John Roberts and the Lines of Fire

Who says there were no smoking guns in the John Roberts White House papers?

While other reporters at the Reagan Library jostled for the boxes labeled "abortion" or "civil rights," we got stuck with presidential proclamations from 1983. But looky here . . .

First page: A man gets his legs machine-gunned out from under him.

Next-to-last page: A Czech cop stands over the dead body of a KGB agent, "his gun smoking."

In between: explosions, detainee abuse, premarital nooky.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, as you vote Thursday, we ask you to consider what the chief justice nominee apparently spent some of his time working on: "The Killing Zone," a screenplay treatment for a Cold War thriller never filmed.

The author, we hasten to add, was not Roberts but one Dana Rohrabacher , then a little-known surfer dude turned presidential speechwriter with Hollywood dreams. What on earth was his work doing in the Roberts files?

Rohrabacher, now the nine-term Republican congressman from Orange County, Calif., laughed when asked. He remembers telling his White House colleague about his screenplay, and Roberts wanted to see it.

"There were a lot of people in the White House who felt threatened by the input of the writers," recalled Rohrabacher, who has written other screenplays and last year got $23,000 for the rights to "Baja," the story of an Iraq war veteran and a liberal doctoral student on a Mexican road trip. "But John was someone who appreciated the creative element."

"The Killing Zone" tells the story of hard-bitten American journalist "Bob Turner," who learns the value of freedom and democracy after falling in love with beautiful Czech actress "Andrea Veritas" and ( spoiler alert! ) deciding to help her flee the communists. Sample dialogue:

Andrea: Why can't you just leave us alone? . . .

Zilovich: If you didn't want to be left alone and went along with the program, we could leave you alone. But because you insist on being individuals instead of part of the collective, that is precisely why we are forced to act.