Marc Liebman's Blog, page 47

Obsession With Spies

At speaking event, a reader who has read several of my books asked me, if I was obsessed with spies and, if so, why?

Obsessed with, no. Concerned about, yes.

Of what I call the “Big Four,” two – John Walker and Jerry Whitworth – worked together. Walker sold highly classified acoustic data we had and were collecting on Soviet submarines and then later, cryptographic keys. He recruited Jerry Whitworth before he retired from the Navy to continue to give him cards used to set-up up the machines to code and decode messages.

During the Cold War, Soviet submarines were very noisy and the Soviet’s didn’t have the sophisticated sonar equipment to listen, track and classify by hull, the sound emanating from each sub. We did.

From the acoustic data Walker gave the Soviets, over time, they were make their subs much quieter, making it harder for us to track, and in time of war, sink. As part of the material he passed to them was the capabilities of a network of acoustic sensors called SOSUS, an acronym for Sound Surveillance System. SOSUS arrays were floating in the deep sound channel from the U.S. and friendly nations and enabled us to monitor Soviet surface and submarine movements around the world. Thanks to Walker, the technological edge our submarines enjoyed in sensors and noise reducing technology went away.

Equally damaging was the transfer of cryptographic keys. What he gave the Soviets who first through the U.S.S. Pueblo seized by the North Koreans and later through machines captured by the North Vietnamese, was the ability to decode encrypted messages in near real time. There’s no doubt in a lot of analyst’s minds that the Pueblo was seized to give the Soviets access to the message traffic, the equipment and its operating manuals.

Think of the advantage Allied code breakers had because we were able to break the German and Japanese codes. If we had gone to war with the Soviet Union before Walker and Whitworth were arrested, the Soviets would have had the same advantage over us we had over the Germans and Japanese and it could have been catastrophic.

Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames hurt us in a different way. The book Circle of Treason written by the two CIA officers who unmasked Ames, details the Soviet officers who were passing us classified information. Ames single handedly destroyed our network of spies at high levels in the GRU – Soviet Military intelligence, the KGB and other Soviet ministries. The public perception is he only gave up a few, but after reading Circle of Treason, the number is north of thirty and the real number is unknown.

Hanssen was an FBI agent who worked in counter intelligence. He revealed a small number of agents working for the U.S., but more importantly, he gave the Soviets vital information on surveillance methods, recruiting techniques and other secrets affecting our ability to collect information on our adversaries.

So where are these four men today? Walker died in prison in 2014. Whitworth began serving a 365-year sentence in 1987. In 1994, Aimes was tried, convicted and is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. In 2002, Hanssen was given a 45-year sentence and is being held in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day.

The activities of all four of these men spanned my Navy career. What they gave up could have gotten me and many of my friends killed. So now you know.

Marc Liebman

September 2017

Manuscript Resurrection Part IV

I’ve written three other blogs about Moscow Airlift describing how the manuscript evolved over time and this is the fourth, but not the last. If I were to give them sub-titles, it would have been:

I – To rewrite, or not to rewrite an old manuscript, that is the question?

II – Houston, I have a problem and need to rethink this!

III – Bringing characters from prior books into the story to make it work

The heavy lifting of writing and re-writing the novel is now done and the big news is Penmore Press is going to publish it. The book should be out sometime in the first quarter of 2018. The “YAAAAAAYYYY TEAM” and the self pat on the back has already happened.

As I rewrote and edited sections, it dawned on me Moscow Airlift is a book about revenge. In the story, Josh is forced to confront the past. In Big Mother 40, he falls in love with Natalie who becomes his first wife and she is murdered in the first chapter of Render Harmless. Natalie was collateral damage because the real target was her father, a highly decorated Red Army officer.  After World War II was over, decided he would rather live in America rather than under Stalin. To remind Soviet émigrés they were never out of reach of the Soviet Union, a selected few were being killed by KGB assassins.

Josh is sent to the dying Soviet Union as a set of fresh eyes to observe the instability and report back. He’s now in the belly of the beast and close, but oh-so-far from the organization who killed his wife. Josh has to resist the urge to try to find her killers knowing it will probably get him killed leaving his wife a widow and his kids fatherless.

