result? The extremely fictitious Vulture’s Point, a rickety high-rise housing some CIA operations on the banks of the Potomac, at least several miles from Skyline.
So what’s invented and what’s fact? Well, in the Connecticut newspapers, I myself revealed Ribicoff’s extremely problematic investment, which he claimed was an accident despite his vagueness about the circumstances under which he found out about the mistake. The story made the NBC Nightly News, after I bluffed Ribicoff’s trustee into revealing the senator’s stake in the Key Building in Arlington. But my disclosure mysteriously stayed out of the Washington dailies for reason still unknown to me. Advertising pressure? Friendships? A government-press cover-up? Or just an honest mistake in news judgment? I don’t know. I certainly had fun concocting an imaginary conspiracy to explain it all.
But you can’t keep a good story—or partial story?—down. Now gossip is spreading online that the actual Skyline complex houses certain secretive agencies well known for their initials, the very kind of outfit about which I wrote in Scandals. True? Once again, I don’t know. I’d welcome some authentic and verifiable information. What I can say is that I do see a need for intel agencies in this era, given that the United States has bungled so badly in Iraq and elsewhere for want of the facts. If I find the rumors pan out, I’ll not publish the exact locations of the intel offices if I discover them and think there is any national security threat in the information’s becoming public. I’m reachable via email at davidrothman@pobox.com.
Related: The Washington Post series on Top Secret America.
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Kent State Massacre 40 years later: ‘Get set!’ ‘Point!’ ‘Fire!’ orders said to be in enhanced recording
Four Kent State University students—including Bill Schroeder, an ROTC cadet whose funeral I wrote up for the Lorain Journal—died 40 years ago on May 4, 1970. Nine suffered bullet wounds. The Ohio National Guard fired 67 rounds at a crowd no closer than 150 feet. Shot in the back while lying on the grass, young Schroeder himself was 382 feet from the nearest Guardsman, according to an official report. He was not among the anti-Vietnam protestors, but rather was simply outside, between classes.
I fictionalized the massacre’s aftermath somewhat in Chapter 29 of The Solomon Scandals, but this much is fact, unfortunately: Throughout Ohio, a small minority rejoiced that young Schroeder and the other three students were dead. An arsonist or group of them had burned down the ROTC armory; and property rights and ideology before human life, no? President Richard Nixon and Ohio Gov. James Rhodes may or may not have wanted the kids dead, but through rhetoric and mishandling of the Ohio National Guard, public officials paved the way with bad intentions. “They’re worse than the Brownshirts, and the Communist element, and also the Night Riders, and the vigilantes,” Rhodes said of the protestors the day before the killings. “They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” Was Rhodes at least indirectly to blame for the deaths, beyond the fact that he ordered the Guard to Kent State?
Did “shoot” orders, impromptu or not, exist? Via the Akron Beacon Journal and elsewhere, you can read of a sound recording that a Kent State student named Terry Strubbe made of the incident four decades ago. Yale University in 2007 enhanced a digital version, as noted by Al Canfora, who, as a student, was injured in the right wrist during the massacre. He says voices in the recording said: “Right here!” and “Get set!” and “Point!” and “Fire!” While not everyone is positive about those words and at least one Guardsman directly challenges Canfora, the New York Times has taken note of the recording’s existence. Especially with digital technology steadily improving, it is time for the Obama administration to do the same and reopen the Kent State investigations with help from reputable technologists and forensics experts.
In The Solomon Scandals, a high-rise collapses and no one suffers any meaningful punishment. The same happened in the real-life Skyline Plaza disaster in the Washington area where 14 workers died and 34 were injured. Maybe it’s too late for anybody to draw a murder conviction for Kent State; but if nothing else, along with the rest of us, Barack Obama could learn from history.
The Internet angle: If the recording is not on the Internet, it needs to be—so techies from all over the world can analyze the sounds. Official experts could then replicate their work if anything significant turned up.
And a Jewish angle: Quite by coincidence, nothing more, three of the four students killed at Kent State were Jewish.
Update, May 8: Mike Mori, the film-maker, has written in to remind us of the existence of a new DVD of his Emmy-winning documentary, Kent State, The Day the War Came Home. Any TSS readers seen it? Your thoughts?
Update, May 11: See New analysis of 40-year-old recording of Kent State shootings reveals that Ohio Guard was given an order to prepare to fire, from the May 9 Cleveland Plain Dealer.
The PD used impartial, independent experts.
