Gordon Thomas > Quotes

“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.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake

“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.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“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.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“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.”
― Gordon Thomas, Gideon's Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service

“There were, to be sure, several on-the-spot executions of looters the first day”—surely a curious denial of the constitutional right to be judged innocent until convicted. Others, conceding that what was done was illegal, have tried to rationalize the killings as no more than what might be expected of hard-pressed soldiers doing a thankless job. But the citizens of San Francisco were under equal stress, and their panic might have caused them to do many things which would have appeared criminal under normal circumstances. Perhaps they deserve understanding more than the soldiers. There has also been a determined attempt to reduce the actual number of killings to a mere handful—and to maintain that in any case, the deaths were those of villains nobody would miss.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“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.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“than twenty-eight thousand buildings destroyed. Many of those buildings were homes. Whole communities had been decimated.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“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.”
― Gordon Thomas, Enola Gay: Mission to Hiroshima

“Oppenheimer remembered a line from the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred epic of the Hindus. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” The”
― Gordon Thomas, Enola Gay: Mission to Hiroshima

“No man actually owns a fortune; it owns him.”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“Finally, in March 1909, a new civic administration permitted publication of The Citizens’ Health Committee Report on Eradicating Plague from San Francisco. Only a handful of people ever knew of the report’s existence. “Instead of being confronted by a united authority with intelligent plans for defense, it [the plague] found divided forces among which the question of its presence became the subject of factional dispute. There was often popular hostility to the work of the sanitarians, and war among the City, State, and Federal health authorities.” The”
― Gordon Thomas, The San Francisco Earthquake: A Minute-by-Minute Account of the 1906 Disaster

“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:”
― Gordon Thomas, Enola Gay: Mission to Hiroshima

“A locker in the first-class writing room containing, among other things, spare jackets for the stewards and waiters, was a perfect site for an incendiary bomb. The locker was immediately below the false ceiling to which the line-throwing Lyle gun and twenty-five pounds of dangerous explosives had been moved. Rogers himself had watched the seamen dump gun and powder barrel into the space between the false ceiling and the deck. The gunpowder would make a perfect trailer. Another trailer was even closer at hand. Near the radio room were two gasoline tanks, used to run the transmitting equipment. It would be a simple matter to uncouple the feed line, allowing the gas to trickle down the deck. Night watchman Arthur Pender, who passed only a few feet from the tanks, smelled a strong odor of gasoline, which he did not report to the bridge, thinking the smell must be the result of late cleaning on the eve of the ship’s arrival in port. If Pender had reported it, even a cursory investigation might have revealed the preparations for sabotage. But he did not. In his investigations Captain George Seeth—who knew well both the Morro Castle and Rogers—suggested how Rogers probably placed his bomb: “Nobody would be surprised to see a radio officer in the writing room. Rogers or one of his staff frequently took messages to passengers, and walking through the writing room was a short cut from their shack. “Again, nobody would have been surprised if Rogers had gone to the locker itself. He would have had a ready excuse to say he was looking for a piece of paper to scribble down a message a passenger had just given him for transmission.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“First Officer William Warms had given the order. It is almost certain there would have been no fire drill if Captain Robert Wilmott had been in full command. Warms’s order directly contradicted a policy the master of the Morro Castle first instituted on June 16, 1934. On that day—in violation of the seaworthy certificate issued by the government’s Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection, and at the risk of endangering the lives of everybody on board—Captain Wilmott had banned all further fire drills. His order could lay him open to prosecution, imprisonment, and the certain loss of his master’s license. Confronted by the classic dilemma of the company man, Wilmott had acted in what he believed to be the Ward Line’s best interests. The basis for his decision was simple. In May 1934, during a fire drill, a woman passenger had fallen on a deck wet down by a leaking joint connection between a fire hose and its hydrant. She fractured an ankle and hired a good lawyer, and the Ward Line settled out of court for twenty-five thousand dollars. Captain Wilmott, after a visit to the shipping line office, ordered the Morro Castledeck fire hydrants capped and sealed; 2100 feet of fire hose was locked away, along with nozzles, outlets, and wrenches for each length of hose. Whether the captain received positive instructions from an executive of the Ward Line, or whether he acted independently, is not known, nor is it important. What is known is that as a result of Wilmott’s order, the pride of the American merchant marine, one of the fastest and most luxurious liners afloat, became from that moment on, a floating fire hazard in all but its cargo holds. If a fire started in any of the passenger areas, the only pieces of equipment readily available to fight it were seventy-three half-gallon portable fire extinguishers and twenty-one carbon tetrachloride extinguishers.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Chief Engineer Eban Abbott was about to dress for dinner when the engine room called. Assistant Engineer Antonio Bujia reported that one of the battery of fire boilers had a fuel blockage.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“The circle between Madison Avenue and Wall Street was complete; they were inexorably linked, in a relationship developed in ten short years, during which the ad men had created an ambience invaluable to the continuing popularity of stock speculation. The limitless, desirable, and expensive goods coming onto the market—often products of companies quoted on the Stock Exchange—could only be sold by determined advertising campaigns. If those campaigns failed, the market would slump. To maintain his place in consumer society, a man was told he needed a car, radio, icebox, and refrigerator; his wife required a washing machine, automatic furnace, and one of the modish pastel-hued toilets. To complete their domestic bliss they would have the latest in bathrooms: a shrine of stunning magnificence, containing, among other items, “a dental lavatory of vitreous china, twice fired.” To buy it would cost the average American six months’ salary. But paying was no problem; there were the installment plans. It was also part of the advertising philosophy that it was no longer enough to buy a car, radio, or refrigerator. People must have the latest model—junking the old one, even though it was still useful. Failure to do so would cause factories to close from the Atlantic to the Pacific, ending what some newspapers called “the golden era.” To protect it, they told their readers, was the patriotic duty of every American; one way to express that was, “to buy until it hurts.”
― Gordon Thomas, The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929

