Karen Silkwood died in 1974 while trying to expose dangerous conditions in her workplace. Her death — and the smear campaign that followed — highlights how retaliation against whistleblowers deflects scrutiny from power by targeting the messenger.
December 29, 2024
Source: Jacobin
Karen Silkwood
The decade-long battle over Karen Silkwood’s legacy — waged, on the one hand, by progressives who mythologized her as a courageous whistleblower and, on the other, by a corporation that vilified and sexualized her as an irresponsible traitor — offers valuable lessons for today. As we face an era where the levers of government power will be wielded by a president who has run on a platform rife with misogyny and vengeance, Silkwood’s story underscores a critical point: focusing on a whistleblower’s character distracts from the content of their claims.
The Illusion of Individual Resistance
Though little remembered today outside of Oklahoma, Silkwood’s employer, Kerr-McGee, epitomized the US energy establishment. Ranked 129 on the Fortune 500 in 1975, with more than a billion dollars in assets invested in oil, uranium, potash, helium, asphalt, and coal, the company was a household name across the American Southwest, where hundreds of gas stations bore the company’s trademark blue and red “K-M.”
Silkwood spent her shifts working with plutonium pellets in a laboratory glove box, a sealed container with glove access points, at a plant thirty miles north of KM’s Oklahoma City headquarters. She ground and polished the pellets before they were assembled into fuel rods and welded shut. She believed that these welds were faulty and that their required quality-control checks had been doctored — a claim later confirmed by government inquiries after her death.
Her own multiple plutonium exposures — as well as those of scores of her colleagues — exposed the plant’s dangerous safety lapses. She was on her way to meet a New York Times reporter when her car crashed into a concrete culvert just outside her workplace in rural Crescent, Oklahoma.
A car wreck in the darkness. A secret rendezvous between an activist employee and a famous journalist. A thin, white, attractive twenty-eight-year-old mother of three, dead inside a mangled car. An irradiated woman, just back from Los Alamos where she had undergone specialized full body testing after her home was found to have been contaminated with plutonium: Karen Silkwood’s death was cinematic, even before Meryl Streep portrayed her on screen.
The deceptions of Watergate, the US war in Vietnam, and the Church Committee’s revelations of widespread illegal surveillance of US citizens — mostly leftists — by the FBI and CIA stood as vivid reminders that the most powerful institutions in the world engaged in criminal acts with impunity. For this reason, liberals cheered the individuals and organizations that exposed such criminality.
Figures like Daniel Ellsberg, who copied and leaked the Pentagon Papers, and Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke elements of the Watergate affair, were revered not only because they revealed the sordid inner workings of power, but also because their very existence provided reassurance that exposure worked as a tool for democratic accountability.
It is not coincidental that the early 1970s is when the term “whistleblower” first came into political parlance. Ironically, because “Vietnam,” “Watergate,” and COINTELPRO were so confusing, and the cast of characters involved so large, the names of individuals associated with exposing these conspiracies took on outsize significance. Narratives demand simplicity; it takes a hero to take down a villainous regime.
“Karen Silkwood” was created as a folk hero by a left political culture that, while deeply cynical about institutions, still clung to the idealistic belief in the power of individual action to challenge systemic corruption or wrongdoing.
Death, Deception, and Nuclear Dangers
In the summer of 1975, leaders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) based in Washington, DC, began to organize around Silkwood’s story, linking the mystery of her death to the activism she carried out in life. To draw attention to Silkwood’s story, her death became the tantalizing hook in NOW’s demand for a Ccngressional investigation. NOW framed this demand as part of a larger effort to address violence against women and the dismissive attitudes of male officials toward outspoken women — Silkwood included.
By establishing November 13, 1975, as Karen Silkwood Day, NOW highlighted the broader issue of systematic disregard for women’s voices. In a letter to chapter members, NOW wrote, “If we allow her death to go by unacknowledged, unprotested, and uninvestigated, we will all be that much more vulnerable when the going gets tough.” NOW’s Karen Silkwood Day activism spawned protests nationwide and tens of thousands of signatures on petitions.
But such hero worship has its costs. Advocacy around Silkwood’s death, and the posthumous fame that ensued, diverted attention from the underlying plant conditions she sought to spotlight and the multiple exposures to deadly plutonium she sustained at the end of her life.
