Jacob Fine believes in God. He believes that every soul that comes into this world is preordained with an individual symmetry or pattern that he or she will go through life with. Choices that are made during one's lifetime, for good or evil, have been preordained as well. Lucky or unlucky, wealth or poverty, happiness or sadness, health or sickness, marriage, children, and all the stages of life that one goes through have been written already, as the saying goes.

His mother gave birth to him in 1926, a screaming eight pounder. His father knew immediately that his son would make a mark in this world. Jacob was brought up in a secular Jewish household. The family would observe the major holidays rather informally. Jacob went through the usual Bar Mitzvah ritual. He had no siblings, and the family enjoyed a nice, comfortable life in a middle-class suburb of Chicago.

Jacob went to law school. He was brilliant, was brash, had political ambitions, and graduated with honors, and he immediately started practicing his profession in a medium-sized law firm.

On a Monday morning in the late 1950s, he received a subpoena, and what followed would help define his impending career. He stared at the order as waves of excitement and anticipation consumed him. He was ordered to appear before Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, DC, on Thursday morning. He smiled and then remembered that it was written, just as he was taught to believe.