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where the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher. As a Capitol Hill hired gun, he had successfully represented environmental polluters in battles with the EPA, allowing them to spread death to an unsuspecting public; he had been the lead political strategist for pharmaceutical giants who had killed moms and their kids; next a passionate advocate for gun makers who didn’t care if their weapons were safe; then a behind-the-scenes player for automobile manufacturers who would rather fight than admit they were wrong on safety issues; and finally, in the mother of all cash cows, he had spearheaded the efforts of tobacco companies in bloody wars with everyone. Back then Washington could not afford to ignore him or his clients. And Buchanan had earned an enormous fortune.
    Many of the strategies he had concocted during that time had become staples of current legislative manipulation. Years ago he had had congressmen float bills on the House floor he knew would be defeated, in order to rip away platforms for change later. Now that tactic was routinely employed in Congress. Buchanan’s clients hated change. He had constantly fought rearguard actions as those who wanted what his clients had nipped at his heels. How many times had he avoided outright political disaster by flooding members’ offices with letters, propaganda, thinly veiled threats to drop financial support? “My client will support you for reelection, Senator, because we know you’ll do right by us. And, by the way, the contribution check is already in your campaign account.” How many times had he said those words?
    Ironically, it was the spoils of lobbying for the powerful that had led to a dramatic change in Buchanan’s life over ten years ago. His original plan had been to build his career first and then settle down with a wife and raise a family. Deciding to see the world before he took on these responsibilities, Buchanan had driven through western Africa in a sixty-thousand-dollar Range Rover on a photography safari. In addition to the beautiful animals, he had seen squalor and human suffering of unmatched depth. On another trip, to a remote region of the Sudan, he had witnessed a mass burial of children. An epidemic had swept the village earlier, he was told. It was one of the devastating diseases that routinely afflicted the area, killing off the young and elderly. What was the disease? Buchanan had asked. Something like measles, he was told.
    Another trip he had watched as billions of American-produced cigarettes were unloaded on Chinese docks, to be consumed by people who already spent their lives wearing masks because of abysmal air pollution. He was witness to birth-control devices that had been banned in the United States being dumped by the hundreds of thousands in South America with one set of instructions written only in English. He had viewed shacks next to skyscrapers in Mexico City, starvation next to crooked capitalists in Russia. Though he had never been able to go there, North Korea, he knew, was a certified gangster state where it was believed that ten percent of the population had starved to death in the last five years. Every country had its schizophrenic story to tell.
    After two years of this “pilgrimage,” Buchanan’s passion for marriage, having a family of his own, had evaporated. All the dying children he had seen became his children, his family. Fresh graves would still come by the millions for the young, the old, the starving of the world, but not without a fight that had become his. And he brought to it all that he had, more than he had ever given to the tobacco, chemical and gun behemoths. To this day he recalled in precise detail how this revelation of sorts had come: returning from a trip to South America, an airplane lavatory, him on his knees, his stomach sickened. It was as though he had personally murdered every dying child he had seen on that continent.
    With eyes freshly opened, Buchanan started marching to these places