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 to
see precisely how he could help. He had personally brought a shipment
of food and medicine to one country, only to discover there was no way
to transport it to the interior regions. He had watched, helpless, as
looters stripped his “care” package clean. Then he started working as
an unpaid fund-raiser for humanitarian organizations ranging from CARE
to Catholic Relief Services. He had done well, but the dollars
amounted to a drip into a bottomless bucket. The numbers were not in
their favor; the problem was only getting worse.
That’s when Buchanan turned to his mastery of Washington. He had left
the firm he had founded, taking only one person with him: Faith
Lockhart. For the last decade his clients, his wards, were the most
impoverished countries in the world. In truth, it was difficult for
Buchanan to regard them as geopolitical units; he saw them as fragile
clusters of devastated people under various flags who had no voice. He
had dedicated the remainder of his life to solving the unsolvable
problem of the global have-nots.
He had used all of his immense lobbying skills and contacts in
Washington, only to find that these new causes paled in popularity to
those he had represented before. When he had gone to Capitol Hill as
an advocate of the powerful, the politicians had greeted him with
smiles, no doubt with visions of campaign contributions and PAC dollars
dancing in their heads. Now they gave him nothing. Some members of
Congress bragged that they didn’t even have passports, that the United
States already spent far too much on foreign aid. Charity starts at
home, they had said, and let’s damn well keep it there.