Apr 29
This last Sunday on my show, I interviewed Lee Kessler, author of “White King and The Doctor”. For those of you who don’t get my email updates, let me get you up to speed on this fascinating individual:
Lee Kessler is a television actress, playwright, and stage director. Her career in Hollywood and New York spans 28 years and includes dozens of guest starring roles in episodic TV, mini-series and movies-of-the-week. She had re-occurring roles in the series “Hill Street Blues” and “Matlock,” and was submitted for Emmy nomination twice for her starring roles in the movie “Collision Course,” and the ABC special, “Which Mother Is Mine?” She also co-starred with Peter O’Toole in the movie “Creator.”
LEE KESSLER:
“Subsequent to the events of 9/11, I held the paradoxical hope that the devastation of that day might be the saving grace of our troubled country—that Americans would become more united. Instead, we have become more divided than at any point in my lifetime.
I asked myself what could be at work here? Was there possibly a “Fifth Column” in the United States whose purpose was to destroy our solidarity? A visit to the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” site revealed a provocative omission. I decided to probe it.
As a professional actress for nearly 30 years, who has had the opportunity to play historical figures, I challenged myself to figure out what the second-in-command of Al Qaeda was actually doing, and to see if his reach extended into the United States in ways we weren’t aware of.
It has been said we lacked imagination in the months and years preceding 9/11. Could I use imagination coupled with basic acting technology to unlock the mystery? I decided to try. Imagine that I did an exercise to create the back-story of Al Qaeda mastermind, Ayman Al-Zawahiri. In the process of discovering his driving motivation, I uncovered something so important that the outcome of the War on Terror depends upon it being known—something intelligence analysts, and the media analysts, appear to have missed.
And imagine that, as the events of 2003 and 2004 unfolded, all of my predictions and evaluations proved true. It seems I had “reconnected the dots” of current events. This is the picture that emerged, fictionalized in order to tell the story. It is fact, where the facts were known; and it is fiction where they were not—done to connect the people and events, and reveal a new picture.
What emerged is the story of “White King and the Doctor.”
At the risk of being involuntarily admitted to OBA (Over-Bloggers-Anonymous), I will share my insights thus far and thoughts about her book and the connection to real life in the world today in a separate blog.
Please do visit her website at: www.whitekingandthedoctor.com
You can get a signed copy of the book through that site. I personally think those copies will be worth some big bucks as the book (and the upcoming sequel) continues to grow in popularity and inevitably gets to the big screen.