Authors: Michael Bowen
“Not much,” Phillips said.
“A small thing,” Michaelson agreed. “But all there is. Thanks for providing the electronics. I'd pitch in on packing it up, but I'd probably break something.”
“Don't bother,” Phillips said. “Just answer one more question.”
“Shoot.”
“What are you going to demand from Connaught when he calls tomorrow?”
“A medal,” Michaelson said.
I was delighted to get Willie a ticket for this,” Michaelson whispered to Marjorie eleven weeks later. “But I can't imagine why he wanted to come.”
“Soaking up atmosphere,” Marjorie said. “He's working on a movie script.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes indeed. A thriller revolving around a politically sensitive document hidden in a crate of German sausage.”
“Remarkable,” Michaelson said. “A wurst-case scenario.”
“That's his title.”
They shut up then and rose because a stentorian voice said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
The president was in good form, as usual. The setting helped. The East Room of the White House, the seal on the podium, the reporters and camcorders crowding the seats, the flags, the sunshine from the Rose Garden window, the marine guards in dress blues. It all conspired to produce just the right pitch of understated solemnity.
The lists of accomplishments for each of the seven people behind him had certainly been written by someone else, certainly not been glimpsed by the presidential eye until minutes before he stepped to the rostrum. Yet he read it as if he'd penned every syllable himself. Now he'd reached the climax of the ceremony.
“And so it is my high honor and distinct privilege to recognize the remarkable contributions of each of these distinguished Americans with our nation's highest civilian decoration, the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” he said. “First, James Terence Halliburton.”
A discreet attendant pushed Halliburton's wheelchair forward. Halliburton wore a lustrous navy blue suit, a white shirt, and a blue silk tie with broad red diagonal stripes. Blue-faced cuff links stamped in silver with the seal of the United States Department of State showed just below his coat sleeves. His black wingtips had been buffed to a mirrorlike shine. Every strand of his thinning hair was in place. If you hadn't heard him chatting a few minutes before the ceremony about how Nixon couldn't be counted out, you might confidently have sent him into a negotiation over anything from fishing rights to hostages.
Smiling warmly, the president leaned over the wheelchair and pinned the medal to Halliburton's left lapel. Shutters snapped. Electronic flashes flashed. The president spoke a few confidential words, getting heaven knew what response from Halliburton. Then he shook the older man's hand amidst more snaps and flashes and stepped back to the podium.
That was it. Michaelson studied Halliburton's eyes intently during the exchange, hoping desperately to spot some flicker of lucidity, however brief, some precious interval of understanding. And he saw one. He was sure of it. He wasn't given to kidding himself and he felt confident of his judgment.
He sat back in his folding chair, satisfied. It was a small thing, done well.
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The historical premise underlying
Collateral Damage
is accurate. Free persons of color lived and worked in Maryland and elsewhere in the antebellum South, and in some cases they owned slaves and exploited the labor of those slaves in the same way that white slaveowners did. As one detailed treatment of the subject explains:
Although the academic community is fully aware that there were Afro-American slave masters, their existence is not common knowledge among the public. Most Americans, black and white, believe that slavery was a system exclusively maintained by whites to exploit black people. But in fact Afro-Americans played a small yet significant role in the annals of the peculiar institution as slave masters. Many black Americans of the antebellum period believed that slavery was a viable economic system and exploited the labor of black people for profit. In Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves, according to the federal census of 1830.
Larry Kroger,
Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790â1860
(University of South Carolina Press, 1985), 1.
The story's technical premise is also authentic. The exit method demonstrated by Michaelson was empirically verified by physical experiment before publication. Readers who would like to examine time-lapse photographs documenting the experiment may obtain them without charge by sending a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Cold Coast Productions, P.O. Box 510015, Milwaukee, WI 53202. Readers who would like to examine a videotape documenting the experiment may obtain it by sending a check or money order in the amount of $15 to the same address.
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