CONFLICT SUMMARIES
The love relationship between Henry and Claire develops through these six inter-aggravating conflicts:
I. Roberta Wiley’s Murder:
Roberta Wiley, public relations director for the Jefferson Academy, was responsible for arranging travel plans for Nelson Rockefeller, Barbara Tuchman, Barry Commoner, and the other honored guests of the Jefferson Academy's first National Issues Conference.
The morning the conference is to begin, Henry Tilghman finds her meditating on the dock at a lake on the Jefferson’s Academy’s grounds outside Charlottesville, Virginia. When he attempts to confront her, he finds that Roberta is dead. Strangled! Stunned, Henry copies the strange pictogram on her body—perhaps it will help him determine who murdered her. When he reports his discovery to his boss, Raymond Paige, Mr. Paige persuades him to alter his story to protect the Jefferson Academy and its history-making conference. By doing this, he also makes himself the primary suspect in Roberta’s bizarre murder.
Henry’s situation drastically deteriorates when Claire Fox arrives. Claire’s boss (and lover) is partisan media mogul Martin Ogden, publisher of The Washington Post. Ogden has sent his ambitious—and beautiful—protégé to determine whether Paige is planning to run for President—and to help him sabotage Paige’s prospects. Paige avoids the trap by handing Claire over to his aide. Now it is up to Henry to keep the enemy’s prying agent from discovering the weird circumstances surrounding Roberta’s murder.
It takes no time for Claire to discover Henry’s secrets, and his doom seems certain. Ironically, it is Martin Ogden who saves him. Ogden does this by proving to Claire what everyone else already knows—he is an abusive bastard! Cut suddenly adrift, Claire begins working with Henry to determine the significance of the ox skull emblem on Roberta’s body. It is the same as the one in the frieze on Thomas Jefferson’s mantle! What does Tertium Datur mean? And what is the connection between Thomas Jefferson, Tim Hardin, and his Aquarian Revolution? As Claire and Henry pursue the hidden truth, she understands that it is not just Henry Tilghman’s life that hangs in the balance. So do the future nation and all social order!
II. Raymond Paige’s Undeclared Presidential Campaign:
Raymond Paige is one of the most illustrious graduates of the University of Virginia’s prestigious Law School. He completed his degree in time to join Naval Intelligence and serve at the end of World War Two. When the war ended, he moved to Wall Street where he was a partner at Lehman Brothers. During two decades of investment banking, he substantially enlarged his family’s vast fortune. He then retired to an estate near the home of Thomas Jefferson.
For the next seven years, Mr. Paige was content breeding prize-winning Angus cattle. But by 1974, he was tired of gentleman farming. That was when he answered an inner call and founded the Jefferson Academy. His plan was to reinvigorate the nation his grandfather had helped transform into the greatest in the world. Like his grandfather a century before, Ray Paige intended to raise the American flag and lead the charge. The fate of a divided nation again hung in the balance. This time, however, the charge would not be made by the Army of the Potomac against entrenched Confederates. Paige would deploy the forces of Faith and Reason to defend the Common Good against the Anti-Christ and his fiendish agents.
III. Tim Hardin’s Aquarian Revolution:
Tim Hardin, founder and director of the Committee for an Open Society, is the leader of an emerging new society the press calls “Woodstock Nation.” Hardin’s mission is to abolish the government instituted by America’s privileged founding fathers and replace it with the egalitarian system Thomas Jefferson framed in his long-lost constitution. The cognoscenti in Hardin’s circle know this document as “Burr’s Unicorn”.
Glib, self-assured, and charismatic, Hardin is the darling of America’s media whose far-seeing visionaries are heralds of the time when all will be equal and care for one another. Hardin prepared himself to create this utopia studying Sociology at Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation, “The Cultural Barriers to an Open Society”, allows him to speak persuasively about leveling society through redistribution of the nation’s wealth. To accomplish this humanitarian objective, Hardin must retrieve Burr’s Unicorn. Before vanishing into thin air, Hardin’s mercurial lieutenant, Fred Ried, reportedly sent the document back to Thomas Jefferson!
IV. Francis Rank’s Women People’s Revolution:
Frances Rank, President the United Women-People of the Earth, is leading the daughters of Gaia to sever all bonds with Man-society. Her objective is to establish a new Woman-nation under the constitution written by Jefferson’s enslaved mulatto sister-in-law, Sally Hemings. Rank’s senior aide in this crusade is Ashanti Shoate’, Professor of Black History at the University of Virginia and the world’s foremost authority on Jefferson’s enslaved concubine.
Rank has chosen the opening ceremony of the Jefferson Academy’s issues conference to declare the independence of women-people from man-society and to demand reparations for the injustice suffered by women-people since Atlantis sank into the sea. Not only will women-people be free from the covenants of man-society, Rank vows they will also cease to obey the Law of the Excluded Middle. Tertium Datur!
V. William O. Douglas’s Communitarian Revolution:
William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, has labored four decades to manufacture a society he prefers. His partner in this great utilitarian rebellion is Martin Ogden, elitist and publisher of The Washington Post. Douglas has conducted his revolution from the cloistered chambers of the nation’s highest court. Ogden has supported it in the pages of his influential newspaper and in the Georgetown salons where the nation’s intelligentsia commune. What is it these self-sequestering giants are rebelling against? Wealth and privilege!
It is now September of 1975, and Douglas is preparing to retire. Through the untiring efforts of Ogden and his allies in the press, the American people have been conditioned to reject the predatory property system Alexander Hamilton instituted at the birth of the republic. Douglas will soon present its communitarian replacement, which he has gleaned through years studying the writings of Thomas Jefferson, the Father of Human Rights. As he prepares for the final victory, Douglas is stunned to learn that his protégé, Tim Hardin, plans to unveil a plan that will destroy everything he has devoted his life to accomplish.
VI. The Battle for Fred Ried’s Albemarle Green Marijuana
Fred Ried is an alumnus of the conservation camp William O. Douglas conducted in the Cascade Mountains of Washington in the early-1960s. That is where he met Tim Hardin and Bo Bildner. He and Bildner went on to serve with distinction in Vietnam War, where they developed valuable skills destroying things. Since then, Ried has learned how to crossbreed the marijuana plants he brought back from Indochina with coca plants he retrieved from the Andes Mountains of Peru. A crew of entrepreneurial counter-culturals is now harvesting his first full crop. It will be worth a fortune in Woodstock Nation. More valuable still are the Albemarle Green seeds. Paige’s son is plotting to get them. Is Aster Paige’s weird companion his real competition?
