At least, Branson thought as he turned to walk away, those stains would eventually be washed away. How long, he wondered, would his memory retain the sight of body bags lined up next to the trailer, or the thought that he had, somehow, been instrumental in filling them?

CHAPTER 4

BOISE, IDAHO • MAY 18

“When we consider the framers of the Constitution, we must take into account their view of the world, not ours.” Pausing, Dr. Edmund Fallner scanned the students before him as he allowed this point to sink in. “Most of the men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 were trained in the classics. These leading Americans, the political elite of their day, were men who were desperately trying to cobble together a nation based on principles and ideas that their world had not seen practiced in centuries, if ever. Not only were they searching for solutions to issues that they themselves had been forced to wrestle with, but they were trying to anticipate problems that they could imagine. In drafting a document that would define the government of the United States and against which every law would be measured, they did not trust the judgment of others, just as they did not trust others to define for them the rights and obligations of their new nation’s citizenry.”

Pausing again as he moved out from behind the protection of his lectern, Fallner leaned on the podium and put one hand in his pocket. Gesturing with his other hand, he continued. “It should not be surprising that men like Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Hamilton, and the rest viewed themselves as modern versions of the ancient Roman patricians. They, the educated, the wealthy, and the successful, were born to rule. It was not only their right as they saw it, but their duty to do so. Unlike the huddled masses who were ignorant of the great works of Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, and Hume, Jefferson et al, had a firm grasp of what these men were saying, or so they believed.”

From her seat in the second row Nancy Kozak listened. She had long ago laid her pen down in order to concentrate on what Fallner was saying. As quickly as each new thought came in, Nancy’s mind took the idea, ripped it down to its bare essentials, examined it for a moment, then filed it away in her memory as useful, or discarded it as pure drivel. Trained by years of service in the Army, Nancy Kozak still had difficulty seeing shades of gray. Everything in her world was either black or white, right or wrong. As a graduate student, Nancy’s approach to dealing with what Fallner said was ideal.

“Jefferson, Adams, and their peers shared many traits with ancient Rome’s republican patricians,” the professor of history stated. “Both groups believed that they had civic duties that only they could discharge. Both had a fear of the masses, whom they considered fickle. And both had a love for the law, which they considered to be supreme and incontestable. So it is to the traditions of the Roman Republic, which many of our founding fathers saw as being pure, that they turned for a model, and not the corrupt, easily manipulated English system that they had so recently broken with.”