In life, Karen Silkwood worked hard to focus her coworkers’ attention on the hazards of their jobs — jobs that had become more perilous over the course of her two-year employment as production pressures ramped up. Silkwood feared for her safety and that of her coworkers, who had been woefully misled by management about the dangers of the job.
The Kerr-McGee plant, where Silkwood worked, fabricated plutonium fuel rods for a government-owned experimental “breeder reactor” — a nuclear reactor that produces more fissile material than it consumes. During the high point of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo, dreams of energy independence were pinned on the success of the breeder, which President Richard Nixon described in 1973 as “our highest priority target for nuclear research and development.”
The Union Struggle for Safety
As Kerr-McGee faced pressure to fulfill its contracts with the government, the plant began to cut corners on worker training. Required radiation training went from forty hours to just twenty-four — and even then, new personnel often began work without any training whatsoever. Silkwood saw this dangerous combination of a high turnover rate, lax regard for safety, and the handling of a dangerous substance as a recipe for disaster. Karl Z. Morgan, a pioneer in the field of medical physics, described the Cimarron facility as among the worst he had ever seen, betraying a “wanton disregard for the health and safety of its employees.”
Silkwood was especially alarmed by the inadequate training workers received. If inhaled, minute particles of plutonium can cause cancer, yet the word “cancer” was nowhere to be found in any corporate training material. Until Silkwood helped arrange a visit by two plutonium experts a month before she died, many plant workers did not realize that the material they handled was one of the world’s most powerful carcinogens.
“From human experience to date, we have nothing to worry about,” explained the plant’s former manager — a statement deliberately intended to reassure workers who were unaware of cancer’s latency period. By the time Silkwood became seriously contaminated — her home was found to have radioactive traces the week before her fatal car accident — she was quite worried. She feared she would die of cancer or have children born with severe disabilities. She even collected her used menstrual pads in hopes that Los Alamos scientists could analyze their radioactivity.
But Silkwood’s campaign, like those of many whistleblowers, was not purely altruistic. Her activism was also a labor tactic. As one of the three workers on her union’s collective bargaining committee — and the first woman to hold the position in the male-dominated workforce — Silkwood was deeply involved in union efforts.
As happened in many unionized workplaces in the 1970s, the Cimarron facility faced a decertification drive — an employee-initiated, management-supported effort to kick out the union. And anti-union sentiments were highest in the laboratory where she worked, where many of her coworkers resented her bitterly and considered her activism a running joke.
With the support of the Washington, DC–based leadership of her union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), Silkwood undertook what was to be a multipart plan. First, to fend off the decertification election, the union would prove its value through an education drive that highlighted the hazards of plutonium exposure and Kerr-McGee’s strategic campaign of ignorance.
Once the union narrowly avoided decertification, Silkwood was responsible for phase two of the plan: accumulating documentation that Kerr-McGee falsified quality-control records. The union hoped that the publicity surrounding these records would be “an exclusive bombshell to drop on the company” amid negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement.
Retaliatory Tactics
To some, these facts might make Silkwood less like a hero and more like a tactician focused on securing a better union contract. But we should avoid fixating on her supposed personal motives. A focus on the character attributes of a truth-teller rather than the context from which they emerge not only runs counter to the concept of whistleblowing — which is fundamentally about the disclosure of information that serves the public interest — but also plays into the hands of a retaliatory management.
This is why the most powerful whistleblower protection laws afford confidentiality. A boss has a harder time retaliating if he doesn’t know who blew the whistle, and an anonymous complaint keeps the focus on the behavior of the employer.
Karen Silkwood’s death eliminated the need for Kerr-McGee to use typical retaliatory tactics like dismissal, transfer, or blacklisting. Instead, it gave management free rein to engage in the most damaging form of retaliation: attacking a whistleblower’s credibility so as to divert from the unwanted questions she raises. Misogyny is a timeless tool for diminishing a woman’s credibility.
Because Silkwood died, she could not respond when Kerr-McGee suggested that she had been a drug addict who smuggled plutonium in her vagina, slept around, and abandoned her kids. When Silkwood’s family filed a lawsuit against Kerr-McGee, these insinuations became more overt in depositions.