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Robert H. Smith death editorial—and the need for the Washington Post to tell the whole story
Robert H. Smith, philanthropist and Crystal City developer, gets another paean today from the Washington Post—this time an editorial, which follows an obituary of more than 1,100 words.
The Post appropriately notes Smith’s donations of “hundreds of millions of dollars to universities, the arts, historic sites and civic activities.”
Given his significance, then, perhaps the newspaper’s business desk could treat him as a flesh-and-blood human and also do a balanced retrospective on his business career. The article could include at least brief mentions of the Skyline high-rise collapse and Sen. Abraham Ribicoff’s hidden and apparently illegal stake in a Smith building occupied by the CIA (right photo). Such a business post mortem could still be overwhelmingly positive—I myself believe in cutting the dead some slack.
But with all due respect to Robert Smith’s memory, the Post should not repeat the omissions of the obit and editorial and leave out facts as public as the Skyline collapse (a rumble heard for miles, 14 workers dead and lawsuits).
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From Bob Dylan to D.C.’s white-collar crooks: U.K. music site’s 3,000-word Q&A with David Rothman
Pennyblackmusic, a U.K. music site, has just posted a 3,000-word Q&A with David Rothman. Here’s the start.
Can Bob Dylan fit into a Washington novel? Actually yes, if you go by ‘The Solomon Scandals’ (Twilight Times Books).
Investigative reporter Jon Stone loves to swap ‘Dylan albums and pulpy old spy novels’ with a friend.
Stone’s fictional memoirs—inspired by such realities as a U.S. senator’s hidden investment in a CIA-occupied building—are in fact Dylan-sardonic.
In ‘It’s All Good’, Bob Dylan sings, ‘Big politicians telling lies/Restaurant kitchen, all full of flies… Buildings are crumbling in the neighborhood/But there’s nothing to worry about, ’cause it’s all good.’
Sure enough, in journalist David Rothman’s new D.C. novel, the Vulture’s Point high-rise on the Potomac River may crumble with more than a thousand IRS and CIA workers inside. Jon Stone’s editor is cronies with the builder Jon wants to expose…
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Originally posted on Aug. 6, 2009. Moved back to play up basics of The Solomon Scandals. — D.R.
RIP, Budd Schulberg. I hated to see the Washington Post obit blog remind us you’d outlived your fame. Of course, I was glad you reached 95, but I wish the media and the public hadn’t been so amnesic. My old paperback of What Makes Sammy Run? is AWOL, but years later I can still remember not just Sammy the opportunist but also Al Manheim, the conscience-driven narrator, the rabbi’s son from a small New England town.
Sammy hasn’t the slightest trouble reconciling—in favor of the latter–the frequent conflicts between personal integrity and the American worship of success. Manheim is a persuasive contrast to Sammy.
Manheim in a town full of Glicks
In The Solomon Scandals, itself written in the first person, Jonathan Stone strives to be a Manheim, a mensch in a town full of Glicks. This is Washington, not Hollywood. But the archetypes transcend geography and even gender. Despite all the cliches about public service, D.C., too, is a city of the deal, as shown by characters such as Donna Stackelbaum, a perversely entrepreneurial civil servant, an old girlfriend of Stone who ditches him for a Glickish young lawyer. Washington has Manheims, too. But Glicks abound.
Seymour Solomon himself is Glickish but far, far smoother about it than Donna or the Schulberg character. Albeit a former bricklayer with two missing fingertips, he can be a true gentleman of a crook, especially when talking to Stone about campaign donations. “Decency, Jon,” he tells the Spinoza–quoting reporter, “it’s the first thing I look for in a politician.”
Controversy in the Jewish community?
Like What Makes Sammy Run?, Scandals may well ignite some controversy in the Jewish community. Sy Solomon is Jewish, after all. But then again, like Manheim, so is Stone, who exposes Solomon despite all the ugly canards about Jewish press conspiracies. You write what you know. Had I been 
Episcopalian, my Solomon—or Smythson or whatever—would most likely have been spouting the related pieties. But then again I can’t envision of Stone himself as not being Jewish. I suspect that Schulberg would have thought the same of Al Manheim, even if Manheim himself hadn’t been a rabbi’s son.
I didn’t agree with Schulberg on everything—especially his testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee—but on balance he was clearly far more of a Manheim than Glick. We’ll also remember him for the Watts Writers Workshop and for his other notable writings such as his scripts for The Harder They Fall and of course On The Waterfront. Maybe now that he’s dead, Hollywood will pay him due respect and finally make a movie out of Sammy.
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