Chapter Seven
THE DAY HAD flown by like the once-mighty Concord with a tail wind. John Knox Smith had made it home by 10:30. As expected, his wife and nine-year-old son, Jack, were in bed. He could have been home sooner, but he and several of his team had decided to dine together, then go out for drinks. A small measure of guilt nagged him about his home responsibilities, but he had learned to ignore it over the years.
Sleep was still a good two hours off; his mind bubbled with excitement from the day. He slipped into his office and checked his email. He found a message from Special Agent Paul Atoms, head of the DTED Enforcement Unit and his liaison with the FBI. It contained a link to a video site that compiled news coverage from around the country. A few moments later he was watching a reporter standing in front of a stone pilaster and iron gate. A bronze plaque read: Gentle Rest Mortuary—Nashville.
John turned up the volume on his computer.
“…that’s right Tanya, I’m here in front of the Gentle Rest Mortuary where services for Rev. Theodore Benson, the clergyman who killed Ronnie Lee Jefferson as the Deputy U.S. Marshal was attempting to execute a warrant, was held a few moments ago. As our viewers are sure to recall, video of the event was recorded as the tragedy unfolded. To protect themselves, other deputies fired and killed Benson as he stood with gun still in hand.
“Jefferson was buried at Arlington several days ago, but funeral services for Benson were held up as investigators continued to gather evidence. The Reverend Pat Preston, popular minister of the megachurch Rogers Memorial Church performed the memorial and graveside services. Reporters were forbidden to attend. Many in Nashville know of Pastor Preston, as do many across the country. His sermons are available through radio, television, and over Internet media.
“All requests to interview Pastor Preston have been declined. As yet, we do not know what connection exists between the two ministers.
“This is Jerry Howard reporting.”
John hit the pause icon, silencing the report.
“Pat Preston?” John couldn’t believe his ears. How long had it been? He didn’t bother with the math. It was enough to know that he hadn’t seen Pat since they graduated from Princeton.
A bank of books stood along one wall of his home study, several hundred volumes from college, law school, and general reading he had done over the years. He kept every book he read. Each stood as a testimony to his keen mind. On the bottom shelf were several yearbooks from his time at college. He pulled the most recent from the shelf, settled into an overstuffed chair, and turned on a reading light.
Flipping through the pages, John found the class photo of Pat Preston. The image opened floodgates of memory. John had many acquaintances in college but only a few friends—two to be precise. Only two would tolerate his argumentative ways. Pat was one of them.
Thirteen years earlier
“ANYONE WHO ACTUALLY believes the Pollyanna version my opponent is defending,” John said, “has been hoodwinked by a right-wing conspiracy to hide the real motives of so-called ‘patriots.’”
John’s eyes traced the crowd in the Richardson Auditorium of Alexander Hall, reading their body language like a man reads a book. Their faces were turned toward him, eyebrows neutral, mouths relaxed. A few leaned forward and several nodded. He was pulling them in.
“If there’s any conspiracy,” Pat Preston, John’s opponent in the debate responded, “then it is perpetrated by educators who want to make you think history is irrelevant, and therefore not worthy of the time to study it. How can you expect anyone to have any interest in learning history if all students do is memorize a bunch of mind-numbing treaties and dates and events with no context? No wonder the average student’s knowledge of history is paper thin.”
Pat’s words garnered an immediate response. Some students cheered; others booed loudly. The moderator repeatedly banged the gavel, calling for order, but it was obvious this debate had hit a sore spot. When decorum returned, Pat continued,
“Most kids just blow it off. Even here on this historic campus, most students slide by without learning anything about the sacrifice made by patriots. They paid a high price for our freedom. For most students, the goal isn’t to learn about history; it’s to memorize just enough to pass the tests. Anything learned is promptly forgotten. Most of our university graduates don’t know enough history to vote responsibly or to even know what candidates should stand for or against.”
Such arguments infuriated John and his liberal friends. His impulse was to interrupt, to stop the flow of Pat’s presentation, but the rules of debate had been clearly drawn. He would have to wait his turn. All he could do now was smile as if his adversarial friend were telling jokes rather than arguing forensic points.
