Code Breaker Contest Number 5!!

How many letters are in the first word?

Exactly!

Is there a key to determine word length?

I'm going to go ahead and post this before someone else beats me to it:

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid" - [D]wight D. Eisenhower
I don't know if the coded phrase was missing the "D" for Dwight or if Moe was being sneaky by having the d that ends timid also start Dwight! I don't see how one determines word length (I've tried several possibilities to no avail), but if you treat ALL numbers and special characters as weeds (nod to actress) and only decode the letters you get the phrase above (see chart below). I was going to wait until Moe answered the previous question to see if there even IS a way to determine the word break boundaries, but that Franklin was looking too good, and he did say no random guesses without ANY explanation. If there is a way to determine word length this is at least SOME explanation. If not, this is the WHOLE explanation.

A = F
B = S
C = ?
D = C
E = O
F = K
G = U
H = I
I = ?
J = M
K = H
L = T
M = ?
N = D
O = A
P = G
Q = L
R = ?
S = E
T = ?
U = ?
V = R
W = N
X = W
Y = ?
Z = Y

Thanks!

I did notice that the number "32" was in every seven character word and was only in one other place, the ten character word Eisenhower. I am also curious if the sharing of the "d" in timid with the "d" in Dwight was intentional and was in some way supposed to show me how to determine the length of the words from the beginning for the quote but count backwards from the end for the name. I tried looking for clues embedded in the words and tried it by stripping out the weeds and processing them separately. I tried looking at only symbols, only numbers, only pairs of numbers, only numbers preceding letters, etc., but then maybe those weeds are just weeds!

I tried studying the portion "to the weak or the" to look for embedded clues.

LE37&
LKS56
XS%$OF3#
EV
LKS67
N3X#H

The word "TO" could be 3#EV, but for the two "THE"s there is a letter immediately before them from the previous word, so if the clue is embedded, it would have to be the numbers at the end. This section convinced me the word length key was probably not embedded in the words themselves so I looked at the weeds separate from the words to hopefully find a pattern. If it's there, I couldn't find it.

good work.

my brain is still melting by the way.
I always enjoy these codebreakers.

Darn it! You beat me to it . However you are incorrect for #1.

Mary Louise Parker is more significant here because of her role in weeds which shows that some of the parts of the message are weeds or are not needed.

Am I right now?!?!?!