Page 55 - ACTL Journal Win24

And that experience led her to write her international best seller, which takes its readers from London, 1593, three weeks before the murder of Christopher Marlowe, play- wright and spy in Queen Elizabeth I’s secret service – a crime that remains unsolved to this day – to present day New York City, where a Renaissance scholar turned pri- vate eye investigates a shocking heist and murder involv- ing a mysterious, antique manuscript recently unearthed in central London.
But, Leslie’s second point – that the historic truths that tore us apart in the early prime of the Boomer generation and are returning now to haunt us a half century later – is the important one. Leslie reminded us that we can ill afford to ignore lessons that we, as a nation, should have taken to heart fifty years ago.
The theme of history repeating itself arose from the sever- al rollercoaster months that Leslie spent working closely with her father in the last stages of his life. The two set out to co-author a book relating to Earl’s long-ago tenure as one of the first of the Watergate prosecutors, respon- sible for indicting the five inept burglars and their two co-conspirators, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, in 1972. Before Congress found itself in the throes of the
gut-wrenching decision-making associated with whether to impeach President Richard Nixon, the Department of Justice had embarked on the purportedly separate, but in truth related, task of prosecuting those involved in the notorious Watergate break-in. The prosecutions of such unknown and minor players as the Watergate “burglars” bore no clear-cut relation to the President, other than the inevitable undertone that intruding into the offices of the Democratic National Committee might have been mo- tivated by the desire to find something other than elec- tronics and petty cash. Earl Silbert was no fool: he and his colleagues gradually came to realize that the breadcrumbs might well lead to persons of far greater interest than com- mon burglars, who perhaps weren’t so common after all.
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