KAREN SILKWOOD

...The Oklahoma City jury at least partially dissolved that charge...

...It found that the company's safety standards at its Cimarron, Oklahoma, facility were at best slipshod and that plutonium from the plant contaminated Silkwood...

...With Rashke's new allegations of further Government knowledgeability and missing plutonium, however, Congress has been stripped of any further rationale for turning its back on the case...

...And more: It's impossible to go over the record as Rashke has presented it and not conclude that the Government investigation of the case was at least criminally negligent, if not part of a cover-up...

...That this jury of twelve angry men and women in a state so dominated by the Kerr-McGee energy conglomerate (oil, gas, coal, uranium, and potash, and more) saw fit to condemn the company for contaminating Silkwood was admirable...

...Finally, " Rashke writes, "Echo confirmed that the CIA had been diverting plutonium from nuclear plants and giving it to countries friendly to the United States and that a number of CIA agents had been contaminated with the plutonium they had diverted...

...What is it the Government wants to hide...

...Several had died...

...Echo," according to Rashke, was the code name of a highly placed FBI source for one of the investigators, Bill Taylor...

...The Bureau hasn't given you 60 per cent of the Silkwood file,' Echo told Taylor...

...Such was the thinly fictionalized interpretation of the Jane Fonda-Michael Douglas film, China Syndrome...

...But the company did send an attorney...

...In fact, it cannot be denied that there has been periodic mumbling from some quarters that the Left has "used" the Silkwood case for its own political reasons...

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...The documents were never found...

...But Echo did not know if the CIA had taken plutonium from the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plant...

...She was afraid of dying, she kept saying...

...A few days later, she was dead, her car run off the road as she toted documents incriminating the company with her...

...It is time, once and for all, to clear the air...

...There are at least four more file cabinets full of documents.' " Later, Rashke writes that "Echo cautioned Taylor not to rule out CIA involvement in the Silkwood case...

...And that forces the question: Why...

...The lawyer kept trying to squeeze a statement out of her" which would absolve Kerr-McGee from damages...

...A grander and more complex novel than the author's first (Final Payments), this story explores the dependence of five women on a conservative Catholic priest...

...Only Felicitas, the youngest, attempts to challenge these values...

...Interested lawmakers can start by reading Rashke's comprehensive book...

...It is virtually impossible, in fact, to look at the ominous circumstances surrounding the case without concluding that Silkwood must have been murdered by someone with an interest in keeping Kerr-McGee's lax security and questionable record-keeping of plutonium stocks secret...

...On the other hand, Rashke does an admirable job of laying out the facts of the case and deciphering the voluminous court record...

...Although the book has redeeming moments, much of the time Griffin belabors the obvious...

...Rashke reviews a number of interesting clues, at least one of them newly published and highly inflammatory...

...In addition, workers whom Rashke interviewed reported wide-scale petty theft of radioactive material by personnel apparently uneducated to its lethal properties...

...One chapter details an episode in October 1977, when investigators working for the Silkwood family were beginning to nudge open a series of "national security" trapdoors in the case...

...Yet, Rashke fills out the record of FBI and Kerr-McGee efforts to smear the victim, a traditional past practice of the Bureau, as well as to try to derail Congressional probes of the case...

...Within a few short hours of the judgment, activists who had raised money for the suit, prodded along a short-circuited Congressional investigation, and kept the case in the public eye over the years went out to the highway where Karen Silkwood's car went off the road, erected a small monument, and held a press conference...

...Few issues embraced by the Left have so unrelentingly been kept in the forefront of the public's attention over the past half decade as the Karen Silkwood case...

...This is heady stuff...

...Kerr-McGee didn't send a doctor," Rashke writes, "even though an afternoon nose smear still showed 600Qd/m—a very serious contamination level...

...Jeffrey Stein (Jeffrey Stein is The Progressive's correspondent in Washington...

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...If what she is saying is not obvious to some readers, her poetic polemic is not likely to convince them...

...If there was no foul play, why has the Government gone to such obvious lengths to keep the lid on...

...But, after a brief flirtation with the radicalism of the 1960s and an affair with a stereotypical macho leader, she returns to the women's cloistered Catholic existence, with her illegitimate, daughter an offering in return for their forgiveness...

...Books Briefly Polemic on Pornography PORNOGRAPHY AND SILENCE: CULTURE'S REVENGE AGAINST NATURE by Susan Griffin (Harper & Row...

...Karen was crying...

...The Justice Department conducted— officially, at least—a cursory review of the case and decided there was no foul play indicated...

...The jury decided one of those questions...

...But prospects are not good, it is said, for a favorable court ruling on the conspiracy allegations brought against Kerr-McGee and the Government by the Silkwood family...

...Unfortunately, both that claim and the title of this book, The Killing of Karen Silkwood: The Story behind the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Case, are overstated...

...So far, many have done their part in this troubling case: the jurors, lawyers for the Silkwood family, such journalists as Rashke, and most of all, the so-called "Supporters of Silkwood," a feminist network which has been the backbone of efforts to keep the case alive in the face of apathy on the part of much of the mainstream press and, of course, Congress...

...In fact, as the book develops, Taylor becomes one of its more interesting characters and a metaphor for the mystery itself: As he pursues the case, the crusty, cop-talking ex-Marine investigator is beaten up, his life threatened, and his house broken into for his files...

...Silkwood worried that she had been intentionally poisoned as a result of her union activity...

...In 1979, five years after her death on a lonely stretch of Oklahoma highway, an Oklahoma City jury decided that the Kerr-McGee Energy Corporation' was negligent in her contamination by plutonium, and awarded $10.5 million to her family...

...But the contamination issue has become over the years only a preliminary bout before the hoped-for title fight: From the moment when a union official and a reporter waiting for Karen Silkwood to arrive at an Oklahoma City motel with documents indicting Kerr-McGee's safety record realized to their horror that she would never make it, the Silkwood case became a murder mystery...

...Such is the nuance of a one-woman show touring the country with the encouragement of the Silkwood support network, and such is the hint in almost every television documentary or magazine article about the puzzling case, including two of my own...

...In this new study, Griffin reworks a familiar theme— that cruelty to women, in pornography and life, derives from the need of Culture (the masculine) to stamp out Nature (the feminine...

...Shadow Lives THE COMPANY OF WOMEN by Mary Gordon (Random House...

...Pornography and Silence is not nearly so original in thought and language as Susan Griffin's Women and Nature...

...Though the ambitions of the novel—to portray not only the relationships among these seven characters, but their points of view as well—are not per60 I AUGUST 1981...

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...But beyond these pyrotechnics perhaps exists the single most important new piece of information to reach print: that there is a highly placed FBI official with direct knowledge of a cover-up...

...She found food in her refrigerator jumping with radioactivity...

...Why a cover-up...

...he did not have access to that report...

...Each lives a shadow life based on sexual abstinence and denial of the need for self-fulfillment...

...While [a company] team decontaminated her apartment, the lawyer had Silkwood cornered In a company car outside...

...Forget the title, and a good book remains...

...The wooden sign raised up there was inscribed: "Karen Silkwood/ Born 2-9-1946/Died 11/13/1974/Vindicated 5-18-1979...

...A few details Rashke provides are useful here: Up to six months before Silkwood's recorded contamination, the Kerr-McGee plant had no security force of armed, uniformed guards...

...After that, the company began deploying two guards at the entrance gate (at least one of whom, Rashke reports, turned out to be a bank robber using an alias...

...The problem with Rashke's book is that it falls short of proving what its title promises: a "killing" of Karen Silkwood...