In 1977, when corporate lawyers questioned Silkwood’s family and friends in sworn testimony, Kerr-McGee’s lawyer asked Silkwood’s father, “Did she ever become hysterical?” The same attorney probed Silkwood’s boyfriend: “Do you think Karen may have been what medical science classifies as a nymphomaniac?” The answer to both questions was “no.”
Bosses’ “Nuts and Sluts” Subterfuge
The flagrant misogyny of Kerr-McGee’s efforts at character assassination shouldn’t obscure the broader power dynamics at play. Retaliation against whistleblowers like Silkwood often appears to be an expression of revenge but is, in reality, a strategic way for management to discredit a whistleblower as troublesome and to discipline the workforce. By framing a complaint as resulting from an individual’s emotional disturbance rather than systemic corruption, employers shift attention away from structural issues and onto a whistleblower’s credibility.
Retaliation is fundamentally an affirmation of power, demonstrating the harm to one’s reputation, career, family, and sense of security that awaits those who confront authority. Although sexism was especially vivid in the Silkwood case, men who resist unethical and illegal workplace practices are also subject to these dynamics.
Indeed, dismissal, demotion, transfer, and blacklisting can be understood as techniques of emasculation insofar as work enables a man to provide for his family — and also highlights his dependence upon his bosses. Employment lawyers call these techniques of diversion the “nuts and sluts” strategy: casting doubt upon the message by focusing attention upon the messenger.
With this strategy, employers always have the upper hand, leveraging the real emotional toll of retaliation — which not infrequently results in depression, divorce, unemployment, and even suicide — as further evidence to undermine whistleblowers. John Barrett, a longtime quality-control manager at Boeing who publicly blew the whistle on defects on the Dreamliner, described the tension created by the hostile environment he faced at work and his efforts to concentrate on airplane safety.
“It has taken a serious mental and emotional toll on me,” Barrett said. “But you know I want to try very hard to keep the focus on the safety of the airplane. That’s what my story is about.” Barrett died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in March of 2024 during his deposition for a suit he brought against Boeing for wrongful termination.
Whistleblowers Are Workers Too
In the next four years, many more lives will likely be devastated by retaliatory power. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to radically roll back environmental, health, and consumer protection rules and has expressed a desire to strip civil service protections from tens of thousands of civil servants, and he will very likely continue his long-standing pattern of brazen corruption. As a result, whistleblowing is poised to become even more of a defining feature of Trump’s second term than it was during his first — a term bookended by women who accused him of wrongdoing and were sexualized and shamed for their testimony.
If and when whistleblowers emerge, Trump’s opponents should avoid the trap of focusing on their personal character — something they failed to do last time. After former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the January 6 Committee, Trump tweeted a broadside against her character (“total phony”) and her knowledge (“bullshit artist”). “This girl,” Trump later said in an interview with Newsmax, has “got serious problems, let me put it that way,” adding, “mental problems.” After her testimony, the former president and his allies floated stories attacking her character to Trump-allied media.
Meanwhile, Trump’s enemies rushed in to defend Hutchinson’s character. Republican representative Liz Cheney pointed out that many of Hutchinson’s “superiors, men many years older,” were “hiding behind executive privilege, anonymity and intimidation,” but “her bravery and patriotism were awesome to behold.”
Democratic House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi reflected, “It was almost angelic to see her with the confidence and the clarity of message, the clear patriotism.” Pelosi called Hutchinson “a gift to our country.”
Many more Americans can conjure up an image of Hutchinson’s youthful beauty, her resolute posture and crisp white blazer, than can recall the details of her testimony and their significance. (Among many other things, she testified that despite knowing his supporters were armed, Trump wanted them to march to the Capitol because “they’re not here to hurt me.”)
While the desire to lionize a truth-teller — especially one who has experienced life-threatening retaliation from the most powerful forces on Earth — is understandable, it risks reducing them to symbols rather than addressing the crucial role they play. It is an unstable basis for an enduring politics that takes whistleblowers seriously for what they are: labor activists whose jobs afford them a view into domains where employers hold nearly unchecked power.
