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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Beyond Landra Reid’s broken neck: A psycho trucker almost killed Carly and me. Tougher regs, anyone?
Landra Reid, wife of of Harry Reid, U.S. Senate majority leader, suffered a broken neck and back when a truck rear-ended the Honda minivan she was in. Good luck to Mrs. Reid in her recovery.
The Reid incident wasn’t scary just because it happened on I-95 here in Northern Virginia. A psycho trucker almost killed my wife and me five years ago on Route 77 in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I’d love to learn the fate of the automobile driver in the Australian video shown here.
In the Reid case, the trucker may or may not have been guilty of reckless driving; he deserves a fair trial. If nothing else, I’d like to know more about his safety record.
The driver on Route 77 was a gung-ho psychopath without doubt, and I hate the thought of his zipping around in a scooter, much less driving a truck many times bigger than our 1988 Honda Civic. “An American Taliban,” a relative of mine described Mr. Monster Truck.
Could deregulation in the trucking industry have encouraged MMT to throw out the rule book—an issue that just might apply in Mrs. Reid’s case, too? Deadlines and speed and fatigue at work on I-95? Whatever the case, according to Public Citizen, nearly 5,000 Americans a year perish in “truck-related” accidents. An AAA photo illustrating the risks to motorists, especially in mountainous areas, is to the left—also see research from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
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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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The Skyline collapse—and property rights vs. human life
Scandals at one level is a beach read, a mix of a thriller and novel of manners. But at another, it’s about bureaucratic laxness, which can kill workers—not just drain investors’ bank accounts.The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico makes Scandals all the more timely. Penny-pinching proved to be lethal. – D.R.
Fourteen workers died and 34 were injured in the real building collapse that inspired the one in The Solomon Scandals.
The Skyline Plaza disaster at Bailey’s Crossroads in Northern Virginia happened on March 2, 1973—the result, many said, of premature removal of concrete shoring.
Fines amounted to just $300 for the shoring-related lapse and $13,000 for violations of worker safety codes. Not so coincidentally, an even worse disaster followed in West Virginia just five years later, killing 51 workers in America’s most deadly construction accident.
The Skyline death toll of 14 was minor compared to the calamity at the fictitious Vulture’s Point, the IRS/CIA building that I located in the general area of Dyke Marsh, south of Alexandria. I added a hill and other topographical features missing from the actual site on the Potomac River. The nature-lover in the right photo is “stalking the birds hiding in the cattails.”
Aided by Gordon Batson of Clarkson University and M. Kevin Parfitt of Pennsylvania State University, I came up with my own causes for the Vulture’s Point disaster, which, unlike Skyline, didn’t happen during construction.
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