Quotes from Gordon Thomas

The Radiomarine Corporation's relationship with shipping lines was impersonal: it was essentially a powerful employment agency supplying specialist staff. A ship was forced to accept a radio operator assigned by the corporation. The corporation was responsible for checking a radioman's qualifications, but no check was ever made into a man's background.

Cabaud was charged with "willfully and knowingly causing and allowing the violations of the law" that Warms and Abbott were charged with.

In Washington, the Hoover Board of Inquiry found that negligence on the part of the two officers had caused the ship's destruction. In its summary, the board dismissed the possibility of arson: "Considerable testimony to the effect that explosions disconnected gas lines, infers this to be the cause. But in running down possibilities of malicious acts, nothing definite was revealed.

The verdicts in the criminal trial arising out of the Morro Castle disaster caused a new sensation. William Warms was sentenced to two years imprisonment; Eban Abbott received four years; Ward Line vice-president Henry E. Cabaud was fined five thousand dollars and given one year's suspended sentence.

In June 1936, George White Rogers joined the Bayonne police force. He was assigned as assistant to Vincent Doyle in the radio department.

Somebody on board wanted to kill him. No record exists of the exact moment Robert Wilmott, captain of the Morro Castle, a cruise liner shuttling between New York and Havana, Cuba, finally came to this conclusion. But by the time the ship docked in Havana on September 4, 1934, the captain had decided that somebody on board did want to kill him.

In San Francisco, two people actually saw the earthquake. Jesse Cook, the police sergeant on duty in the produce market, saw it a moment after he became aware of panic among the horses all around him. Years later Cook recalled: "There was a deep rumble, deep and terrible, and then I could see it actually coming up Washington Street. The whole street was undulating. It was as if the waves of the ocean were coming towards me, billowing as they came.

On the average, one thousand people settle on or near the San Andreas Fault each day. Nowhere in the United States is the density of population greater than in San Francisco and its environs. Nowhere is disregard of the danger more apparent.

The rubble of the 1906 disaster was pushed into the Bay; buildings were built on it. Those buildings will be among the most vulnerable when the next earthquake comes.

At 5:29:45, everything happened at once. But it was too fast for the watchers to distinguish: no human eye can separate millionths of a second; no human brain can record such a fraction of time. No one, therefore, saw the actual first flash of cosmic fire. What they saw was its dazzling reflection on surrounding hills. It was, in the words of the observer from The New York Times:

No man actually owns a fortune; it owns him.

At 5:29:45, everything happened at once. But it was too fast for the watchers to distinguish: no human eye can separate millionths of a second; no human brain can record such a fraction of time. No one, therefore, saw the actual first flash of cosmic fire. What they saw was its dazzling reflection on surrounding hills. It was, in the words of the observer from The New York Times: a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one.

Oppenheimer remembered a line from the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred epic of the Hindus. "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." The

bolt upright in bed, clutching at his nightshirt with both hands. To Hertz, the singer was in many ways a figure as pitiable as any he had ever portrayed on stage. The earthquake seemed to have visibly shrunk Caruso, "as if the cataclysmic terror had singled him out to obliterate his glory of the previous night; as if Providence had evil designs on him personally.

When Kwame Nkrumah, the pro-Chinese ruler of Ghana, was on a state visit to Beijing, Mossad orchestrated the uprising that led to both Nkrumah's overthrow and the destruction of the CSIS infrastructure in the country.

than twenty-eight thousand buildings destroyed. Many of those buildings were homes. Whole communities had been decimated.

Robert Wilmott, ponderously firm and earnest, lacked imagination. To the passengers aboard the Morro Castle, however, he was a public-relations press release come true, a dream of what a liner captain should be. He epitomized the advertised enchanted world of a sea cruise, in which there is no death or danger, where the seams between reality and magic are always caulked.

Robert Wilmott was responsible for no small part of the Morro Castle's success. Passengers frequently made sure that he was still in command of the ship before buying a ticket. He was the perfect ship's captain for passengers who had never been on anything bigger than the ferryboat to Staten Island.

But during the summer of 1934, a series of events had occurred which endangered not only the Morro Castle, but also her master. On July 29, a meal had been served that made Wilmott ill enough to suspect poisoning; on August 4 an attempted strike had threatened to wreck the liner's tight schedule; on August 27 a fire had started in a hold containing high explosives.

Meanwhile, in assessing responsibility for the attempted arson, murder, and strike action, Robert Wilmott had made one grave mistake. He suspected the wrong person.

Built with a low-interest government loan of $3,422,-181, the liner had been designed for conversion into a troop carrier in the event of war. But at no time had the Ward Line or its parent company, Atlantic Gulf and West Indies, ever informed the government that a vessel "certificated for ocean passenger service" was also going to be actively involved in gunrunning.

The Morro Castle was regularly engaged in a traffic in armaments. The shipments were used by the Cuban dictatorship of Gerardo Morales Machado to suppress a growing Communist influence on the island. There are strong indications that the shipments were organized by powerful U.S. business interests concerned about the threat Communist activities would pose to the handsome profits coming from Cuban tobacco and sugar.

Richard Whitney wrote his own requiem for the Crash. "A thing compounded of both wisdom and folly, of both heroism and fright, of stubborn persistence and impatient irresolution, of tragically shattered hopes and ambitions and of incongruous and unique episodes not without at times a certain humorous aspect.

Acting Captain Warms was still unaware that at least one lifeboat had been launched without his authority and that passengers were jumping into the sea. The calmness which a few hours before had impressed the purser and First Officer Freeman was gone.