On the fiftieth anniversary of Karen Silkwood’s death, we should honor her legacy by strengthening whistleblower protections while we still can. This means moving beyond character-driven narratives and recognizing whistleblowers not as sinners or saints, but as workers trying to improve their workplaces for themselves, and for all of us too.
20 Years After His Death, Gary Webb’s Truth Is Still Dangerous
Karen Silkwood
The decade-long battle over Karen Silkwood’s legacy — waged, on the one hand, by progressives who mythologized her as a courageous whistleblower and, on the other, by a corporation that vilified and sexualized her as an irresponsible traitor — offers valuable lessons for today. As we face an era where the levers of government power will be wielded by a president who has run on a platform rife with misogyny and vengeance, Silkwood’s story underscores a critical point: focusing on a whistleblower’s character distracts from the content of their claims.
The Illusion of Individual Resistance
Though little remembered today outside of Oklahoma, Silkwood’s employer, Kerr-McGee, epitomized the US energy establishment. Ranked 129 on the Fortune 500 in 1975, with more than a billion dollars in assets invested in oil, uranium, potash, helium, asphalt, and coal, the company was a household name across the American Southwest, where hundreds of gas stations bore the company’s trademark blue and red “K-M.”
Silkwood spent her shifts working with plutonium pellets in a laboratory glove box, a sealed container with glove access points, at a plant thirty miles north of KM’s Oklahoma City headquarters. She ground and polished the pellets before they were assembled into fuel rods and welded shut. She believed that these welds were faulty and that their required quality-control checks had been doctored — a claim later confirmed by government inquiries after her death.
Her own multiple plutonium exposures — as well as those of scores of her colleagues — exposed the plant’s dangerous safety lapses. She was on her way to meet a New York Times reporter when her car crashed into a concrete culvert just outside her workplace in rural Crescent, Oklahoma.
A car wreck in the darkness. A secret rendezvous between an activist employee and a famous journalist. A thin, white, attractive twenty-eight-year-old mother of three, dead inside a mangled car. An irradiated woman, just back from Los Alamos where she had undergone specialized full body testing after her home was found to have been contaminated with plutonium: Karen Silkwood’s death was cinematic, even before Meryl Streep portrayed her on screen.
The deceptions of Watergate, the US war in Vietnam, and the Church Committee’s revelations of widespread illegal surveillance of US citizens — mostly leftists — by the FBI and CIA stood as vivid reminders that the most powerful institutions in the world engaged in criminal acts with impunity. For this reason, liberals cheered the individuals and organizations that exposed such criminality.
Figures like Daniel Ellsberg, who copied and leaked the Pentagon Papers, and Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke elements of the Watergate affair, were revered not only because they revealed the sordid inner workings of power, but also because their very existence provided reassurance that exposure worked as a tool for democratic accountability.
It is not coincidental that the early 1970s is when the term “whistleblower” first came into political parlance. Ironically, because “Vietnam,” “Watergate,” and COINTELPRO were so confusing, and the cast of characters involved so large, the names of individuals associated with exposing these conspiracies took on outsize significance. Narratives demand simplicity; it takes a hero to take down a villainous regime.
“Karen Silkwood” was created as a folk hero by a left political culture that, while deeply cynical about institutions, still clung to the idealistic belief in the power of individual action to challenge systemic corruption or wrongdoing.
Death, Deception, and Nuclear Dangers
In the summer of 1975, leaders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) based in Washington, DC, began to organize around Silkwood’s story, linking the mystery of her death to the activism she carried out in life. To draw attention to Silkwood’s story, her death became the tantalizing hook in NOW’s demand for a Ccngressional investigation. NOW framed this demand as part of a larger effort to address violence against women and the dismissive attitudes of male officials toward outspoken women — Silkwood included.
By establishing November 13, 1975, as Karen Silkwood Day, NOW highlighted the broader issue of systematic disregard for women’s voices. In a letter to chapter members, NOW wrote, “If we allow her death to go by unacknowledged, unprotested, and uninvestigated, we will all be that much more vulnerable when the going gets tough.” NOW’s Karen Silkwood Day activism spawned protests nationwide and tens of thousands of signatures on petitions.
But such hero worship has its costs. Advocacy around Silkwood’s death, and the posthumous fame that ensued, diverted attention from the underlying plant conditions she sought to spotlight and the multiple exposures to deadly plutonium she sustained at the end of her life.