Pat’s limited time ticked by. It was time to start bringing the argument home. “We meet inside a place of history. Over in Nassau Hall, at the heart of Princeton University, we are surrounded by history that changed all our lives—including that of my opponent. That great memorial, Nassau Hall, once served as a barracks and a hospital for American and British soldiers at various times during the Revolutionary War. When British soldiers tried to take refuge there in 1777, a cannon ball fired by Alexander Hamilton’s men decapitated a portrait of King George. The patriots who preceded us used the frame for a portrait of George Washington. Be honest: How many of you knew that?”
Murmurs and moans floated in the air, but there were no loud protests. “If it weren’t for one of our professors who still believes that history matters—and by history I mean accurate history, not recast, reformatted, remade history—I wouldn’t have known that fact either. As Professor Roberts of the Witherspoon Philosophical Society noted, ‘Postmodern scholars have been rewriting history to fit their pet theories so much that the historical facts have been buried in a blizzard of reinterpretation.”
Pat reached beneath his podium and pulled a freshman history textbook from a shelf and held it up. “Look familiar? This text is required reading for American History. This book contains multiple-page essays on current figures in American history, all of whom turned out to be people the political left call heroes: people like John Dewey, Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, Saul Alinsky, and Noam Chomsky.
“In this text, there is a story about the Old South Church in Boston, the famous meeting hall during the American Revolution. It has since become a museum and the repository to a collection of plaster statues of all the liberal heroes who have spoken there. One is Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. It shows her wearing a gag. She often wore a gag when appearing in public to show how society was ‘oppressing’ her for her views. This book has a picture of her statue, but not a word about Sanger’s support for eugenics, her bigotry, in which she called certain parts of the human race ‘human weeds,’—faces I see in this room tonight. It makes no mention of the abortion industry she helped create.
“That alone should be enough to cause concern, but there is more.” He flipped through the pages. “Here it is, a short article about George Washington with a tiny black-and-white picture showing Jean Houdon’s famous bust of Washington. It refers to him as ‘the man some have called the father of his country.’ The essay says George Washington was a wealthy slaveholder who participated in a war to preserve his right to own slaves and increase his fortune. That is the entire coverage of America’s first constitutional president.”
For effect, Pat snapped the book shut. The sound rolled through the auditorium. “The hero of the era, according to this author, was Thomas Jefferson, who made sure the government protected the principle of ‘separation of church and state.’” Pat sighed. “As every history professor knows—or should know—Thomas Jefferson was four thousand miles away at the time and had no input into the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. When the founding fathers penned those documents, Jefferson was serving as Ambassador to France. And I hope I don’t need to tell anyone here there was no instant messaging or Internet in those days.”
Th
e comment brought laughter.
“Let’s take another step to historical accuracy.” Pat set the book down. “The phrase ‘separation of church and state’ is used a great deal today. But where did it come from and how was it originally used? It is true that Jefferson wrote those words, but he did so in a letter to a Baptist church in Danbury, Connecticut. When the entire letter is read, it is clear that Jefferson meant the federal government had no inherent right to interfere in religious matters. Were you taught that in history class?
“The document Jefferson did write,” Pat continued, “is the Declaration of Independence, and that document proclaims that our freedoms come not from kings or governments but from the Creator. President John F. Kennedy said essentially the same thing two hundred years later. Anyone who tells you the founders meant to keep religious life completely separate from public life—as my worthy opponent is doing—has swallowed the bait and hook of revisionists who wish to alter history—history you have a right to know. It’s the duty of every patriot.”
It was John’s turn to rebut and he didn’t waste a second.
“Patriots?” Although John’s podium held a microphone, he projected his voice to the back row. “Patriots? We have used that term so frequently and so haphazardly that it’s lost all meaning. One man’s patriot is another man’s terrorist. True patriots hunger for truth and balance, for equality, not a one-sided view touted by history cheerleaders waving pompoms; cheerleaders who wish to make gods of the flesh-and-blood men who wrote our early legal documents. We are educated men and women who need not fear an accurate history even if that history reveals the founding fathers to be a bunch of slaveholding rich people who didn’t like paying taxes to King George.