Danielle Debenard and her father Jacques are also hell-bent on revenge. In Cherubs 2, both along with her younger sister Gabrielle are captured by the Pathet Lao and sent to a re-education camp. Three plus years later, only Danielle and her father get out. Danielle, now stationed in Moscow is working as an analyst for the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure, the French CIA. Both want to find and kill the man who repeatedly raped Gabrielle.

There’s a third person wanting revenge. This individual is targeting an institution and wants changes to happen so the abuses of the past will not continue. I’ll let you read the book to find out who he is and what he does.

We’ll see how the editing and proofreading process goes. I should see it with the editor’s comments sometime next week. Net, net, Moscow Airlift has some new, and very interesting characters along with twists and turns to keep you reading. To stay true to Josh’s roots, early in the book, I managed to work in a hair raising combat rescue!

Marc Liebman

September 2017

Why Norwich University

Every so often, I get questions from the audience that surprise me. Two weeks ago, I was invited to speak at a local Rotary club to give what I call my “Grandpa, what did you do during the Vietnam War?” speech. Lead time on these events can be as short as a week or two or several months.

At this event, the surprising question was “Why is Josh Haman a graduate of Norwich University?” Hmmmm, never been asked that one before. Obviously, he’s read one of my books!

When creating characters, you have to make a lot of choices. I went to a writer’s clinic where they supposedly tell you everything you need to know to get published and become the second coming of Tom Clancy or John Grisham. One of the takeaways from the event was “make your characters different.”

Since all, at least since the Naval Aviation Cadet program ended, have to be college graduates, Josh Haman had to get a degree from someplace. The Naval Academy was too easy and was eliminated. Given the year he graduated, there were four commissioning sources for potential Naval Aviators – Naval Academy, ROTC, Aviation Officer Candidate School (AOCS) and Aviation Reserve Officer Candidate (AVROC).

In my mind, I went back and forth between AVROC and ROTC and finally settled on ROTC. Most everyone knows about ROTC and I wanted Josh to come out with a regular commission and didn’t want to have to explain the augmentation process from reserve to regular officer because it wouldn’t add any value to the story. That settled, Josh had to graduate from somewhere.  Because Josh is a ski racer, many schools like VMI, University of Arizona, Texas A&M, UCLA, University of Florida, Vanderbilt, etc. were eliminated. It came down to an interesting group – Rennselaer Polytech, Norwich University, University of New Mexico and University of Colorado.

I picked Norwich for four reasons. It is a small, tough to get into school school nestled in the hills of Vermont and a twenty minute (longer in heavy snow) of some of the best skiing in the world.  I liked its culture and, at the time Josh is there, it had its own small ski area.  Norwich is a very small school – when Josh would have been there, the corps of cadets from all three services would have been about 600 students of a total university enrollment of about 1,200.

Two, Norwich has a very interesting history. It is the oldest private military college in the U.S. and was founded by a West Point graduate in 1819 to produce engineers for the Army.  Since its founding, it moved from Norwich, VT to Middletown, CT back to Norwich and now it is in Northfield, VT.  It went through struggles in the late 1800s but managed to persevere.

Three, it has produced an astonishingly long list of distinguished graduates for such a small school. To date, 102  generals, 12  generals, 9 generals, and 16 admirals are Norwich grads and more are coming.

Fourth, Norwich is also recognized by the DOD as the “birthplace of ROTC. I could go on and on, but those are some of the facts. And, it didn’t hurt that my son is a member of the Norwich class of 2000!

Marc Liebman

September 2017

Updating Amazon’s Author Central So Readers Can Learn More About My Books

Whether or not you like Amazon or not, from an author’s perspective it is the six hundred pound gorilla. If you’re not available on Amazon, it is to sell books.

For authors, Amazon has a site called Author Central. There, authors can, within limits, add more info on each book. For example, you can add reviews by professional/magazine reviewers or tell a little about why you wrote the book or provide more info on the plot and characters. Also, my blog feeds the site, so you can see it a short time after it is posted on my web site.