In life, Karen Silkwood worked hard to focus her coworkers’ attention on the hazards of their jobs — jobs that had become more perilous over the course of her two-year employment as production pressures ramped up. Silkwood feared for her safety and that of her coworkers, who had been woefully misled by management about the dangers of the job.
The Kerr-McGee plant, where Silkwood worked, fabricated plutonium fuel rods for a government-owned experimental “breeder reactor” — a nuclear reactor that produces more fissile material than it consumes. During the high point of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo, dreams of energy independence were pinned on the success of the breeder, which President Richard Nixon described in 1973 as “our highest priority target for nuclear research and development.”
The Union Struggle for Safety
As Kerr-McGee faced pressure to fulfill its contracts with the government, the plant began to cut corners on worker training. Required radiation training went from forty hours to just twenty-four — and even then, new personnel often began work without any training whatsoever. Silkwood saw this dangerous combination of a high turnover rate, lax regard for safety, and the handling of a dangerous substance as a recipe for disaster. Karl Z. Morgan, a pioneer in the field of medical physics, described the Cimarron facility as among the worst he had ever seen, betraying a “wanton disregard for the health and safety of its employees.”
Silkwood was especially alarmed by the inadequate training workers received. If inhaled, minute particles of plutonium can cause cancer, yet the word “cancer” was nowhere to be found in any corporate training material. Until Silkwood helped arrange a visit by two plutonium experts a month before she died, many plant workers did not realize that the material they handled was one of the world’s most powerful carcinogens.
“From human experience to date, we have nothing to worry about,” explained the plant’s former manager — a statement deliberately intended to reassure workers who were unaware of cancer’s latency period. By the time Silkwood became seriously contaminated — her home was found to have radioactive traces the week before her fatal car accident — she was quite worried. She feared she would die of cancer or have children born with severe disabilities. She even collected her used menstrual pads in hopes that Los Alamos scientists could analyze their radioactivity.
But Silkwood’s campaign, like those of many whistleblowers, was not purely altruistic. Her activism was also a labor tactic. As one of the three workers on her union’s collective bargaining committee — and the first woman to hold the position in the male-dominated workforce — Silkwood was deeply involved in union efforts.
As happened in many unionized workplaces in the 1970s, the Cimarron facility faced a decertification drive — an employee-initiated, management-supported effort to kick out the union. And anti-union sentiments were highest in the laboratory where she worked, where many of her coworkers resented her bitterly and considered her activism a running joke.
With the support of the Washington, DC–based leadership of her union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), Silkwood undertook what was to be a multipart plan. First, to fend off the decertification election, the union would prove its value through an education drive that highlighted the hazards of plutonium exposure and Kerr-McGee’s strategic campaign of ignorance.
Once the union narrowly avoided decertification, Silkwood was responsible for phase two of the plan: accumulating documentation that Kerr-McGee falsified quality-control records. The union hoped that the publicity surrounding these records would be “an exclusive bombshell to drop on the company” amid negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement.
Retaliatory Tactics
To some, these facts might make Silkwood less like a hero and more like a tactician focused on securing a better union contract. But we should avoid fixating on her supposed personal motives. A focus on the character attributes of a truth-teller rather than the context from which they emerge not only runs counter to the concept of whistleblowing — which is fundamentally about the disclosure of information that serves the public interest — but also plays into the hands of a retaliatory management.
This is why the most powerful whistleblower protection laws afford confidentiality. A boss has a harder time retaliating if he doesn’t know who blew the whistle, and an anonymous complaint keeps the focus on the behavior of the employer.
Karen Silkwood’s death eliminated the need for Kerr-McGee to use typical retaliatory tactics like dismissal, transfer, or blacklisting. Instead, it gave management free rein to engage in the most damaging form of retaliation: attacking a whistleblower’s credibility so as to divert from the unwanted questions she raises. Misogyny is a timeless tool for diminishing a woman’s credibility.
Because Silkwood died, she could not respond when Kerr-McGee suggested that she had been a drug addict who smuggled plutonium in her vagina, slept around, and abandoned her kids. When Silkwood’s family filed a lawsuit against Kerr-McGee, these insinuations became more overt in depositions.
