The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Scandals’ origins

Blame The Solomon Scan­dals on my lack of ESP. Oh, to have read the minds of the peo­ple whose lives and deeds helped inspire the novel!

Just why did the late Sen. Abra­ham Ribi­coff end up with a $20,000 invest­ment in a build­ing that the CIA moved into? What were Ribi­coff and friends really think­ing and doing in pri­vate, and how much did he know? Why didn’t the GSA lease list the part­ners in the build­ing as required by law?  And how come his name was hid­den from the pub­lic? Was it really because of the fear that peo­ple would bother a sen­a­tor about about leaky faucets?

Damn if I knew the full story. A novel seemed the right medium, then—a chance to fill in the gaps even though I nor­mally wrote nonfiction.

Yes, hints abounded in doc­u­ments and care­ful pub­lic state­ments. I recalled some tan­ta­liz­ing facts about Ribicoff’s “close friend” Charles Smith—the king of the GSA land­lords, whose com­pa­nies held $150 mil­lion in gov­ern­ment office leases in 1975. Smith was not just any old real estate tycoon. He had a num­ber of famous friends and investors in gov­ern­ment or non­govern­ment projects. They ranged from Art Buch­wald to at least sev­eral fed­eral judges and exes, includ­ing for­mer Supreme Court Jus­tices Abe For­tas and Arthur Gold­berg. But for the most part, the names on the part­ner­ship papers were just that, noth­ing more. They didn’t tell me any­thing about the par­ties or fam­ily cel­e­bra­tions or other occa­sions where Smith might have hooked up with his friends. While I could guess what mainly drew Smith and Ribi­coff together—both were ambi­tious self-made men, Ribi­coff hav­ing even worked in a zip­per and buckle fac­tory at one time—that was far from a com­plete explanation.

Early on I wrote some­what in a new jour­nal­ism vein, but the results fell short of what I wanted, because I lacked the req­ui­site infor­ma­tion about the Smith-Ribicoff crowd and their actual thoughts, along with other details. The result was that I saw this not just as a con­ven­tional inves­ti­ga­tion but also a novel, with an oppor­tu­nity to imag­ine, in fic­tion iden­ti­fied as such.

The pos­si­bil­i­ties grew more intrigu­ing after I learned, through Jim Polk, the inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist, that the Ribicoff-linked Key Build­ing had housed some CIA offices. A sce­nario occurred to me. In part, couldn’t Sy Solomon’s real estate empire be a vehi­cle for agency-related invest­ments? Per­haps along the way his peo­ple could oblig­ingly plant hid­den micro­phones in his build­ings to let the CIA spy on other bureau­cra­cies. As a nov­el­ist, I could even cook up some mur­der­ous rival­ries among dif­fer­ent fac­tions of spook­ish busi­ness people.

Noth­ing against new jour­nal­ism, truly well executed—in fact, it’s more ardu­ous than con­ven­tional report­ing. But in this case fic­tion seemed the best way to go in writ­ing up the human side of the story. While I pub­lished news arti­cles, I was really look­ing ahead to fictition.

I wrote the novel, on and off, over a period of more than 30 years. The title, orig­i­nally The Golden Lease, evolved into The Cover-Up, then The Solomon Scan­dals. Back in the 1980s I had a near-sale to Warner Books, but luck­ily Warner turned me down, giv­ing me time to do exten­sive rewrites and add a fram­ing device. That is, the main plot of the book is pre­sented between the fore­word and after­word writ­ten in the late 21st cen­tury by the direc­tor of the Insti­tute for Study of Pre­vir­tual Media.

Work­ing on Scan­dals, I felt thor­oughly time-warpy; I bounced back and forth as if I were Billy Pil­grim in Slaughterhouse-Five. My writ­ing tools changed over the years from an old elec­tric type­writer to a Kaypro II, then a whole series of other giz­mos, lead­ing up to my present sys­tem, a cheapie Hewlett-Packard desk­top with many times the com­put­ing power of my first machine.

Luck­ily for me, in terms of the con­tin­ued news­wor­thi­ness of this novel, Wash­ing­ton so far has remained reli­ably cor­rupt. How many other towns have even had scan­dals tours over the years? Ide­ally The Solomon Scan­dals can help you under­stand the scoundrels whose deeds and mis­deeds inspired the tours.

Image credit: Cre­ative Com­mons–licensed photo from Grunt­zooki, aka Cory Doc­torow. Cap­tion reads, “ESP off but­ton dis­ables pre­cog pow­ers in rental Volk­swa­gen, Lon­don, UK.”

Related: Scan­dals’ ori­gins as dis­cussed in a Writ­ing Show inter­view with Paula Berin­stein in June 2009.

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• Solomon for real?
• Robert H. Smith death editorial—and the need for the Washington Post to tell the whole story