What I couldn’t figure out is how to get to all the content from the visitor’s page. If you type Marc Liebman in the search bar on the Amazon page, it takes you right to my books. Click on a book and you see one of the items. Why which one pops up and how to get from one to another is beyond me. I know the material is there because I checked. Amazon, it is world of promotion algorithms probably rotates them in some predetermined pattern unknown to the author.

Amazon has also added a calendar feature to the site. Its probably been there all along but I just noticed it. Unfortunately, it won’t link to my web site calendar so I am going to do it manually. Right now, I do it twice, once in Outlook and then on my web site. This will make three and if I put it on Goodreads , I will have do add the same info four times. So much for only adding data once!

What surprised me is how long it took to add all the material. A lot had to be written, some had to be re-formatted, and some, literally, had to be found in the bowels of my laptop. It took the better part of three full days of work to get it all done. Amazon says, at least on the page where you enter the data, it should take three to five days to appear.

There were some odd things about inserting the info. One was there were different pages for the Kindle and hard copy versions? They asked for the same info. So, I kept asking why?

Another oddity was on the Kindle page, there was only room for one professional review and five on the hard copy? Again why?

After all that work and saving the content I created in their recommended format, I am still finding formatting issues such as missing spaces between words, added spaces between paragraphs, etc. Even using the recommending format, there are still errors which I found incredibly frustrating and correcting them time consuming. The cause is probably only known to the IT gods and Amazon.

Apparently, Author Central is a living breathing “thing” and Amazon keeps adding more features to the page which means more work for the author and the author’s publicist.

Oh well!

Marc Liebman

September 2017

The ‘Stuff Cut’ File

You’ve probably heard the phrase “some of my best work wound up on the cutting room floor.” It comes from the movie production biz and dates back to when movie producers actually cut sections of film and spliced them together. In the process, whole or parts of scenes wound up discarded and laying on the floor.

Before I start editing a manuscript, my cutting room floor is what I call the ‘Stuff Cut’ file. Into it goes either whole scenes or large sections of a scene. The file name is ‘Stuff Cut from . As I cut and paste the material from the future novel, I type a line so I know where it came from in the story.

These ‘stuff cut’ files are not dead letter boxes where my prose goes to die. Most of the material never sees the light of day but there I times when they are very useful.

Scenario one is in a future edit, I rethink a passage and want to add the paragraphs back into the plot in a different way. During the writing and editing process, the ‘Stuff Cut’ file becomes a holding tank.  Copy goes in, copy comes out.

In scenario two, I use a section from one manuscript into another novel and modify it so it fits in the plot. Here, I’m go back through the ‘stuff cut’ files for both published and unpublished manuscripts. Sometimes it fits, sometimes it doesn’t.

Scenario three is a variation of scenario two where I am stuck either writing or editing a draft and need actual material or inspiration. The difference between scenario two and three is in two, I am looking for something specific and in three, just looking!

Right now, I am working on a manuscript called Flight of the Pawnee for a new series of books and I wanted an interesting helicopter flying scene that wasn’t combat related. It was needed to establish the main character’s flying credentials. In another Josh Haman manuscript, I’d cut it out to reduce the length and because by that time in the story, Josh Haman didn’t need any more flying creds.

The passage is based on a true story in which a helicopter from my squadron literally hoisted a very valuable racehorse out of a mudslide way back in 1973. The horse was generating stud fees at $50K a pop. If the owner couldn’t get it out, they were going to have to euthanize the animal. We got a call asking if we could help.

When I originally wrote the section, I’d gone back to the news articles on the rescue to make sure I got the basic facts right. After pasting it into Flight of the Pawnee and changing the helicopter from an HH-2D to an HH-60H; moving the location from near Red Bank, NJ to San Diego, it worked.   By the time I finished updating the historical context of the horse rescue to match the Flight of the Pawnee, I had something that was exciting reading, germane to the plot and different.

So now you know why I maintain the ‘Stuff Cut’ files for each manuscript.

Marc Liebman

August 2017

Pets and Skiing in a New Manuscript

In my latest manuscript, I’ve included passages on pets and snow skiing as something new. None of my five previous published books included material about dogs and my favorite sport, snow skiing.

I’m a “dog person.” I love them. Give me a puppy to play with and I’ll wilt and want to take him home. Dogs come up to me and want me to play with them. I guess they sense I’m an automatic friend.