In 1977, when corporate lawyers questioned Silkwood’s family and friends in sworn testimony, Kerr-McGee’s lawyer asked Silkwood’s father, “Did she ever become hysterical?” The same attorney probed Silkwood’s boyfriend: “Do you think Karen may have been what medical science classifies as a nymphomaniac?” The answer to both questions was “no.”
Bosses’ “Nuts and Sluts” Subterfuge
The flagrant misogyny of Kerr-McGee’s efforts at character assassination shouldn’t obscure the broader power dynamics at play. Retaliation against whistleblowers like Silkwood often appears to be an expression of revenge but is, in reality, a strategic way for management to discredit a whistleblower as troublesome and to discipline the workforce. By framing a complaint as resulting from an individual’s emotional disturbance rather than systemic corruption, employers shift attention away from structural issues and onto a whistleblower’s credibility.
Retaliation is fundamentally an affirmation of power, demonstrating the harm to one’s reputation, career, family, and sense of security that awaits those who confront authority. Although sexism was especially vivid in the Silkwood case, men who resist unethical and illegal workplace practices are also subject to these dynamics.
Indeed, dismissal, demotion, transfer, and blacklisting can be understood as techniques of emasculation insofar as work enables a man to provide for his family — and also highlights his dependence upon his bosses. Employment lawyers call these techniques of diversion the “nuts and sluts” strategy: casting doubt upon the message by focusing attention upon the messenger.
With this strategy, employers always have the upper hand, leveraging the real emotional toll of retaliation — which not infrequently results in depression, divorce, unemployment, and even suicide — as further evidence to undermine whistleblowers. John Barrett, a longtime quality-control manager at Boeing who publicly blew the whistle on defects on the Dreamliner, described the tension created by the hostile environment he faced at work and his efforts to concentrate on airplane safety.
“It has taken a serious mental and emotional toll on me,” Barrett said. “But you know I want to try very hard to keep the focus on the safety of the airplane. That’s what my story is about.” Barrett died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in March of 2024 during his deposition for a suit he brought against Boeing for wrongful termination.
Whistleblowers Are Workers Too
In the next four years, many more lives will likely be devastated by retaliatory power. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to radically roll back environmental, health, and consumer protection rules and has expressed a desire to strip civil service protections from tens of thousands of civil servants, and he will very likely continue his long-standing pattern of brazen corruption. As a result, whistleblowing is poised to become even more of a defining feature of Trump’s second term than it was during his first — a term bookended by women who accused him of wrongdoing and were sexualized and shamed for their testimony.
If and when whistleblowers emerge, Trump’s opponents should avoid the trap of focusing on their personal character — something they failed to do last time. After former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the January 6 Committee, Trump tweeted a broadside against her character (“total phony”) and her knowledge (“bullshit artist”). “This girl,” Trump later said in an interview with Newsmax, has “got serious problems, let me put it that way,” adding, “mental problems.” After her testimony, the former president and his allies floated stories attacking her character to Trump-allied media.
Meanwhile, Trump’s enemies rushed in to defend Hutchinson’s character. Republican representative Liz Cheney pointed out that many of Hutchinson’s “superiors, men many years older,” were “hiding behind executive privilege, anonymity and intimidation,” but “her bravery and patriotism were awesome to behold.”
Democratic House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi reflected, “It was almost angelic to see her with the confidence and the clarity of message, the clear patriotism.” Pelosi called Hutchinson “a gift to our country.”
Many more Americans can conjure up an image of Hutchinson’s youthful beauty, her resolute posture and crisp white blazer, than can recall the details of her testimony and their significance. (Among many other things, she testified that despite knowing his supporters were armed, Trump wanted them to march to the Capitol because “they’re not here to hurt me.”)
While the desire to lionize a truth-teller — especially one who has experienced life-threatening retaliation from the most powerful forces on Earth — is understandable, it risks reducing them to symbols rather than addressing the crucial role they play. It is an unstable basis for an enduring politics that takes whistleblowers seriously for what they are: labor activists whose jobs afford them a view into domains where employers hold nearly unchecked power.
On the fiftieth anniversary of Karen Silkwood’s death, we should honor her legacy by strengthening whistleblower protections while we still can. This means moving beyond character-driven narratives and recognizing whistleblowers not as sinners or saints, but as workers trying to improve their workplaces for themselves, and for all of us too.
