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This chapter emphasizes the collaborative nature of conspiracies of silence, illustrating how each conspirator's actions are symbiotically complemented by the others'. Breaking a conspiracy of silence involves acknowledging the presence of the elephant in the room, by making the elephant's presence part of the public discourse. Publicity critically acts in preventing and counteracting denial. Like silence itself, breaking it is a collaborative endeavor that involves an entire social system. For a conspiracy of silence to actually end, there ultimately need to be no more conspirators left to keep it alive. The situation of being in a minority and facing the majority's pressure to maintain a conspiracy of silence becomes more pronounced as the number of conspirators increases. Conspirators of silence may try to actively divert attention away from silence breakers or ask everybody around to “move on” and not “dwell on” the elephants they exposed.

This chapter examines the history of Ireland during and after the Easter Uprising in 1916. It highlights the failure of the authorities to move against the conspirators and attempts to understand why the Irish allowed Ireland to deteriorate for years before making a move. The chapter discusses the economic benefits of the war for Ireland and Eoin MacNeill's recognition of the possibility of an uprising as early as February 1916.

This chapter explores the nature of the military tribunal that weighed the fate of the conspirators—with a different goal in mind. It illuminates the important questions its work raised (and continues to raise) on the issue of constitutional due process, deficient at many junctures during the conspirators' trial. Strikingly, the questions about such tribunals in Lincoln's day mirror those confronting Americans in the 21st century. The chapter thus serves as backdrop to the use of military tribunals, and the due process to be accorded the accused, in the modern wars on terror. The lessons of yesterday, as always, offer potentially valuable insights into the problems of today.

This chapter discusses the legal ramifications of the use of a military court to try the Lincoln conspirators. It notes that, after a war that cost 620,000 lives—Northern and Southern—Americans were traumatized as never before. It shows how the staggering death toll profoundly affected the pursuit, imprisonment, and trial of the assassins. The use of a military commission to try them was a rational decision in 1865, and the commission proved more objective than a civil trial might have been at the time. Nevertheless, the emotions of the moment had much impact on the proceedings. To show this, the chapter focuses particularly on the later trial of John Surratt, the son of the conspirator Mary Surratt, who, unlike his mother, escaped conviction at a civil trial because of a hung jury. Surratt's release fueled the impression that the 1865 military commission had been biased in favor of the prosecution. It is argued that the major difference between the two trials was the less frenzied environment that prevailed in 1867.

This chapter provides a discussion on the treatment of Clement VII and the Sack of Rome. It is suggested that the events in Rome caused Clement to relive the tragic assassination of his father, Giuliano de' Medici, during the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478. Clement's diplomacy after the Sack of Rome shows a profound awareness of the Laurentian legacy and of the memory and myth of the Laurentian “golden age,” which had come to occupy such a large place in the consciousness of Florentine intellectual circles after 1494. Clement was not always the target of conspiracy; he was a conspirator, too. He turned to the past in his moment of crisis. The fact that the past failed him only testifies to those broader political and cultural changes that were then gathering force in Europe.

New World Order theory claimed to provide an overarching explanation for contemporary politics by fitting all events into a single scenario: a diabolically clever and unscrupulous secret organization was in the process of seizing control of the world. The New World Order came to include highly specific claims about both the identities of the conspirators and the means they would employ to seize power and defeat their opponents. Among the latter techniques, three allegations were particularly significant: that black helicopters are tangible evidence of the conspiracy's existence, that a network of concentration camps is being readied to incarcerate dissenters, and that a technology of mind control has been developed in order to make the rest of the population docile and malleable. New World Order beliefs had the special advantage of speaking with equal force to both the religiously and the secularly inclined.

This chapter studies the naming strategy used by John Dos Passos. It looks at Josephine Herbst, one of the people he named when he was visited by the FBI. It takes a look at the Robles affair and Dos Passos' fictionalizing of Herbst as Georgia, one of the characters in The Grand Design. The chapter also takes a look at this novel, which hunts out the actual culprits of the Cold War and singles out the way the alliance with the Soviet Union and the Popular Front supported Communist conspirators in Washington to become key players in the radical cryptologizing of the New Deal administration.

This chapter examines doctrines attributing liability to an actor who has not fulfilled all the objective elements of an offense. Doctrines imposing anticipatory liability for trying to commit crimes include the inchoate offenses of attempt, solicitation, and conspiracy to commit some other offense. Doctrines imposing participatory liability for helping or encouraging others to commit crimes include complicity and liability as a co-conspirator, perpetrator-by-means, or supervisor. Most of these doctrines require actors liable under them to have at least as much culpability as is required for the commission of the offense. These doctrines are all relatively modern. For some of these doctrines the conduct required has diminished over time. The rise and expansion of these doctrines illustrates the general movement of American criminal law toward more subjective standards of liability.