Robert Smith’s death as the W. Post covered it: Nothing on Skyline or secret Ribicoff investment
How did the sprawling Crystal City complex, near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, get its name? In the 1960s, developer Robert H. Smith dressed up his first apartment building there with a chandelier in the lobby, and soon the name spread to other Smith properties. It was, as I see it, a perfect example of the Smith family’s marketing prowess. Telling details like that enlivened a generally excellent Washington Post obituary on Smith, whose father, Charles E. Smith, was a partial inspiration for the Seymour Solomon character in The Solomon Scandals. Similarly the Post obit lavished space on the Smith family’s charitable activities, exactly as it should have.
But here’s a mystery. In more than 1,100 words, why didn’t the obituary even briefly mention the Skyline Plaza tragedy, which, as a timeline from the Fairfax County Public Library shows, was a major event in county history? The Smiths and friends owned the project, and the controversies over the disaster were rather public. Fourteen construction workers died at Skyline, and dozens were injured. The Smiths denied responsibility for the collapse, and I won’t reach any conclusions here, but, for what it’s worth, Robert Smith was running the construction arm of the Smith interests at the time. Not mentioning Skyline was an injustice against the workers’ families.
Still, I can appreciate the pressures of space and time, the explanation kindly given to me by the one of the obituary writers today. Now I’m rooting for the obit crew to do a follow-up in the lively and thoughtful Post Mortem blog, given the Smith family’s importance in D.C.-area history and local society.
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D.C.’s power lunchrooms: Then and now
The Solomon Scandals mentions the Sans Souci, where so many members of the D.C. élite plotted and dined.
In real life JFK almost surely ate there on occasion, and aides such as his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, most definitely came.
So did dealmakers and celebrities like the late Art Buchwald, seen in the right photo. A humor columnist and Kennedy-family friend, he invested with a real estate mogul who in some ways resembled Sy Solomon.
The Sans Souci shows up in Scandals’ first chapter when George McWilliams, editor of the Washington Telegram, threatens to boycott the Sans if it won’t honor the wishes of an embittered politician and name a baby shark after McWilliams.
But life and tastes in restaurant move on. The San Souci is gone from 17th Street, and Ristorante Tosca is now where many of the highest-priced lobbyists and lawyers drink and dine.
- The Solomon Scandals’ first three chapters for free—glass shark tank mention included
- Wash. Post killing off domestic news bureaus: D.C. ‘prism’ better than the full story?
- The Watergate editor and the society legend: A loving look at them by their son who lives ‘A Different Life’
- Plot
- Overview of ‘The Solomon Scandals’
The ACTUAL Telegram?
A friend and I had just seen a movie with a soft-spoken and obscenity-free editor, a balding Boy Scout of the city room. Now she wondered if my novel hadn’t sinned in making such a wild character out of George McWilliams, editor at the fictitious Washington Telegram. Her message couldn’t have been clearer. Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post, would never behave like my Mac.
Some of Bradlee’s enemies would emphatically disagree. I won’t take a stand. But here’s the real point: I wasn’t even writing about the Washington Post. I had created my own Washington, with its own morning newspaper. The duty of a novelist isn’t to report facts but to convey basic truths, and ideally to entertain the reader along the way. By blending in details from different newspapers, I could write a better book. Nowadays, incidentally, Sam Zell lords it over the Chicago Tribune and sister newspapers, rides a motorcycle and supposedly says it’s fine for his people to watch porn on the job as long as they’re productive. He’s an owner, not an editor, but you get the idea: different cultures sprout up in different newsrooms or at least different executive suites (no, I’m not accusing Trib journalists of taking up Zell on his offer!).
At a deeper level, if someone asks if parallels existed in the 1970s between the Post and the Telegram in the treatment of federal landlords, I’ll plead ignorance and mean it. I’d love to know why the Post and other local papers didn’t make more out of the relationship between Sen. Abraham Ribicoff and Charles Smith, the biggest of the landlords—especially after the NBC evening news spotlighted Ribicoff’s hidden investment in a CIA-occupied building through a Smith partnership. Fear of loss of real estate ads? Or something more innocuous? Maybe a series of overlapping friendships existed, making the Post less curious than it might have been otherwise. Art Buchwald, the late humor columnist and close friend of Bradlee, was even a Smith investor. And David Broder, the political columnist, suggested Abe Ribicoff as a vice presidential possibility—-perhaps reflecting some other Post people’s fondness for Ribicoff, which was also abundantly evident in the paean of an obit. Last but not least, the Key Building story could simply have been up against the Not Invented Here Syndrome; perhaps the Post preferred to focus on original stories rather than devote resources to verifying mine.
Bottom line: The Post is not the Telegram, and Bradlee isn’t George McWilliams, who, incidentally, is Brooklyn-born and in many ways is the antithesis of a Bradlee-style Boston Brahmin.
Some positives about the Old Guard at the Post: Let me also throw in some positives about the Bradlee-era at the Post despite my disappointment over the paper’s less-than-complete coverage of Ribicoff-related matters. Not long ago, maybe partly as a way of showing it didn’t want to live in the past, the Post painted over a lobby collage that included Bradlee and Katharine Graham. That, I think, may have been a mistake—especially in the era of the Net, when newspapers have to distinguish themselves from other media. Say all the nice things you want about the Post’s Slate magazine, of which I’m a fan, and from which visitors to the Post will see pages on a high-resolution monitor in the lobby. But where was Slate during the fuss over Watergate and the Pentagon Papers? Maybe the best solution would be four monitors in the outer lobby to display not only Slate, Newsweek.com and washingtonpost.com but also scenes from the Post’s past.
Related: Deep Throat is dead—and so are the old rules of investigative journalism.
Photo credit: Jack Weir (image released into the public domain).
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