20 Years After His Death, Gary Webb’s Truth Is Still Dangerous
December 30, 2024
Source: FAIR
Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide, following a stretch of depression. The subject of the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power.
Journalist Gary Webb (1955–2004)
In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News (8/18–20/96) that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s words, “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans across the country.
But Webb’s revelations should hardly have been a newsflash. As FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (10/21/14) noted in a 2014 dispatch, the CIA was informed
as early as September 1981 that a major branch of the Contra “leadership had made a decision to engage in drug-smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations,” according to the CIA inspector general’s report.
Not that the CIA was any stranger to drug-running—as indicated by, inter alia, a 1993 op-ed appearing in the New York Times (12/3/93) under the headline “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency.” The essay traced CIA ties to narco-trafficking back to the Korean War, while the Vietnam War reportedly saw heroin from a refining lab in Laos “ferried out on the planes of the CIA’s front airline, Air America.” The piece went on to emphasize that “nowhere…was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan” during the Afghan/Soviet war of 1979 to 1989.
In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News (8/18–20/96) that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s words, “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans across the country.
But Webb’s revelations should hardly have been a newsflash. As FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (10/21/14) noted in a 2014 dispatch, the CIA was informed
as early as September 1981 that a major branch of the Contra “leadership had made a decision to engage in drug-smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations,” according to the CIA inspector general’s report.
Not that the CIA was any stranger to drug-running—as indicated by, inter alia, a 1993 op-ed appearing in the New York Times (12/3/93) under the headline “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency.” The essay traced CIA ties to narco-trafficking back to the Korean War, while the Vietnam War reportedly saw heroin from a refining lab in Laos “ferried out on the planes of the CIA’s front airline, Air America.” The piece went on to emphasize that “nowhere…was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan” during the Afghan/Soviet war of 1979 to 1989.
Decade-long suppression of evidence
Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97): “Besides self-serving denials, journalistic critics of the Mercury News offered little to rebut the paper’s specific pieces of evidence.”
And yet, in spite of such established reality, Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR’s Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97). The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself—as in “CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy” (11/16/96), one of the examples cited by Solomon—which is kind of like saying that the bear investigated the sticky goo on his paws and determined that he was not the one who got into the honeypot. In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times (12/19/97) reassured readers that the “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.”
As Solomon argued, “The elite media’s attacks on the series were clearly driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the Contra-cocaine story—involving a decade-long suppression of evidence” (Extra!, 7/87; see also 3–4/88). Time and again, the nation’s leading media outlets had buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links; Naureckas (10/21/14) pointed out that the Washington Post
ignored Robert Parry and Brian Barger’s groundbreaking AP article (12/20/85), which first revealed the involvement of Contras in drug-running, and then failed to follow up as smaller papers reported on Contra-related cocaine traffic in their backyards (In These Times, 8/5/87).
As a senior Time magazine editor acknowledged to a staff writer whose 1987 story on Contra-related cocaine traffic was ultimately scrapped (Extra!, 11/91) : “Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.”
‘Hospitable to the most bizarre rumors’
In addition to attacking Webb, many media commentators took care to suggest that the reason Black Americans were so up in arms over the Mercury News series was that they were simply prone to conspiracy theories and paranoia. In October 1996, for instance, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/96) declared pompously that “a piece of Black America remains hospitable to the most bizarre rumors and myths—the one about the CIA and crack being just one.” Bizarre, indeed, that Black folks might be not so trusting of the government in a country founded on, um, slavery—where to this day, racist persecution remains standard operating procedure rather than rumor.
Furthermore, much of the CIA’s behavior over the years beats any conspiracy theory hands down. The agency’s mind-control program MKUltra comes to mind, which operated from 1953 until the early 1960s and entailed administering drugs like LSD to people in twisted and psychologically destructive experiments. Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, described in an interview with NPR (11/20/20) how MKUltra
was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.
In 2012, NBC News reported on a lawsuit against the US federal government by the “sons of a Cold War scientist who plunged to his death in 1953 several days after unwittingly taking LSD in a CIA mind-control experiment.” In short, who needs conspiracy theories when you have the CIA?