Right now, we own three – two Standard Poodles and one Miniature. One of the Standards is thirteen and a half and the Miniature is fourteen plus. The other Standard turned two last March so he’s two and a half. In human years, he’s a teenager and acts like one.

We treat our dogs like children and Standard Poodles, one of the two smartest breeds (the other is a Border Collie) act like a fifteen to eighteen month human. You can talk to them, they understand and they have behaviors and sounds with which they communicate with their owners. Essentially it is, “human, I am doing this and you figure out what I want….” Usual choices are food, water, go out side to go to the bathroom but sometimes, there are other reasons.   I could bore you with stories but suffice it to say the sixteen pound Miniature is the alpha and won’t take any crap from his two larger, sixty pound brothers. When he snarls, barks or snaps at either one, they stop whatever they are doing.

Skiing. I love it and ski as much as I can. Way back in the days of my misspent youth and early years, I was a ski racer – my favorite event was downhill, the giant slalom. In a twisty-turny slalom course, I was a danger to myself and the slalom poles. I’m or at least was, a certified as a ski instructor on the U.S. and Canada. So, yes, I am a pretty good skier.

And yet, I’ve never included passages about either dogs or skiing until I wrote Flight of the Pawnee. In it, the hero owns four Standard Poodles and the heroine, one. Parallel to the love story between the humans is one between her female Poodle and one of the hero’s.

In the backstory, there’s a passage about the hero at a collegiate ski race running, guess what, a slalom. He’d finished fourth in the giant slalom the day before and was, surprise, surprise, in the top seed for the second slalom run after finishing fourth in the first. For those of you who don’t know, in slalom, each racer takes two runs on different courses and the winner is the one with the lowest combined time. To find out what happens to the hero, you’ll have to read the book.

Why did I write these scenes? They are a way to show another side of each character and make them deeper and more interesting. The skiing section was a way of suggesting to the reader the hero was a pretty good athlete without saying “he’s athletic.”

Dog lovers will want more dog scenes and to be honest, they were harder to write than the skiing one mostly before I was afraid I was going to go overboard and turn the dogs into major characters. In the latest version, I deleted about a third because I didn’t think they advanced the plot. Who knows, the publisher may want them back in.

Net net, I hope to finish the latest version of Flight of the Pawnee and look for a publisher sometime after Labor Day. With any luck, it should see the light of day sometime in 2018.

Marc Liebman

August 2017

The Petulant Child Who Leads North Korea

Kim Jong-Un is a petulant, spoiled brat who wants to get his way. He’s frustrated because other presidents and world leaders have caved in by this time.  He probably didn’t expect this reaction because he keeps making his own threats. And now, he’s in a box of his own making and the only way out is by backing down.

Think of a two year old who is sent to his room due to bad behavior and starts screaming in frustration. He/she keeps it up until the parents get tired of listening and sympathy/empathy for their child kicks in.  As a parent, you can’t give in because the child subconsciously sees it as a victory.

Kim Jong-un is not much different. Instead of pounding on the floors or the walls, he fires missiles into the ocean and makes threats aimed at the five government audiences he wants to reach.

One, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) knows sanctions imposed by the U.S. for not intervening and pressuring North Korea could cause its economy to collapse and cause widespread unrest and possibly civil war.  For the PRC’s leaders, maintaining power and regime survival is the core issue, not supporting North Korea. By making Kim Jong-Un a problem for the PRC, Trump is making it more difficult for Beijing to sit on the sidelines. And, they didn’t by telling Pyongyang, you’re on your own if you strike first.

Two, the Republic of Korea a.k.a. South Korea is now militarily superior to North Korea in almost every way except nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.  Kim knows the South Koreans have much more to lose than his Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in a war.  On the other hand, re-unification is very, very scary to the South Koreans because the cost – financial, cultural, political and social – is unknown.

Three, the U.S. We have the most to gain and lose.  If we resolve it peacefully without giving in, we win. If Trump’s strategy backfires and Kim Jong-Un fires a missile or missiles at Guam or Japan or the Aleutians, he has no choice but to react militarily.  The question is how?  The first question is the weapon nuclear, chemical, conventional or biological warhead?  If it is either or all four, then the U.S. has a another choice to make. Do we respond with one or many nuclear weapons? Or, do we respond with conventional weapons?  If the missile(s) have conventional warheads, what is our strategy?

