Archie and Marshall at The Examiner

Where we left off at the Examiner: Marshall had followed the hypnotized Ed Dooley to his cubicle (and led him to a conference room with a door) and discovers that Ed is desperate because he published the letter; the SHEG glyph tapped into his pre-existing need to get the Examiner ahead of the Chronicle and his need to break a sensational story. He published it without checking with the FBI or SFPD, even before any of the specific bomb information was confirmed to be accurate. This could easily get him fired. Marshall has Ed replicate the letter's envelope cover through a deep hypnotic trance; the envelope had no return address and a postmark from Pittsburg Calif. Marshall is deciding whether or not to fully brainwash him.

In the small meeting room near his cubicle, Ed Dooley is scared. He realizes what he's done, how he's endangered his career but still doesn't have a super firm grip on why he did it. He's not out-and-out crying anymore but he's visibly distraught. But Marshall still has a firm hold on him thanks to the initial hypnosis he did in the conference room.

Archie was trying to establish who exactly on the editorial board had been exposed to the SHEG glyph and had confirmed that it was the folks at the table (executive editor Thomas Eastham, publisher Charles Gould, heir and owner Randy Hearst, and news editor Ed Dooley). However, given the fact Ed already greenlit the publication of the letter, the command "Publish this exactly" had little to no effect on them. As Archie was doing this, a gentleman in a priest's cassock poked his head in and asked if they were talking about the letter.

Eastham says to Archie, "Oh, Mr. Ransom, this is our Religion Editor, the Reverend Lester Kinsolving." Kinsolving sits at the foot of the conference table and asks quite suddenly, "So is this about the letter claiming responsibility for the bombing?" Grim assents all around the editorial board.

The letter's definitely pulled, but the entire editorial board sort of leans in to hear what the Rev has to say. Archie remembers his name from an exposé last year about a religious sect out in Ukiah called Peoples Temple. Kinsolving was a crusader trying to expose the group as a dangerous cult. Rumor had it that Examiner brass stopped the final three articles in the series from fear of legal action from this group. And it is with this in mind that Kinsolving begins to for lack of a better phrase, fulminate from the pulpit right here in the conference room.

Kinsolving starts off quite quiet and measured, but he builds up quite a head of steam as he goes on. "I suppose what I'm wondering is why this... evil screed was given prime real estate in our paper. I've had some experience with this kind of crackpot, as you well know—Randy, Charles—and the first thing I learned is that you don't EVER give them a megaphone to shout their anti-American propaganda from the highest tower possible!"

Charles Gould tries to interrupt, saying that he knows the editorial process broke down here, and that it's now pretty certain that this letter didn't even come from the actual bomber, given the information they now have from Messrs. Ransom and Redgrave here...

"Oh, shove it, Charles. I don't care if this person planted the bombs themselves or just saw an opportunity; whatever editorial failures are concerned here are on you and your conscience. All I care about is the fact that this paper saw fit to put Satanic symbols and calumnies against our Founding Fathers—who fought for FREEDOM against a bloody tyrant, need I remind everyone at this table—on page six of our newspaper! This city is ready to explode and you people seem to be all too ready to throw gasoline on the fire for the sake of a sensationalistic headline and saving your precious circulation!"

As Archie listens to this, he's likely got a copy of the letter in front of him, either from the paper or the fake movie script pages brought to the meeting to bolster SANDMAN's psyop (I imagine that the Librarian quickly banged out a few pages of this before you all left for the Examiner; one thing she LOVES doing is forging documents :laughing:), idly re-reading it given Kinsolving's fevered breathless take on it.

After he has extracted all the information he thinks he can get out of Dooley regarding the envelope, Marshall will bring Dooley out of his hypnotic auto-recall state. He will explain that this does not look good for Dooley, or for Examiner, but that he (Marshall) thinks he can convince his client not to pursue legal action. Marshall will intimate that he sees no reason to "out" Dooley to the board in the big conference room, but that he hopes Dooley remembers this little favor Marshall's client has done for him today going forward.

Before leaving Dooley in the small conference room, he'll also casually mention, should Dooley have any trouble sleeping or experiences any lingering concerns regarding the letter, that he should "feel quite free to reach out," and he'll write the number for the Mission on a notepad that he'll leave on the table.

Marshall will then wait for Archie in the reception area or lobby and observe the goings-on around the floor. He's not looking for anything in particular; he is just naturally observant (Observation Skill 16).

Internally, Marshall muses that they will need to send someone(s) to Pittsburgh, California, to make inquiries, and makes a mental note to bring this up to the group once everyone has reconvened.