And yet, in spite of such established reality, Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR’s Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97). The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself—as in “CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy” (11/16/96), one of the examples cited by Solomon—which is kind of like saying that the bear investigated the sticky goo on his paws and determined that he was not the one who got into the honeypot. In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times (12/19/97) reassured readers that the “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.”
As Solomon argued, “The elite media’s attacks on the series were clearly driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the Contra-cocaine story—involving a decade-long suppression of evidence” (Extra!, 7/87; see also 3–4/88). Time and again, the nation’s leading media outlets had buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links; Naureckas (10/21/14) pointed out that the Washington Post
ignored Robert Parry and Brian Barger’s groundbreaking AP article (12/20/85), which first revealed the involvement of Contras in drug-running, and then failed to follow up as smaller papers reported on Contra-related cocaine traffic in their backyards (In These Times, 8/5/87).
As a senior Time magazine editor acknowledged to a staff writer whose 1987 story on Contra-related cocaine traffic was ultimately scrapped (Extra!, 11/91) : “Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.”
‘Hospitable to the most bizarre rumors’
In addition to attacking Webb, many media commentators took care to suggest that the reason Black Americans were so up in arms over the Mercury News series was that they were simply prone to conspiracy theories and paranoia. In October 1996, for instance, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/96) declared pompously that “a piece of Black America remains hospitable to the most bizarre rumors and myths—the one about the CIA and crack being just one.” Bizarre, indeed, that Black folks might be not so trusting of the government in a country founded on, um, slavery—where to this day, racist persecution remains standard operating procedure rather than rumor.
Furthermore, much of the CIA’s behavior over the years beats any conspiracy theory hands down. The agency’s mind-control program MKUltra comes to mind, which operated from 1953 until the early 1960s and entailed administering drugs like LSD to people in twisted and psychologically destructive experiments. Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, described in an interview with NPR (11/20/20) how MKUltra
was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.
In 2012, NBC News reported on a lawsuit against the US federal government by the “sons of a Cold War scientist who plunged to his death in 1953 several days after unwittingly taking LSD in a CIA mind-control experiment.” In short, who needs conspiracy theories when you have the CIA?
Connecting the dots
Peter Hart (FAIR.org, 5/20/13): “If accountability for genocide is an important value, then it would stand to reason that US media would pay some attention to a genocide that our own government facilitated.”
The question remains, however, as to why Webb underwent such a vicious assault when, at the end of the day, Contra drug-running was no more nefarious than anything else Washington was up to in the Americas. Objectively speaking, reports of the infliction of “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaraguan civilians should have raised the same alarms, and prompted as extreme an establishment backlash, as narco-activity by CIA mercenaries. Plus, the whole Iran/Contra scandal should have already alerted Americans to their government’s propensity for lying—not to mention violating its own laws.
Around the same time that the US was enabling Contra crimes, of course, it was also backing genocide in Guatemala, facilitating mass slaughter by the right-wing Salvadoran military and allied paramilitary groups, and nurturing Battalion 316, “a CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s”—as the Baltimore Sun (6/13/95) put it. In December 1989, the US went about bombing the living daylights out of the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo, killing up to several thousand civilians and earning the area the moniker “Little Hiroshima.”
While Contra drug-running thus cohered just fine with imperial foreign policy, it seems that Webb’s fundamental crime was connecting the dots between US-backed wars on civilians abroad and the US war on its own domestic population, which continues to disproportionately target Black communities. After all, under capitalism, all men are not created equal, and the institutionalized overlap of racial and socioeconomic inequality partially explains why African Americans have a lower life expectancy than whites—and how we’ve ended up in a situation in which white police officers regularly shoot unarmed Black people.
But there we go again with those “bizarre” conspiracy theories.
Now, two decades after Webb’s death, the US government obviously hasn’t managed to kick the habit of wreaking lethal havoc at home and abroad—including in the Gaza Strip, where US funding of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has been accompanied by a calculated media campaign to obscure reality. Rather than speak truth to power, journalists have lined up to faithfully spout one untruth after another on power’s behalf, rendering themselves effectively complicit in genocide itself. And as the major outlets trip over each other to toe the establishment line, the corporate media is more of a conspiracy than ever.
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