Do we try to decapitate the regime or target his military capability? Finding Kim Jong-un will be hard, if not impossible and he’ll be well underground.

Attacking his nuclear reactors with conventional munitions risks a Chernobyl type disaster.  The DPRK’s military will go underground as soon as the missiles leave the launch pads.  So again, what do we hit and how?  This is problem the strike planners in the Pentagon have wrestled with for years.

Four, the rest of the world. Outside of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and probably the Philippines, most countries don’t have much skin in the game and would be reluctant to put financial or any kind of sanctions on the PRC to force their hand.  They, like the U.S. have become addicted to cheap Chinese manufacturing costs. Sanctions against the DPRK are already in place and the only lever left is ending their ability to export iron ore.

Fifth, last and not least are the hardliners within the DPRK.  What these guys fear most is collapse of the regime. Most are pariahs and would find it difficult to be granted asylum. If the current regime was overthrown by a faction wanting to have more normal relations with the world, they would be quickly killed or imprisoned.

The U.S. needs to stay the course. Let Kim Jong-Un rant and rave. And, as long as he doesn’t fire a missile at U.S. territory or an ally or start a war he knows he will lose, we keep him in locked in his room. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll come out with a smile on his face and change his behavior. We can always hope.

Marc Liebman

August 2017

Dreaming of a Movie

I think every novelist dreams of not only writing a bestseller and having it turned into a movie. So, let me get it this out of the way, I’m no different. And that’s where reality interferes.

Most, if not all, best sellers come from the large publishing houses. Does that mean they have the best writers? Maybe. It does mean they have the most marketing muscle to push the books, generate sales and voilà, the book is on the best seller list.

Some, but not all movies come from books. Many – don’t ask me for a percentage – are the product of a scriptwriter’s fertile imagination. There are also people reading books and unsolicited manuscripts for major movie houses looking for what could be the next blockbuster movie.

Why this sudden fascination about turning one of my books into a movie?  Well, I have taken two very small steps along this path. Out of chance – some would call it is networking – the son of one of my neighbors is in the movie business. After several conversations, he offered to introduce me to someone looking for new story ideas. His friend is a former screenwriter who is now an independent producer with ties to two of the major studios.

The first part of the conversation was disappointing. While he thought the story lines of the two books (Big Mother 40 and Forgotten) I suggested were probably worthy of a possible movie or cable series, Hollywood (in late July 2017) is looking for something ‘contemporary.’

Then we talked about my future books and I ran the plot of Flight of the Pawnee by him. It takes place in 2015. Next question was whom did I envision playing the lead role. After thinking about it for a few seconds, my answer was Matt Damon or Ben Affleck. We talked about Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks and I said no due to their age. The hero in Flight of the Pawnee is in his mid-thirties and Hanks is 61 and Cruise is 55.

Another topic. Hollywood doesn’t like giving terrorists ideas. What about the movie Black Sunday and all the Mission Impossible movies? We went back and forth on this subject for a few minutes.

He dispelled the myth ‘You need to have your novel converted to a movie script’ by telling me if you have one and the production company likes it, it will be edited and/or re-done. And, if they like your book/story idea, they’ll hire a screenwriter to turn it into a movie script.

Another question. Will the manuscript get published? My answer was yes. Now that it is done, I think it is good enough to go to a publisher. He asked when and I said end of August. Then he said he’d like to see it! Holy feces Batman! We agreed I would send him the version I send to a publisher.

Two very small baby steps have now been taken. Do I have hopes he’ll like it? Oh yeah! Do I think Flight of the Pawnee get made into a movie? One can only dream.

Marc Liebman

August 2017

Six Down and A New Series to Go

A little over two weeks ago, I sent Moscow Airlift off to Penmore Press. Hopefully they’ll take it on and we’ll get it out around the first of the year. Assuming the novel gets published, it’ll be book six in the Josh Haman series and there’s one more, almost ready to go. It’s called The Simushir Island Incident and it will be the last in the series.