“By Christmas 1934, over three hundred claims totaling $1,-250,000 had been filed against the Ward Line by survivors and relatives of the dead. The Ward Line asked the federal court to limit the total of any single claim to $20,000 and offered $250,000 as a full and final settlement. Lawyers for the line based their case on the “limited liability” law that had been on the statute books since 1851. The 1851 law was clear that in the event of disaster, “only by proving the owners to have possessed knowledge of the unseaworthiness of the vessel or the inadequacy of the crew before sailing,” could passengers collect.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“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.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“It’s in that locker!” Campbell shouted. Opening the locker, he saw a mass of flames inside. Quickly, he slammed shut the door, blistering his hands in the process. Both men turned and ran from the room to raise the alarm. As they ran, they passed a fire extinguisher placed on the wall near the writing-room door. It was the first mistake by members of a crew poorly trained in fire drills, rescue operations, or virtually any crisis. If Campbell and Ryan had turned that extinguisher on the fire at once it might have made a critical difference. Three vital minutes passed before Clarence Hackney arrived with his fire extinguisher. He yanked open the locker door and a wall of flame rushed out. Hackney backed off and emptied his extinguisher into it, but it was a waste of time—a dozen extinguishers could not have contained the inferno now raging around the locker.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Gottlieb told the meeting he was convinced that “successful brainwashing” was rooted in the use of drugs: LSD, mescaline, cocaine, or even nicotine. He did not yet know which one — “but it had to be something like that.” He reminded them that all over the United States in research centers — Boston Psychiatric; the University of Illinois Medical School, Mount Sinai and Columbia University in New York, the University of Oklahoma, the Addiction Research Center at Lexington, Kentucky, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester, among others — researchers were running projects funded by the CIA to try to prove his theory.”
― Gordon Thomas, Secrets & Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control & germ Warfare

