Shadow of Power Read Free

Discovery of a secret letter—
    Footnotes to the Declaration?”
    “All of that is true,” said Scarborough. “But there’s something else.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I’m not at liberty to say right now.”
    “Either you trust me or you don’t,” said the agent.
    Scarborough’s silence answered the question for him.
    “In time you’ll know everything,” he said eventually.
    “Yes, come death, we’ll all know the riddles of life,” said Bonguard. He hated the Zen-like conundrums of this guy. Terry Scarborough was like the kid in the clubhouse who always had the biggest secret and wanted everybody to pound the crap out of him to get it because it made him feel important.
    As he looked at his client in the mirror, the thought crossed Bonguard’s mind that maybe Scarborough was talking to another agent. In his business, especially in the stratosphere where they were playingnow, you always had to look for poachers dangling the prospect of a better deal. It was the reason Bonguard was glued to him on this book tour. You never want to let a $22 million prick walk around alone.
    “After the show we can talk about a few details. We won’t have to worry about chasing the media. They’ll be coming to us,” said Scarborough.
    “Yeah. A year early,” said Bonguard. “In this business, timing is everything.”
    “I’m getting tired listening to the same song. The J letter is national poison, and there’s no expiration date on the bottle,” said Scarborough.
    People in the White House were already pulling their hair out over the first book, and there was nothing they could do. It could only get worse when the J letter was revealed.
    Strangely enough, the controversy that Scarborough had ignited with the current book swirled around arcane language in the Constitution. Like original sin, the words had been there since the beginning, since 1787, the year the Constitution was first adopted. They had been overridden by a civil war and later amendments, but they were still there.
    The words may have been dead-letter law, but to a generation sensitized to racial slight they were offensive. And because of the peculiar manner in which the Constitution is published, they were still visible in public print, right there in the organic law of the nation. They were the original words of slavery.
    To a broad public unschooled in the stylistic nuances of codebooks and statutes, the vast majority of Americans, the fact that these shame-filled words and their hidden meanings still graced their Constitution was news the minute Scarborough published his book and took to the trail on his publicity tour. Suddenly people who had been outraged that some states could even consider flying the Confederate flag were confronted with words that confirmed African American bondage and defined black people as “three-fifths” of a human being, and then only for purposes of voting by their white slave masters. The public outrage, in black communities, in colleges and universities across the country, exploded.
    Slavery may have ended, but the stigma and the sudden reminderthat it was embedded in the Constitution brought back history with a vengeance. The words were there for all time, for their children and grandchildren, for all of posterity to read.
    The problem was that government was powerless to remove the offending words. Republicans and Democrats all stumbled over themselves trying to placate the African American community. There were resolutions of comfort in Congress. The president had done everything but go on national television to offer a public apology. He had been quoted, while heading to Marine One on the White House lawn, as saying, “We’re all looking very hard at this, in a bipartisan way.” He talked as if words engraved in the Constitution more than two hundred years ago had suddenly uncoiled themselves, slipped up behind the entire country, and strangled us all in our beds.
    Without realizing it, the founders had