After all this sturm und drang, Dooley lifts his face to the calming words of Doc Red. "Yes. I suppose I'll need to take my lumps from the board on this one, but they'll likely want to avoid embarrassment as well. A full retraction, an explanation that the story yesterday seems to have been published in error thanks to consultation with Legal and with local and federal law enforcement, and a firm commitment to doing better in future." Dooley may have come across in the midst of all this as weak, but he's a senior member of the staff and as such knows what needs to happen now. Sure, he might get fired or demoted or reassigned for this but mostly he's just grateful that the weird urge to publish this manifesto has finally been purged from his head.

"Thank you, Doctor. I'm glad you called our attention to this quickly so we didn't pursue this and embarrass ourselves any further." He shakes Marshall's hand and takes the card.

Out in the newsroom Marshall can clearly see through the glass windows of the executive meeting room a man in a priest's collar haranguing the board. Dooley emerges from the small meeting room and starts to head back to the board to "take his lumps."

That bit late in the letter, "The creation of consent is a very old art," is a paraphrase of a line from Walter Lippmann's seminal 1922 work Public Relations. So whomever wrote this letter is not only passingly familiar with Illuminati conspiracy theories and History B, but also the rich history of 20th century public relations and consent-creation.

(Again, this is just an aside to the scene with Kinsolving and the executive board but Kinsolving's virulence around the letter's anti-Americanism definitely got Archie's feelers tingling enough to take a second look at the letter. I'll also leave it to you whether you want to interact with anything Kinsolving's said or just let this play out.)

OK, so Archie will try to engage Kinsolving at least briefly. If Kinsolving knows Archie from his reputation as an ad man, hopefully he knows of Archie's public service / raising healthy democratic young minds / Jaycee / Corporation for Children's Television type work. So Archie will agree somberly and piously with concerns about anti-American or un-Christian propaganda, while gently dissenting from fears that the city is "about to explode" - surely it's not as bad as all that, there are a few bad apples out there but Archie believes in the silent majority of good Americans, even in San Francisco! He tries to flatter Kinsolving and get him to talk a little more, mainly to suss out if Kinsolving has any deeper/outside knowledge about the letter or anything in it beyond what's on the page, any reason to connect the letter to the People's Temple (or Zodiac for that matter), etc.

The other thing Archie will do, when he gets a chance, is work up some memetic material designed to discourage people from taking letters to the editor in newspapers seriously. Get Dr. Stanton to get Merv Griffin or Tom Snyder to drop some snide remarks about "shut-ins writing letters to San Francisco newspapers" into their monologue, or arrange a subplot on a cop show about a deluded kook writing letters to the editor.

The message being: People who write to newspapers aren't serious political thinkers OR dangerous radicals, they're harmless kooks and cranks. Views outside the mainstream are silly and pointless!

And then I expect Archie and Marshall will head back to Lawrence Livermore.

So considering Archie's words on this, Kinsolving sits back in his chair, no longer tensed up, but he casts an eye at the editors before saying, "I take your points. I just don't like the idea of us doing the work of radicals and maniacs for them! Whatever motivated this person to send this letter, we've got to report on this stuff soberly and assiduously! Whole columns and articles of public interest have gotten scuttled at this paper while the ravings of madmen, whether from a film script or not, get column inches!" Clearly he is still tremendously bitter about his Peoples Temple pieces getting axed, and it's not all political for him: it's personal.

But again, Kinsolving sits back and says, "I have a little bit of expertise on this sort, of course. And if you ask me this letter-writer is opportunistic. A lone kook who saw an opportunity in this bombing to trot out his pet theories. But he didn't do the bombing. Mark my words. When the FBI comes back tomorrow morning, they'll have a new suspect." Kinsolving continues, "You say this is likely someone who got hold of your film script and embellished upon it. That's as good a theory as any. It's not Zodiac, the language is too flowery, the 'politics' too involved. Campus leftists? No. Apart from a few mentions of businessmen and the war effort, there's no self-important jargon, none of their typical juvenile entitlement. And Jones's people? Their rantings always have the edge of the chiliastic to them. While there is a sense of apocalypse in this note, of unveiling, there's little of their hysteria."

Kinsolving sighs and looks tremendously downcast. "The mentions of children... this individual could be a pederast in some kind of denial about his sick desires. That would make sense for someone from Hollywood," Kinsolving says with a sneer. "If indeed you do think this person had access to your clients' script. That's the kind of thing you and your colleague should tell the FBI, I think." At this tense point, Dooley walks in and as he does, the entire board stands up. "Well, we should probably be discussing our plans going forward," Randy Hearst says, extending a hand to Archie. "It was good to meet you, Mr. Ransom, and give Dr. Redgrave our regards." Archie feels like the board is a little bit embarrassed by Kinsolving's own rants but more intent right now on taking Dooley to the woodshed.

(Kinsolving does seem, despite his personality, to be a very good person to know and have available. His knowledge of the new religious movements and political cults of the Bay Area seems deep and solid even taking into consideration his own deeply-held political beliefs.)