Foul Play
Kohn, Howard
BOOKS Foul Play WHO KILLED KAREN SILK WOOD? by Howard Kohn Summit Books. 462 pp. $8.95. The basic features of the Karen Silk-wood case are by now well-known. "Someone" ran the young Oklahoma...
...Steve Wodka and Tony Mazzocchi, the union officials who supported Silkwood's whistle-blowing work in the plant, and John Gof-man and Tom Mancuso, the nuclear experts who testified at the trial and whose work laid the groundwork for many of the health concerns over plutonium...
...It proves once again that life is bigger than both art and politics...
...reads like a detective story and has the impact of a bomb thrown into the heart of the atomic industry...
...Peter Stockton, the Washington investigator who uncovered key evidence...
...Among those friends was Howard Kohn, an investigative reporter for Rolling Stone, who specialized in nuclear matters...
...Kohn's treatment is a strong reminder that though the Silkwood story is now well-known, there was no reason it should have been, except that strong-willed people were determined to make it so...
...it is a profoundly human, gripping tale full of real people with all their frailties...
...Gerry Spence, the flamboyant courtroom gunslinger...
...Drew Stephens, Karen's boyfriend...
...Bill and Merle Silkwood, her parents...
...Soon rumors of drug use began to spread, as did a vicious controversy over plutonium contamination...
...Though she didn't know them, Karen Silkwood had some powerful friends—not rich or well-connected, but friends determined to find out what she knew about Kerr-McGee and to make sure that the service she had tried to perform would not be forgotten...
...All that really seemed to matter was that another troublesome worker had to be disposed of...
...She had a personality like all of us, with good points and bad points...
...In fast-moving prose that creates the effect of a powerful trial novel, Kohn traces the Silkwood story from the November evening she set out to meet David Burnham through the triumphant day nearly seven years later when a jury found Kerr-McGee liable for more than $10 million in damages as the result of a suit brought by her family...
...An expert driver who often participated in road races, Silkwood was killed when her Honda Civic struck a culvert on a lonely stretch of Oklahoma highway...
...As Sara Nelson put it, while dedieating a roadside marker where Silkwood died: "It's important to realize that Karen was a regular person...
...Soon after she was found, the documents she had been carrying strangely disappeared...
...Someone" ran the young Oklahoma plutonium plant worker and union organizer off the road in November 1974 while she was on her way to deliver documents about her employer to David Burnham of The New York Times...
...Danny Sheehan, Sara's husband and leading attorney in the case, also becomes a key player—as does health researcher Robert Alvarez, Kitty's husband...
...Kohn introduces us to Kitty Tucker and Sara Nelson, two headstrong activists determined not to let Silkwood's life be wasted because she was an activist and a woman, one who dared to speak and act...
...Despite the best efforts of the Oklahoma highway patrol to prove otherwise, all the evidence pointed to murder...
...Subsequent investigations found suspicious dents on the Honda's back fender...
...In short, Kohn's treatment of the Silk-wood case is just as it should be: profoundly human...
...Harvey Wasserman (Harvey Wasserman is co-author of "Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation," to be published by Delacorte Press in April...
...Karen's employer was the Kerr-McGee Corporation, a power in state and national politics...
...He was on his honeymoon when Silkwood died but soon found himself commuting between Washington and the flatlands of Oklahoma, painstakingly tracking down the details of a story that proved to be increasingly disturbing as each day went by...
...With the eye of both a journalist and a friend, Kohn tells what their pursuit of Silk-wood's case cost Nelson and Tucker—what it did to them, their families, and the relationship between the two of them...
...Kohn's narrative of that story has now been published in book form, and it is a major achievement...
...What it takes is courage and a willingness to push ahead, no matter what the odds...
...Who Killed Karen Silkwood...
...It demonstrates that people with determination, drive, and the knowledge they are right can bring an industry to its knees...
...On that score Kohn's book is just what is needed to drive the real lesson of Karen Silkwood home...
...Kohn also brings us close to the "other side," to Jacque Srouji, the mysterious "reporter" whose FBI connections and intrigues lend a bizarre angle to the case, and to Robert Kerr and Dean McGee, the big-time operators whose plutonium plant would become a national symbol in the fight against atomic proliferation...
...What she did was something we all could do, something we all should do...
Vol. 46 • March 1982 • No. 3