Originally, I thought there would/could be nine books in the series, but after I finished the last draft of The Simushir Island Incident, I thought the ending of the story was perfect way to end the series after seven books. More on this book once I know what happens with Moscow Airlift.

                  So what’s next? Flight of the Pawnee and Manpads are going to be the first two in a new, more contemporary series built around the adventures of a new hero, Derek Almer. The only similarities between Derek Almer and Josh Haman are they are both Naval Aviators and helicopter pilots. While Josh was a career Naval Officer, Derek leaves the Navy after eleven years and becomes a contract pilot for the CIA.

Converting Flight of the Pawnee from a Josh Haman story to one featuring Derek Almer took a lot more than just using ‘find and replace’ for the names. The Josh Haman version took place in 2002 and the Derek Almer based manuscript happens in 2015.

The historical context had to change because the story in the original manuscript occurs in 2002 and the Derek Almer version occurs in 2015. In 2002, the U.S. hadn’t invaded Iraqi and bin Laden was still alive. In 2015, the U.S. is still engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan and bin Laden is dead.

All of the backstories having to all be changed. References to prior actions in Josh’s career went into the trash basket and new stories and characters along with their relationships to Derek have to be researched and written. Little things such as references to computer and phone technology have to be updated. For example, in 2002, the first iPhone was still five years in the future! In 2015, the iPhone 6 and 6S were on the market.

Location research also has to be updated. Simple things like new roads, buildings, airport updates, new models of cars, etc. all had to be factored in while keeping the plot the same. Al Qaeda wants revenge for the killing of Osama Bin Laden and wants to kill more Americans than died on 9/11. To do so, they send one of the top bomb makers to the U.S. to plan and carry out the attack.

All in all, I think I probably re-wrote about forty percent of the book. Next step is for me to read it out loud to my dogs to proof it and then it is ready to go to a publisher. In a later blog, I’ll talk more about the plot of Flight of the Pawnee and the new guy, Derek Almer.

Marc Liebman

July 2017

Poignant Reminder About What Makes This Country Great

Last week, I was honored to speak at the Los Angeles chapter of the Daedalians at their monthly luncheon. They’re an organization of current and former military pilots and aviators and I gave what I call my “Grandpa, What did you do during the Vietnam War?” talk.

The location was the Los Angeles Air Force Base – I’ll bet many of you, including me – didn’t know there was an Air Force Base in LA.   While I was speaking, I noticed two of the servers were standing in the back, long after the tables were cleared. After all the members left and I was packing my books, one of the women came up to me and tells me her son wants to apply for an NROTC scholarship and wants to be a Navy helicopter pilot. She was familiar with some of the steps, but not all of them.

I asked her the usual questions about what year of high school did he just complete (junior year); GPA (close to 4.0 including honor and AP classes); class standing (top 5%); sports (he played soccer for a club team and his high school); and leadership (captain of his club team and a class officer). As it turns out, he lives in Houston with her parents and wants to go to Texas A&M.

My thinking is the kid’s got the basic qualifications and we talked about how to apply for a ROTC scholarship with any of the services. She took some notes and asked a few questions. Satisfied, with my answers, she tells me, her son will be the first person in their family to go to college and they want to do something for the country that opened its arms to them. Curious, I asked her where was she from.

She, along with her husband and children – two boys and a girl all under the age of six – arrived from Honduras in 2004. Her husband enlisted in the Army because it was the fastest path to U.S. citizenship. I didn’t ask how she got there but to get a job on a U.S. Base, one has to be a citizen or at least have a green card.

I said welcome to the United States and she says when they left Honduras, political and particularly economic conditions were really bad. Without prompting, she tells me her family is /was one of the lucky ones who got here. In Honduras, she said America is referred to as “the cow” because people can come here and milk it to get wealthy! Then, she went on to say, “I don’t mean that in a bad way like I came to the U.S. to live on welfare, it is a place where one is free to do what one wants and if you are good and work hard, you will make a better life for your children and your grandchildren.”

It was a poignant reminder the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty. It is as true today as it was when Emma Lazarus wrote it on November 2nd, 1883. Here it is in its entirety:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Marc Liebman

July 2017