“The English parliament only asked our forefathers to pay a reasonable tax, just as our government demands today. The colonies were expensive to support and manage, not to mention a long way across the ocean. Furthermore, two-thirds of the colonists were against independence and never dreamed of going to war. Rich landowners pushed the British into war because they refused to pay their fair share just like so many of the wealthy today.”
John took hold of the podium and leaned forward. “We all admire the framers of the Constitution, but if we are to be intellectually honest—led by our minds and not our hearts—then we have to admit the document was written by rustics who were limited to the knowledge of their age. If they lived today, they would argue to amend the Constitution to reflect the values of our own time.”
The booing began before John had finished the sentence, but a second later applause erupted, drowning out the expressions of disfavor. Sensing the majority of the crowd shifting his way, John added, “When Jefferson wrote that ‘all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,’ he knew what he was doing: He was writing for the unwashed masses who still hung to religion, whose votes would eventually be needed. Besides, Jefferson was one of them, himself. He owned slaves, didn’t he? He was sleeping with the help and didn’t know the first thing about true equality. We may as well admit it. The past was corrupt. The founders were corrupt. There’s nothing we need to learn from the founders, except not to be like them. What matters is our ability to overcome the handicaps they created for us, from slavery to prejudice to intolerance to religious dependency.
“In 1898, H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds. Make no mistake: What we have in the intellectual community and the country at large is a ‘war of the worlds’ or better yet, a ‘war of the worldviews.’ I think it is best, I think it is noble, I think we can honor our founding fathers by being honest in our view of them and the country they started.”
JOHN CLOSED THE yearbook and let it rest on his lap. He leaned his head back against the chair and closed his eyes. Those had been good days. Their debates were often fought in places other than the university auditorium. They argued in classes, in the cafeteria, and over restaurant tables. The debates revolved around politics, history, and, most of all, religion. Of course, Pat never called it “religion.” He called it “faith.” Whatever. A rose by any other name.
Even though their interests were different, John and Pat were well acquainted at Princeton. Their mutual interest in student government often meant competing for the same leadership positions as class officers, and ultimately, in the race for class valedictorian. They often showed up at the same places at the same time, and several times took the same classes.
John wondered how a man of such keen intelligence and such superior academics could go so far wrong and chase after myths and legends in the church. Truth was, as great a student as John was, Pat was better. The difference lay in individual ambition: John had it, and Pat didn’t.
He could still replay the give-and-take they had over religion. Pat would listen to John’s well-reasoned arguments but never seemed influenced by them. Instead he quoted from the works of C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Russell Kirk, but never descended into personal argument. It was one thing to debate on stage, but another to be offensive face-to-face. John still suspected that Pat feared driving him away from God, as if he hadn’t already traveled far away enough. He never pushed his advantage. In fact, he often deferred to John whenever they came to an impasse—except on spiritual matters.
Both ran for class president their senior year and it looked as if it were going to be a hard-fought race. But rather than go against John publicly, Pat decided to run for vice president, leaving the top job for his opponent and friend. Mid-way through their last semester, they learned both were finalists for class valedictorian. They had precisely the same grade point average.
To settle the tie, the university president asked faculty members to vote for the student they believed to be most deserving of the title. Knowing this, John went to Professor Saul Peterson, and the two of them had begun lobbying the faculty. Eventually, enough of the faculty agreed to vote for John to assure his victory. If Pat felt slighted or resentful, he never let on to John.
Pat’s humility kept John unsettled. He knew how to deal with ambitious people but not humble ones.
Within hours of graduation, Pat returned to his family home in Owensboro, Kentucky, and spent the summer working with his dad at the mill. John spent a few days with his father in Colorado before heading to Cambridge.
John lowered his feet from the desk, set the yearbook aside, and played the news report again. “What are you doing, Pat? What are you getting yourself into? How can you perform a religious service for a man who killed a federal law enforcement officer? A man with a family?”
John dictated a note to himself using his smartphone: “Have team look into Pat Preston.”