Conspiracy?

IT IS a bizarre story. Just before duck on a November day in 1974. Karen Silkwood was killed on her way to meet a New York Times reporter. She had said she was bringing evidence which would prove that her employer, the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation, was manufacturing defective plutonium fuel rods, but her car went out of control on a lonely stretch of Oklahoman highway and the documents never arrived. Only a few days earlier, she had been contaminated by eating and inhaling plutonium, which AEC investigators concluded was deliberately placed in her apartment.

Few people had ever heard of Karen Silkwood on that fatal winter day, but over the next five years her death sparked rallies and candlelight processions in New York, Chicago, St. Petersburg and Cleveland. A symbol for the feminists, the environmentalists, and the labor movement, her name was shouted at Seabrook and invoked in union halls. In 1979, when a federal court jury found Kerr-McGee guilty of negligience and awarded the Silkwood estate $10.5 million in damages, her picture made the front pages of papers across the nation. She became what Richard Rashke calls "a nuclear martyr."

The ultimate tragedy of stories like Silkwood's lie in their very appeal. Crucified for a popular cause, crowned with a garland of public approval, these "martyrs" ascend into the realm of legend. Their names become watchwords for the faithful, but the details of their struggles are lost in political rhetoric and strife. Their stories are invoked without being remembered, and many who write about them sensationalize--relying solely on an inherent emotional appeal to those who do not wish to believe. Such works are often dismissed as propaganda.

The title and opening chapter of Rashke's The Killing of Karen Silkwood suggest that he too has been seduced by this temptation, but the remaining 400 pages bely this initial impression. The book's greatest strength lies in that Rashke is a rusader but he is not afraid of facts. Shunning the emotional, he explores in depth the allegations and evidence on all sides of the Silkwood saga. What emerges is a clear and well-documented case, which strongly suggests that Silkwood's death was not purely accidental, and that the cover-up involved not only Kerr-McGee and the AEC, but the FBI and perhaps even the Justice Department itself, Rashke does not draw a final conclusion, because as he notes, all the evidence is not yet in.

Drawing on his experience as an investigative reporter. Rashke carries the reader though the early years of Silkwood's life, the months she spent at Kerr-McGee, the FBI and Senate hearings that followed her death, and ultimately the battle in federal court. He describes her married and personal life, her use of prescribed quaaludes as a sedative, and her leading role in the fight for union represenation at Kerr-McGee's Cimarron plant. All of these factors become important later, when Rashke examines company and FBI portrayals of Silkwood as an emotionally disturbed, sexually promiscuous drug addict, who poisoned herself with plutionium to make the company look bad.

No one can quarrel with Rashke's research. His information comes from over 25,000 pages of trial transcripts and pretrial depositions, FBI reports and Congressional hearings. He conducted scores of interviews and "created" none of his dialogue.

And all of his evidence points in one direction: Kerr McGee was grossly neglig ent in its handling of the plutonium. Plant executives resented Silkwood's attempts to publicize the unsafe working conditions. Karen Silkwood was mentally competent, emotionally stable and awake on the November day when her white Honda slid across the road and crashed into a culvert. The investigations that followed were both cursory and inadequate. More tenuous but still plausible, is his contention that someone tried to prevent Silkwood from delivering her evidence, and inadvertently ran her off the road.

ODDLY ENOUGH, if Rashke has committed a fatal flaw in his book, it is in carrying this attribute too far. In his effort to sound authoritative, Rashke gets bogged down in miniscule details of little significance. Into a book already saturated with facts and figures, Rashke throws in the bills charged by wrecking companies years before, the shape and size of folders and notebooks, and the life histories of individuals Silkwood met for two hours. In a book devoid of details, these facts would add realism. Instead, they make Rashke's book read at times like a lawyer's brief or a set of raw detective notes.

Rashke sheds much new light on the Silkwood case, providing a clear and convincing agrement for further investigation. It is unfortunate that the forces the reader to wade through pages of extraneous detail and occasional highly technical descriptions. It is a tragedy that he gave the book the name he did. A hundred pages shorter with a title less bold sensational, his book might be read by those who mattered. As it is, it will probably be read only by those who are already converts to the Silkwood name.