“Over dinner Sargant told Buckley the purpose of their visit was to collect the results of the latest tests in which terminal cancer patients at St.Thomas’ Hospital in London had been injected with two rare viruses: the deadly Langat virus and the even more lethal Kyasanur Forest Disease virus. These patients had no idea they were being used as medical guinea pigs. The viruses were being considered as possible biological weapons. The tests had ended with the death of all the patients. In addition to their cancers, they had contracted encephalitis. Dr. Sargant was to collect the paperwork on the autopsies carried out at Porton Down; Buckley was to take the material back to Dr. Gottlieb.”
― Gordon Thomas, Secrets & Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control & germ Warfare

“The seamen who dumped gun and powder barrel into the hiding place Hackney had found carried the apparatus past the wireless room. When Chief Radio Officer George Rogers stopped them to ask what they were doing, they told him the purpose of their mission. He expressed interest, saying he never knew the space existed.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Those millions of sales represented a loss in share value on the New York Exchange alone of some $10 billion. That was twice the amount of currency in circulation in the entire country at the time. Eventually, the total lost in the financial pandemic would be put at a staggering $50 billion—all stemming from a virus that proved fatal on October 29, 1929: the day the bubble burst.”
― Gordon Thomas, The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929

“At 2:51 A.M. student engineer Tripp wrote in his log: “Night watchman Foersch reported to captain that he had just seen and smelled smoke coming out of one of the small ventilators on the port after side of the fiddley.” The fiddley was a galvanized-iron duct supplying fresh air to the first-class writing room on B deck, among other rooms.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“The Morro Castle traveled 3.1 miles head on into the storm at a speed of 18.8 knots for over ten minutes. In that time, the wind, gusting at over 20 knots, had acted as a giant bellows, fanning and speeding the flames the length of the ship.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“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.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“brown shoes,”
― Gordon Thomas, Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

“solution to the situation; there was every possibility that it might also reflect Batista’s wishes. He had quickly accepted the proposal—with one important proviso. He argued that it would be an act of good faith on the part of the Cuban government to allow the passengers”
― Gordon Thomas, Voyage of the Damned: A Shocking True Story of Hope, Betrayal, and Nazi Terror

“Regulations governing the sending of distress signals at sea are strict: no SOS can be sent without the express order of the captain. But the rules also allow an operator some leeway. It would have been proper for Rogers to have sent a message such as “Fire on Morro Castle off New Jersey. Awaiting orders from bridge.” Such a message would have alerted the outside world. No one could later have criticized such a course of action, confirming the Luckenbach’s sighting a serious fire through ten miles of rain. While it was not a formal SOS, it would nevertheless have been a standby call for help. And the time to send it was now. At 3:15 a.m. the mandatory “listening-out” period for all radio operators at sea began. Instead of a distress signal, Rogers sent: “Standby. DE KGOV.” KGOV was the call sign of the Morro Castle.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“On December 3, 1934, the grand jury handed out indictments. Accused of willful negligence were Acting Captain William Warms, Chief Engineer Eban Abbott, and Ward Line vice-president Henry E. Cabaud. In the preamble to the charges against Warms, the indictment declared: “Members of the crew were without discipline and did not know what to do, and the passengers were left to help themselves; the passengers in large numbers were pushed into the water or jumped in the water or perished in the fire.” Warms was accused specifically of failing to observe the law in ten matters:
1. To divide the sailors in equal watches. 2. To keep himself advised of the extent of the fire. 3. To maneuver, slow down, or stop the vessel. 4. To have the passengers aroused. 5. To provide the passengers with life preservers. 6. To take steps for the protection of lives. 7. To organize the crew to fight the fire properly. 8. To send distress signals promptly. 9. To see that the passengers were put in lifeboats and that the lifeboats were lowered. 10. To control and direct the crew in the lifeboats after the lifeboats had been lowered.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle