I have been to Israel more than a dozen times between 1947, when I ran away from home to briefly join the Haganah, and through my dozen years covering the peace talks that produced the Camp David Accords, Israel's treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and a tentative agreement between the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin.

I attended the signing of the treaty with Egypt on the north lawn of Jimmy Carter's White House and, the treaty with Jordan on a river wash between the two nations. And I celebrated with President Bill Clinton when he won the pledge of "no more war" from the Palestinians and Jews on a sun drenched day on the South lawn at the White House.

But much of those agreements have come to little. They have not brought peace. Rabin was murdered by an Israeli; Arafat's Palestinians were hopelessly divided when he died. The Middle East became more volatile. So when the Israelis attacked the Turkish ship seeking to breach the Israeli blockade of Gaza with relief supplies, it brought to mind my encounter in 1978 with one of the legendary heros in the founding of Israel-a man I knew as Captain Ike Aranne.

I was on an El Al flight from Nairobi, in Kenya, to Tel Aviv to meet my wife who was coming to Israel for the first time. She told me she had ben reluctant to come, because her orthodox father, in chanting the prayer at the end of the Passover Seder seemed to be saying something about dying in Jerusalem. And she thought from childhood that she would die if she went to Israel.

Anyway, I had spent some weeks in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it was suspected that Cuban troops were stirring trouble against the imperialist powers of France and Belgium, whose King Leopold had made billions from its copper and diamonds, by wreaking great cruelties among the workers. There were no Cuban troops. The country had been torn by civil war, encouraged by the CIA, tribal rivalries, a culture of corruption and Zaire it became a stake in the cold war. It was ruled by the pro-west dictators, Joseph Mobutu, who stole millions, but he had the support of the U.S., the World Bank and Israel, which was seeking influence in Africa.

I was typing out on my Olivetti my final story from Zaire, when the man next to me on the flight asked what I was doing. He was handsome, and wiry with a shock of white hair, and I noticed that the El Al cabin crew seemed to treat him with deference. I told him who I was and asked him if he was someone famous.

He asked me if I had heard of the President Warfield. Garfield, I said but there was no President Warfield. The President Warfield ,he said, had been a Chesapeake Bay ferry, named afer the head of the company that owned it. It had been secretly purchased by the Israelis in 1947 to bring Jewish refugees from Nazism, to British occupied Palestine. The ship had been renamed "Exodus, 1947"and my seat mate was its captain, who gave me his anglicized. name " Yitzhak (Ike) Aranne."

In contrast to the happy ending of the Exodus voyage in the movie of the same name, the British, resisting the creation of a Jewish state, rammed and blockaded the ship and refused to let it land as it stood offshore for days, packed with 4,500 sick and hungry passengers, three of whom died in battles with British who boarded the ship. The British raised the phony charge that the refugees were armed.

After days of fruitless negotiations the vindictive British prime minister, deported the ship and with nowhere else to land, it was forced to land in Germany, which just a few years earlier tried to kill every Jew in Europe. The refugees were interned, but one result of the world-wide outcry on behalf of the Exodus, was the 1948 vote in the United Nations to partition Palestine, which gave Israel its independence, but left the Palestinians in a national limbo. The voyage of the Exodus had worked.

Not surprisingly, the New York Times saw a parallel between the plight of the Exodus and the Israeli attack on the Turkish ship trying to breach the tight Israeli blockade of Gaza with food and other essentials. The Times reported on May 31, "To some Israeli observers, it was impossible to miss the parallels" with the story of the Exodus. Rafi Man, of the Israeli Democracy Institute, asked on his blog, "Will this be the Palestinian Exodus?"

I am not sure that Captain Ike would disagree with the parallel. Yitzhak Ahronovitch, who died in December at the age of 86, was among the earliest settlers. He came to Palestine from Poland when he was ten and he was only 23 when he commanded the Exodus. He had been a veteran merchant seaman during the Second World War and in the struggle against the British occupation, he was a member of the Palmach, the Haganah's strike force, which fought the British occupiers with bombs and terrorism.

But when we spoke in his apartment, with his American-born wife, and over a long dinner in Joppa, he worried that the Israelis had lost their way and had become the hated occupiers-of the millions of Palestinians, farmers and shopkeepers, who could trace their roots in Palestine-Israel back to Christ's time.

As I remember it, Ike told me that the glow of Israel's spectacular victory in the 1967 Six-day war had turned to uncertainty. Israel had conquered three Arab armies and had taken control of Egypt's Sinai, Syria's Golan Heights, Jordan's West Bank of the Jordan River, and most treasured of all, the old city of Jerusalem and the Western Wall of an ancient Jewish temple.

The occupation of these territories, which is still not recognized as legal by the U.N. or the
U.S., brought internal violence again as the Palestine Liberation Organization asserted itself with terror bombings not unlike those of the Palmach against the British occupation. As Ahronovitch told me, "we were sure that the '67 war would give us peace at last. But now, we don't know what comes next." Israel's confidence in its future as a Jewish state had been shaken.

By 1978, as Palestinian resistance grew more violent, the inevitable dynamic of the occupied and occupier became increasingly violent, and the call for security clashed with the democratic idealism of the nation's founders, like Ahronovitch. Palestinians were treated badly, to counter the violence of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, which led to stronger, angrier Palestinian resistance and the spiral of violence that continues today. Although Israel regards itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, democracy does not extend to the Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, the Bedouins and non-Jews.

As the traditionally non-secular (younger, immigrant) Jews in Israel have become dominated by orthodox Rabbis and their right-wing parties (women are forbidden to pray at the Western Wall,) have turned racist, seeking to expel the Palestinians and even the Israeli Arabs. For self-protection, the Israelis have built apartheid walls which keep the Palestinians and their plight out of sight of most Israelis and visiting Americans.

Because of real security concerns, the domination of the Israeli Defense Forces in the cabinet and the religious orthodoxy that closes down the country on the Sabbath and rules the lives of women, in particularly, have made much of Israeli a military theocracy. Such are the fruits of occupation that lead to unintended consequences. To counter the influence of the non-secular Palestinians, Israel invited into the country elements of the deeply religious Muslim Brotherhood, based in Egypt.

They became Hamas, a grass roots political and social movement hostile to the more moderate non-fundamentalist Palestinians. Hamas' religious fundamentalism is especially hostile towards Israel as an affront to the Muslim faith. But they won a democratic election and they now rule Gaza. From which they send rockets into Israel, which responded with an invasion, many innocent civilian deaths and today's blockade. So nowhere is the peace in sight that Yitzhak Ahronovitch had hoped for in 1978. For without the reluctant support of the Palestinians, Hamas and the stalling Israelis, the so-called two state solution seems untenable.

That brings me to another sad chapter in the ongoing Middle East drama, the reprehensible call by my friend, a long time colleague that Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine" and Jews should go back to the European nations of their origin. But I know something of the background to the outburst. Helen Thomas, born in Kentucky, in a Lebanese family, covered dozens of Israeli officials who came to the White House and she traveled to Israel with presidents. Despite her inner anger at some of the more hostile Israeli statements and policies towards Arabs, and their bloody invasions of Lebanon, her reports remained straight with nary a hint of how she feels. But her unthinking mini-diatribe, was born from frustration that the 30-year peace process is going nowhere and suggests a new path to peace-the one state solution, in which Israel and Palestinians shared the land as Israel's founders intended.

Let's face it: It is impossible to cobble together two states out of the walled off Palestinians, whose lands are torn by hundreds of armed settlements, a modern semi-secular and paranoid Israel and the besieged, destitute and powerless Gaza under Hamas. So why not one state with Palestinians and Jews who are more alike than they would admit, in looks, culture, intelligence, intellectual achievement, a desire for education, business sense and acquisitiveness, their penchant accumulate wealth and build a business?

In 2003 the Middle East scholar and political scientist Virginia Tilley, writing from South
Africa in the London Review of Books, and writer Tony Judt, who is Jewish and a frequent writer on the Middle East, opened a discussion on the alternative to the faltering two-state solution.

Tilley: "The two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an idea and possibility whose time has passed, its death obscured by the spectacle-the hoopla of useless road maps, the cycle of Israeli gun ship assassinations and Palestinian suicide bombings, the dismal Palestinian power struggles, the house demolitions...." And now as a last resort for safety, the walls of what Israelis acknowledge as Apartheid. What next?

Judt: "The peace process is dead. The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution--the core of the Oslo process and the present "road map"--is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Israel's cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state."

Other Middle East actors, including the Palestinian Authority have begun serious consideration of the one-state solution. The early Zionists, like Yitzhak Ahronovitz, according to Amos Elon, saw Israel (perhaps naively) as a socialist democratic home for Jews and Arabs, not necessarily a secular Jewish State, but a homeland for the Diapora. Captain Ike would not have supported the unthinkable, the expulsion of millions of Palestinians; if there is to be peace, I believe the one state solution-call it Israel or Palestine or both--is inevitable.

Write to saulfriedman@comcast.net Friedman also writes for www.timegoesby.net

When Rep. Anthony Weiner made a nice over-the-shoulder grab during Tuesday's 49th Annual Congressional Baseball Game, he might just have expected it to go down in the rarely-revisited history books of Capitol Hill sports.

Instead, ESPN elevated it into the rarefied air of Sportscenter's Top 10.

Call it a slow sports day -- the #10 play of the day involved hot dog eating -- but pitcher Joe Baca, Congressman from California likely thanked Weiner for his Hank Aaron-esque acrobatics at the warning track, which eventually set him up for the win when Dems battered Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) late in the game to break a deadlock.

The Democrats would go on to beat the Republicans 13-5.

Weiner, perhaps worried that the impressive display of congressional athleticism would be quickly forgotten, posted the clip to his YouTube page as a permanent reminder.

Also, if you'd prefer to watch "middle-aged people in tight uniforms falling down," which, as Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post points out, happened at least twice during the game, take a look at his blog.

Watch Weiner's catch, which comes in at #9:

Spy fever is sweeping the nation! With the arrest of the 10 alleged Russian spies this week, Americans can stop worrying about depressing problems like the oil hurricane down the Gulf, or boring problems like the Senate's financial "reform" kabuki theater, and just focus on the sexy dangers of international espionage. It's like the fifties all over again! I for one can't wait to grease up my pompadour and roll up a pack of unfiltered cigarettes in my t-shirt sleeve and go see Attack of the Giant Leeches at the drive-in and snap my fingers to doo-wop music and chug a six-pack while seeing how fast my old man's Dodge Diplomat will go and invoke the specter of nuclear annihilation so as to get a little over-the-bra action from my best girl while we're parked out by Smuggler's Cove.

Except, these so-called Russian spies were total lamers. Instead of having metal teeth and skulking around swapping vials marked "ANTIDOTE," like the ultra-realistic movie spies do, these spies were suburban couples with mortgages and LinkedIn accounts. They went to networking functions and got involved with think tanks, which science has proven are the boringest things in the world. This information does not compute! Aren't spies supposed to stick out, always wearing things and doing things that obviously mark them as spies? Could everything Hollywood has taught us about the intricacies of global espionage be incorrect? That would truly be a blow to the national psyche.

But thankfully, a big scoop yesterdat: One of them is hot! Just look at her Facebook pictures there, looking all generically attractive, like the countless indistinguishable women who clatter around midtown Manhattan every day, in her plastic tiara. Smoking a cigarette in a tiger-print club dress? Ooh la la! She's the "femme fatale" of the group. Every media outlet says so. Does that mean she's killed people, or are these media outlets just being stupid? Either way, big development!

But everyone is missing the big story here, which should chill us to the bone. By sending 10 spies deep undercover for decades to pose as suburban real estate brokers, consultants, and luxury goods peddlers, it would appear that the Russians are trying to crack our formula for quiet despair. Well, good luck, comrades! You'll never beat us at our own game.

Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) took aim at his own party's policy ideas when he took to the podium to speak before a group of moderate Republicans on Wednesday.

"As I look out at the political landscape now, I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas," Bennett told members of the Ripon Society. "Indeed, if you raise specific ideas and solutions, as I've tried to do on health care with [Oregon Democratic Sen.] Ron Wyden, you are attacked with the same vigor as we've seen in American politics all the way back to slavery and polygamy. You are attacked as being a wimp, insufficiently pure, and unreliable."

Bennett, who was kicked off his party's primary ballot last month at the Utah GOP convention, predicted that Republicans will retake control of the House of Representatives in November, but suggested that the shift in power may be short-lived given the lack of solutions coming from their side of the aisle.

"The concern I have is that ideology and a demand for absolute party purity endangers our ability to govern once we get into office," Bennett said.

WATCH: GOP Sen. Bob Bennett Takes Aim At His Own Party

The Democratic National Committee unveiled a new ad Wednesday seeking to highlight what they see as the disconnect between House Minority Leader John Boehner's statement that the recently-negotiated Wall Street reform amounted to "killing an ant with a nuclear weapon," and the enormity of the financial crisis.

"Congressman Boehner, this is a bunch of ants," the ad's narrator reads, while ants scurry across the screen. "This is the 2008 financial crisis," the narrator continues, introducing a montage of news footage from the heart of the economic downturn. "Any questions?"

Boehner made the comments Monday during an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in which he also suggested that the retirement age should eventually be increased to 70.

This ad appears to echo a sentiment expressed by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs at a briefing on Tuesday that Minority Leader Boehner is "completely out of touch with America."

"It's the clearest expression yet from the Republicans of what they believe - that the system in place for regulating Wall Street works fine and is in need of minor reforms - if any at all," a Democratic official said, according to CNN. "You can bet Boehner's comments will be heavily featured in DNC ads this fall."

Boehner spokesman Michael Steel defended his boss, however, maintaining that the Minority Leader was simply expressing his unhappiness with the reach of the Democrats' Wall Street reform bill, not downplaying the scope of the financial crisis.

"Boehner was certainly not minimizing the crisis America faced - he was pointing out that Washington Democrats have produced a bill that will actually kill more jobs and make the situation worse," Steel said, according to CNN.

Watch the ad:

You may not know Mosab Hassan Yousef, but he is a hero. Mr. Yousef grew up in a culture of violence and hatred, and rejected it for faith in peace and a belief in humanity. He chose to place himself in mortal danger by working against one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world.

For his heroism, the United States immigration authorities may today choose to send him to certain death.

Yousef is the renowned "Son of Hamas": the eldest son of Hamas founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef. Hamas itself is well known, for all the wrong reasons. The Islamist group is infamous for its practices, of which suicide bombings of buses, weddings, and cafés are only the tip of the iceberg. For all Hamas's terror against Israelis -- of whom I am one, native-born and raised -- its most numerous victims are the Palestinians who suffer under its tyrannical rule in Gaza.

To live under Hamas as a Palestinian in Gaza is to suffer oppression and privation in equal measure. The Economist, among other sources, has documented its repression of the people it purports to liberate: If you form a rival political party, Hamas's killers will storm your mosque and shoot you down at prayer. If you protest its taxes, you'll be thrown in some of the worst jails in the Middle East. If you fail to abide by its extortionate permitting processes, Hamas will bulldoze your home. (Interestingly, foreigners only show up to protest when Israelis do this.) If you attempt to purchase basic goods, you are subjected to Soviet-style shortages as a result of Hamas's unyielding belligerent actions. If you are one of the dwindling number of Palestinian Christians, forget about living as anything but a dhimmi -- a second-class citizen without basic freedoms. And God help you if you are a woman or a gay man.

Overlaying all of this is the awful realization that what Hamas does to Palestinians is only a preview of what it would do to Israelis, given the chance. Those of us from Israel know this all too well. Even I, from a super left-wing Israeli family -- we're Labor voters, and even Labor is sometimes too conservative for us -- have had to confront that grim reality. I remember that awful day in 1995, when I was woken up by the words, "A bus has exploded two blocks from home." Twenty-one Israelis and one Dutch citizen were killed in that attack. A radical Islamist fanatic detonated his suicide vest. He slaughtered 22 innocent people who wanted nothing more than to get to work, to go shopping, or to get home.

One of the dead could have been me. And the murderer could have been Mosab Hassan Yousef.

I wasn't among the dead through plain luck -- and Mosab Hassan Yousef never became a killer through the power and uprightness of his conscience and character. A year after that attack, Yousef was arrested by the Israeli security services. That's when he began working for Israel to stop Hamas's terrorism, as one of its most trusted and valuable secret agents.

When we are raised with a certain doctrine, any doctrine, we tend to relate to it as absolute reality and it is often impossible to make your own judgment on what you are being told is "the truth." Not Mosab Hassan Yousef. He grew up, thought about what he was being indoctrinated, and came up with the following conclusion: "People become enslaved to radical Islamic beliefs that promote hate and violence." Imagine that: having never known any other life, having been taught an ideology of death from the cradle, and having a founder of Hamas as his own father, the young Yousef was ready to reject all that. Once in an Israeli prison, he was, paradoxically, free: free for the first time to examine his scruples and follow his conscience.

I believe that there is good in every heart, and that hate judgment and racism are taught. No evil is innate, and no child is born bad. Yet how many of us would have the strength to do what Yousef did? I'm not sure I would, and I am sorry to say few could.

What came next was a decade of precious information. Yousef became a double agent for Israeli security. Remarkably, he saved lives on both sides: he prevented Hamas attacks on Israelis, and he insisted that the Israeli forces never kill those on whom he informed. On top of all that, he had a change of faith. Yousef turned against Hamas in 1996, and three years later, he began exploring Christianity -- a process culminating in his 2005 baptism. The radical break with his past, from Islamist purveyor of violence to Christian advocate for peace, was complete.

Yousef could not stay in Israel or any of the Palestinian territories after that. As an apostate from Islam and (by 2007) a known agent for Israel, he was marked for death on two counts. There was no safe haven for him -- no spot outside the reach of Hamas or the Palestinian and Islamist movements. So he came to America.

Now, three years later, he may have to return -- and not by choice. Yousef has spent his three years in this country speaking out against terrorism, against Radical Islam, and against hate. He has written a bestselling book about his experiences. He has been a model immigrant: productive, upright, and fully embracing the American ideals of toleration and individual liberty. Yet because his application for refugee status is denied, a federal immigration judge in San Diego may today elect to force him to return to Israel or the Palestinian territories, where he will be a marked man.

This is, to be blunt, insane. I too am an immigrant in this great country but my situation is hardly like Yousef's. If Mosab Hassan Yousef is sent home, the hunt begins, and he counts down the days until the most accomplished murderers on earth exact their revenge. It is a cruel injustice, and a terrible repayment for a man who has truly walked in righteousness where most of us would surely fail.

Yet in a larger sense, it's not just Yousef's fate that is in the hands of the immigration judge today. The question is whether America's justice system is worthy of the American people. Americans are better than a great people -- they are a good people. They understand that Yousef, in his actions - rejecting violence and standing up for peace, embodies the longed for hope for the troubled Middle East.

That's an ideal, and a sort of man, that America has attracted from its very founding. From the Jewish refugees from European pogroms, to European refugees from fascism, to Asian refugees from Communism, to Mosab Hassan Yousef runs a direct line. The "huddled masses yearning to be free" have always found refuge on these shores. If the immigration judge today sends Yousef to the deadly welcome of Hamas, he'll do more than condemn one good man -- he'll betray the ideals that bring America the world's best.

Noa Tishby is an actress and producer living in Los Angeles, California. Her acting credits include The Island, Big Love, and NCIS. Her producing credits include HBO's In Treatment. She is a native of Israel.

Deep in the cotton belt of Washington, Texas, where the grass bends to the whimsy of the wind and the soil is dark and rich, McKinley Nolan told Mary Nolan, his young, beautiful bride: "I want to explore the world."

The time was 1965 and they had been married for about a year.

"I said, 'Where we going?" asks Mary Nolan, relaying the fond memory while sweeping the porch, her hair kept tidy with a kerchief to keep away the dust and the heat, her endearing smile matching the pleasant lilt of her southern accent.

"He said, 'I'd like to go into the army.'"

"I said, 'Well, good. You want to go into the army? Go ahead, they might choose you, with your two left feet!'" Mary recounts, echoes of the adoring young woman teasing her husband floating easily from her voice.

"He left June 16, 1966, to go to Vietnam, and I haven't seen him since."

Such is the start of Henry Corra's feature documentary, The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan, a haunting, heart wrenching, and soul searching exploration not only of the horrors surrounding the quagmire of the Vietnam War and the men we sent to fight it, but also, and perhaps even more importantly for modern audiences, the strength, endurability, and triumph of the human spirit to, quite literally, soldier on. Further buoyed by a longing, soaring score from Robert Burger, the movie recently screened as part of the AFI Discovery Channel Silverdocs Festival.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Dan Smith visited the Vietnam battlefields of his youth in 2006 and may have encountered McKinley, alive. "When I killed my first man, or boy, like me - that pretty much ruined my life," Dan says in the movie. "Once you kill someone, once you take a life, I truly believe you forfeit your own as well." He joined forces with journalist Richard Linnett, who has been researching the McKinley Nolan case since 1998, and Richard brought the story to Henry's attention.

"Dan came in as a symbol of hope," says Henry from the air-conditioned comfort of his office. "What I think might have happened is that he enabled them to take this journey that they never would have been able to take, and perhaps mourn for the first time. And, you know, at least try to find closure," Henry explains as he discusses the journey of McKinley's brother Michael, to Vietnam and Cambodia, to trace the path of his brother who may have been captured, may have been a traitor, may have been an American operative, may have killed two guards; these conjectures swirl around McKinley, a defector who joined the Viet Cong as an American soldier disillusioned by the realities of war and the polarizing magnet they offered to the rhetoric he was fed pre-battleground in the USA. McKinley did go on to take another wife, a Cambodian ethnic living across the border in Vietnam, and have two children.

"Although they still don't know (what happened to McKinley). Did you find that frustrating by the way? You can be very honest. Do you think it's a flaw of the movie as a story to let the audience down, or is it more true to life for you?" Henry's boyish blue eyes flash to punctuate his rapid-fire questioning and rueful grin as he spins the interview table around.

The documentary is executive produced by Danny Glover and Joslyn Barnes and their company, Louverture Films, which is dedicated to the development and production of films of historical relevance, social purpose, commercial value, and artistic integrity. Their involvement was particularly helpful in leaping over hurdles presented by both the American and Vietnam governments as the Nolan family and the film crew embarked on the investigation of McKinley's disappearance.

Whittling 300 hours of footage to a spellbinding 77 minutes edited over a year and a half, The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan has more questions than answers. Henry Kissinger's office issued an ambiguous memo in 1974 acknowledging the location of McKinley in Cambodia and questioning whether or not he should be airlifted out as part of Operation Homecoming.

"It's very cryptic, because it says would he be eligible for amnesty? Do you think Kissinger's office would have issued the memo if they had known McKinley had murdered two guards to escape? And also, what do you think about the fact -- were you convinced that he shot those guards?" Henry doesn't pause for an answer. "With this void of information, everybody is left to speculate. In a sense you are forced to find your own version of the truth, to find your own way of processing his story, and find closure with it. What do you think happened? Because it's a crazy world out there and there's a lot of crazy information, right?," Henry continues with his interrogation.

"Was it just love? Did McKinley just meet another woman and fall in love, or did he kill the guards? Was he afraid to go home because he thought he would be prosecuted and murdered? Why did he name his two children Mary and Roger after his wife and son back at home? Everybody who talks about McKinley Nolan is really talking about themselves, because he is a ghost."

Co-producer Jeremy Amar chimes in, "Or a part of themselves they wish they were. They project their hopes upon him."

A tense confrontation and perhaps a thinly veiled confession between Michael Nolan and Cham Sone at the Chamkar Café in Cambodia serves as overwhelming testimony and evidence, barring the last physical stronghold of a body or bones, that McKinley met his death through a shovel beating at the hands of 6 guards of the Khmer Rouge in 1977. The Khmer Rouge were members of the Communist Party, ruthless enforcers of social engineering, and responsible for the genocide of an estimated 1.7 million people between 1975 and 1979. It is likely that McKinley's Cambodian wife and two children met their fate at the hands of the Khmer Rouge as well.

"I was born in 1955. From '67 to '73, I was 12 to 17 years old, going through my adolescence in suburban Richmond, VA. And the years prior to that as a smaller child, the Civil Rights movement was going on around me, and the Vietnam War was on the news every night. They had this incredible coverage of the war, much more true coverage than the recent wars now. Our suburbs were sort of encroaching onto rural African American enclaves that were very similar to the Nolans, and there's the Vietnam War raving on TV, but I didn't really understand what it meant. When I was a little kid, I remember going to the bus station and seeing the "Coloreds Only" sign. The public tennis courts where "Whites Only," and my mother (who was a very progressive blonde Doris Day type), our housekeeper, who was black, her daughter, and me as a little blonde 8 year old went out on a Saturday and played on the public courts, which were right in the middle of downtown Richmond. I didn't even understand what I was doing. Everyone stopped their cars and got out to watch this doubles tournament," shares Henry candidly, as he expresses the resonance this story, time, and people stir in him.

"I knew I was going to make this film because of the look in Mary's eye, the look on Dan Smith's face, the cadence in Michael Nolan's voice. Can you imagine going out and trying to raise money and saying, 'I know this is going to be a good film because of the cadence in his voice'? But I did. That's how it started. I just knew I was going to follow it. We did have some funders who said, 'What if you don't find him?' And I went, 'What if we do?!'" Henry exclaims.

If and when Mary Nolan ever legally declares her husband dead, all of his military and CIA records will be released. "They just don't want to declare him dead until they are 100% sure, until there's evidence. Would you want to declare your mother dead without evidence?" Henry asks pointedly.
Adds Jeremy, "How do you shift that burden to Mary? She has never left the cotton belt of Texas. Why do you put that emotional burden upon that woman? If you know...the organization knows. There's information that should be brought to her, not the other way around."

"I always maintain that finding McKinley Nolan would be much less interesting than not finding him. So I just kind of assumed that we weren't going to find him. That he was missing. The real meat of this story and the real catharsis of this film was always not about finding him, but having the hope that maybe we could." Few modern filmmakers have the guts to craft a story that trusts the intelligence of an audience and the integrity of a story, leaving viewers with more questions than answers that a pat conclusion might provide in a cinematic wake.

"I just spoke with Michael yesterday, and he said, 'He could have run away. Before they beat him with the shovels. Henry, you're not giving up, are you?' And it just broke my heart. I don't know what to say. It kind of has a biblical aspect to it, the whole story," says Henry softly.

The Nolan family, including Roger, who was born after his father went to Vietnam, traveled to Maryland for the Silverdocs Festival last week and was crushed to discover upon their very first trip to Washington D.C. that McKinley Nolan, because he is classified as a defector, is not among those 58,000 plus names included on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. "I thought you were innocent until proven guilty in this country. He needs to be on this wall," said Mary Nolan.

A pillar of strength among her family and in her community in Washington, Texas, Mary remains steadfast and unwavering in her conviction: "I'm still his wife. 'Till death do us part' is what I said, and that's what I meant."

For more information on Henry Corra's The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan, visit http://www.mckinleynolan.com.

The end stages of anyone's life are likely to be somewhat chaotic. Ailments consume one's thoughts, strength wanes, memory fades, and the ability to take care of ordinary activities, albeit work or just shopping for food, declines. Those with jobs are apt to retire - the business will go on - and devote the remainder of their lives to a less stressful existence. In 1996, multimedia sculptor Nam June Paik (1932-2006) suffered a stroke that largely curtailed his ability to create new installations, but his career was far from over. Exhibitions of his work were being planned, new pieces were still being fabricated and existing works continued to be put up for sale at galleries. What's more, a series of sculptures purportedly by Paik, but which the artist denied were his, were put up for sale, leading to two lawsuits against Paik, which his lawyers chose to settle, because Paik was not deemed mentally competent to testify at trial. "You can see this as people taking advantage of a senile artist," said Paik's nephew and estate executor, Ken Hakuta. "He was sick."
The lawsuits were eventually resolved out of court. Had Paik maintained a documentary record for all his work - "So-and-So Gallery or studio assistant is authorized to produce this-many pieces, to be titled this, this and that and sold for these prices," signed and initialed by all parties involved - the confusion might have been resolved more quickly and with less expense. Good recordkeeping, unfortunately, is not one of the characteristics of highly successful artists. Diminished brain function, however, may prove catastrophic for an artist whose business is run completely out of his or her head. "Just getting old is hard," said Dr. John Zeisel, director of the Woburn, Massachusetts-based organization Artists for Alzheimer's. "Bills don't get paid; things don't get put away. Most creative types have things lying around anyway and, when they develop dementia, it becomes much harder to organize."
Among the problems that may occur are:
• Artworks that have been loaned to a gallery, collector or museum and are forgotten. The recipients may construe the loans as gifts, sometimes selling the works.
• Artworks consigned to a gallery and forgotten. Galleries, too, sometimes forget to pay artists.
• Images that are licensed for commercial use, also forgotten. "Postmortem royalties, with few exceptions, tend to taper off," said Elliot Hoffman, a lawyer with an arts practice in New York City, "but sometimes royalty payers forget to pay the artist or the artist's estate or heirs. Sometimes, they just stop paying and wait to see if anyone complains."
• Elements involved in the process of creating a multiples edition, such as mock-ups, proofs, maquets, molds or drawings, are overlooked by the artist but are subsequently used or sold by the publisher, fabricator or foundry.
• Artworks that are not documented with photographs or written information (title, size, year, medium), which may pose later problems of attribution. Artists are generally thought to be the best judges of their own work (although there are instances where some have been less than truthful, denying early pieces they now dislike or, in the case of Giorgio di Chirico, intentionally misdating works) but, when the artist suffers memory loss (as in the case of Nam June Paik) or dies, the problem of attribution is magnified. Determining when a work was created and by whom becomes a more drawn-out and expensive process.
"Artists, by definition, are not business-minded," Hoffman said, which is neither true nor a definition, but thee have been numerous instances of artists neglecting to keep good records on their artwork, loans, licenses and consignments, leading to headaches and lawsuits during an artist's lifetime and beyond.
If artists kept better records on their work and careers, there might be less need for lawsuits, authentication committees - art fakes hardly would be profitable - and catalogue raisonnés. Toward that goal, the Joan Mitchell Foundation (155 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013, 212-524-0100, www.joanmitchellfoundation.org) has established a grant program enabling artists to document their work. The foundation will underwrite this process by hiring an archivist and paying for a computer (if need be) and the creation of an image and text database rather than providing money to an artist directly. "If you just give artists money, they might not spend it on archives," said Carolyn Somers, executive director of the foundation. "While they are alive, artists can do their own catalogue raisonné."

Presidents often remark about the eeriness of the first moments after they revert back to being private citizens. Suddenly all of the fanfare is gone. Nobody is there at your beck and call. The band doesn't strike up any longer when he walks into the room and he is once again, just an ordinary citizen.

As I park behind a book store called Book Soup in West Hollywood and make my way to the front door I am reminded of this as a store employee hopefully asks if I am here for former presidential candidate Fred Thompson's book signing. Sort of, is what I meant to say, but I say yes to make him feel better I guess. Actually, I was just coming to pick Fred up for a late dinner before his flight back to DC the next morning, but as I walk to the back the steady stream of autograph-seekers has slowed to a trickle and I think about, as I do for the rest of the evening as we have a quiet dinner uninterrupted by gawkers or fans at an outdoor café on a sidewalk on Sunset Blvd., how close Citizen Fred came to, instead of being here with me tonight, being the Leader of The Free World, unapproachable and distant.

In 2008 I was pretty sure that the race was going to be Barack Obama vs. Fred Thompson and I'm usually a fairly good handicapper of such things. Early on in the campaign I had had coffee with Fred's wife Jeri at a hotel in Burbank and caught a glimpse of Fred walking out the door on his way to the Tonight Show where he was going to announce his candidacy. As he strode purposefully to the front door, trailed by his wife, daughter, nanny and son, he looked, well, "presidential." It would have been a fascinating race-the laid-back Southern-fried country boy vs. the Honolulu/Chicago City slicker, and we'll never know how it would have turned out. But it would have been far more fascinating than the race we got.

Once while Fred was in the middle of his campaign I had the challenging task of calling him about playing a lead role in a film that I was then-producing, awkwardly mentioning that I understood well that he could only be in it if the whole running-for-President thing didn't work out. He didn't seem offended and asked for more details. A year later my fellow producers and I were off of the project but Fred starred in the film anyway, and on this balmy May night I tell him that I'd see the movie and it looks pretty good and I'm back to thinking how amazing American democracy is that a man can be so close to such a high position and then just as quickly be back to starring in indie movies and signing books.

As his fans, known as Fredheads, well know, Fred now has a daily radio show (he took over O'Reilly's slot when Bill left radio) and has now published a memoir called Teaching The Pig To Dance. If Fredheads came to Book Soup hoping for a rehash of his most recent political race or an exegesis of the Obama administration, they'll likely be disappointed. Instead, it's a warm look over the shoulder at life in small-town America. This resonates with me especially because I've just spent time on the set of my next movie in a warm, friendly but quiet town called Smithville, in Texas, that I imagine is similar to the one Fred grew up in, in Tennessee.

On the set in Smithville, I keep thinking that these are the kinds of towns that mass media has destroyed-that the kids of Smithville instead of living and breathing and contributing to their city, are indoors watching stupid TV shows produced by my friends in Hollywood, and are, in the process, losing out on so many of the virtues that kids like Fred learned in his small town. Instead of soaking up the values of their parents and grandparents, I think, today's kids are absorbing the values of Britney, Lindsay, and Paris and maybe our country is going to hell as a result.

Fred's book is a lot like the man himself: warm, unpretentious, modest and contemplative. He has a Reaganesque ability to chalk up any negative things that have happened to him in life as part of the plan that got him on the right track. Having a son at 16 is certainly nobody's idea of a good way to start life, but Fred believes that it saved his life and kept him on a path of hard work and integrity.

He's so modest in real life that it's easy to forget the things this man has done, which I do. At dinner we can't escape talking politics and I tell him a story about being at another dinner with former Watergate figure Chuck Colson and, knowing that he's seen so many presidents up close, I had asked him his opinion of President Obama: Colson gave me two adjectives but later asked that I not publish them. I pass on the two adjectives to Fred and Fred is just as amazed as I was when I first heard them, but then proceeds to talk about Colson as though he knew him. "Of course," I almost smack myself. "You were there-at the Watergate hearings as Senate Counsel."

Fred gives me historical context and suddenly I see Colson in a different light-not as the do-gooder prison reformer and author of books on God, but as a Rahm Emmanuel-like figure who would have done anything and screwed anybody in pursuit of his objectives.

And perhaps, I think, those are the kind of epiphanies that we no longer have because we don't listen to our elders the way the young listened to elders in Fred's time in the small town where he grew up in and which much of the book is about.

Fred writes movingly of his father's wit and his Mom's kindness and of life in a small town in which elders were always there to correct the mistakes of their youth and the young became better men and women because of it.

As we head back toward my car for the short drive back to his hotel, I decide to tell him my story about his "presidential gait" that night in 2007. I figure he's not feeling very presidential on this night and that he might like to know that even though circumstances, Providence and the voters had made other choices, on that night anyway, he very much looked the part of the most powerful man in the world.

And something about Fred Thompson's life mirrors the greatness of America-how ordinary men and women answer the call to service. He was willing to serve, of course, but not obsessed by the need for power. He doesn't seem overly disappointed that things didn't work out the way he'd planned, and seems pleased to have the chance to get back to raising his family, doing his radio show and writing a book for his fans-passing along the words of wisdom he learned in a small town, that have stood him well in life.

A few years ago the idea of socially responsible design, also known as humanitarian architecture, was viewed as the ugly stepchild of the architectural world. However, thanks to a new army of altruistic designers, where purpose trumps profit, it has gradually become part of the mainstream of the profession. A case in point is the OS House Design Competition. During the spring over 3,100 designers from 45 countries were hard at work developing ideas for low cost housing in West Africa. The result, a sustainable off the grid housing unit that could become a benchmark for the worlds' emerging middle class.

The winner of the competition was an international collaboration of designers based in Brazil, Mexico and Portugal. Blaanc + Joao Caeiro developed "Emerging Ghana" as an adaptable, locally built housing unit that incorporates natural building technologies. The design itself was a good interplay between creating a livable space and an energy efficient structure. The design seems tangible and will fit in well in the intended setting. Additionally the Ghanaian Ambassador, who was on hand at the awards ceremony, noted that this design cost around 2/3rds the current cost of middle income housing in the country. At scale, this could drop even further. Admit it, which one of you wouldn't want this home for $6000?

The OS House project was developed by Enviu and architect Vincent van der Meulen with Eight Design Prinicples for participants to follow. The team is working with local partners to build a prototype structure, to be built by end of year. As well as continuing to promote the implementation of more of the finalists they hope to realize more than 100, 000 OS-Houses in Ghana by 2020.

Is this the solution to the worlds' housing problem? No. But it is a solution, a site specific scheme that incorporates the desires of the community and the reality of building in an environment with stressed resources and limited funding.

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About the OS House Competition