Thanks to good luck and good connections, I got to write not one but two articles about The Conspirator, the new firm opening this week about the trial before a military tribunal of Mary Surratt, one of the alleged conspirators who joined with John Wilkes Booth to kill Abraham Lincoln and attack other high government officials. One of the pieces, assigned through old and new connections at the Times, introduced me to Joe Ricketts, the founder and former chairman of TD Ameritrade, who founded the company that underwrote the film, The American FIlm Company, and to James Solomon, the screenwriter who began the script 18 years ago. Congratulations to them both. It was great to be back in Arts & Leisure, and also to work once again with my former Us magazine colleague Kathy Heintzelman, now of Parade, who recruited me to interview the director of the film, Robert Redford, one of the very few people for whom phrases like `icon’ and `living legend’ actually seem like les mots juste. It was a pleasure to talk to him; I’m sorry our conversation last only an hour. One of his best comments was about the parallels between 
this post-Civil War period, when anger and grief over LIncoln’s assassination drove the government’s handling of the prosecution of the conspirators, and our current moment, when similar feelings about 9/11 seem to have dominated administration policy:
Obviously, I could see the parallels to the present, and I knew that this could be dangerous for me, because people see me as a liberal and might pigeonhole me and the film as having some partisan point of view. But I don’t feel that the political films I’ve made have been partisan criticisms of the left or right, but criticisms of the political process itself. I’m not inventing anything [about Mary Surratt’s trial]—I’m just putting a spotlight on it. The other factor for me, having experienced what I’ve experienced in my lifetime, is how could I not see patterns in our history? And one of the biggest patterns I’ve noticed is that whenever there’s chaos, there’s ambiguity, and where there’s ambiguity, there’s fear. And fear gets manipulated.