Good Writing, Research Make Book Riveting

“Every Knee Shall Bow: The Truth and Tragedy of Ruby Ridge and the Randy Weaver Family” By Jess Walter (HarperCollins, 375 pages, $23)

Like the sermons of a firebreathing redeemer, the title of Jess Walter’s first book speaks of a religion that will tolerate no other before it.

The Old Testament message is pure King James, lifted from Isaiah 45:23: “I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me, every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.”

And in that Bible passage, folks, is the theme that Walter develops with consummate skill in his non-fiction study of people-vs.-government, called “Every Knee Shall Bow: The Truth and Tragedy of Ruby Ridge and the Randy Weaver Family.”

The central nature of that theme is deceptively simple: Blind obedience is the way to salvation.

This is hardly an original sentiment, yet in Walter’s hands it pulsates with irony. To what power, he asks, do we owe ultimate obedience, the Old Testament version of the God called Yahweh or the federal government of the United States?

After all, he says, either road can lead to death, especially for the defiant. And while Yahweh may kill only the spirit, the feds - as we all know by now - can, and will, kill the body.

History has taught us this about governments. Yet if anyone needed reminding, the 1992 siege on that remote hilltop in North Idaho called Ruby Ridge provided all the requisite proof. It was there that a small army of law officers waged war with a white separatist named Randy Weaver, his wife, son, three daughters, friend and family dog.

The rest of the country is now learning more about the incident as Weaver and others testify before a U.S. Senate committee investigating the incident.

They would do just as well, perhaps even better, to read Walter’s book. For Walter insists on telling the story - from both sides - and he doesn’t torture anyone with political grandstanding.

Working from hundreds of pages of official documents and having culled the personal recollections of many of those actually involved, Walter has constructed a book that rivals any work of its kind. This is the match even of Jack Olsen’s best book, “Give a Boy a Gun,” which just happens to be the study of another anti-government figure, Claude Dallas.

Walter provides the whole sordid story. He gives us the childhood of Weaver’s wife, Vicki, an Iowa farm girl who learned early on to view government with distrust. He portrays her courtship with Randy Weaver, the Army veteran whose Green Beret training later made him seem more dangerous than he ever really was. We learn about their growing belief in a curious Old Testament version of Christianity that proves to be anti-Semitic, racist and, ultimately, separatist and paranoid.

Walter puts the reader next to the Weavers as they head for Idaho and, ultimately, end up on Ruby Ridge. With their radical beliefs underscored by Vicki’s religious visions, the Weavers see this isolated spot as a perfect place to wait out the coming end of civilization.

But the end doesn’t come right away.

Instead, the family endures years of struggle on its mountaintop retreat, making friends easily and losing them just as easily. Separated from Vicki’s family back in Iowa, the Weavers become even more cut off from mainstream society - living off their garden, home-schooling the children and earning whatever they can by logging and whatever odd jobs that Randy can find.

When it does come, the end arrives in the shape of a self-fulfilling prophecy: Attracted by Randy’s anti-government status, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) decide to target him. Weaver accommodates them by selling an ATF informant a pair of sawed-off shotguns.

Weaver himself isn’t the ultimate target. He is considered merely a potential infiltrator of the group that would eventually become the Militia of Montana. Whatever their intent, though, the feds face a problem when Weaver refuses to cooperate.

Instead, he retreats to his cabin and dares the government to come and get him. Which, eventually, they do.

And then in quick progression, through an incredible morass of bureaucratic bumbling, bad decision-making and unfortunate miscommunication, U.S. Marshal William Degan, 14-year-old Sammy Weaver and his mother Vicki are dead.

Eventually, Randy and his remaining family come down from the mountain. The remainder of Walter’s book involves the government’s mostly unsuccessful attempt to convict them of a menu of crimes that could have earned Randy and family friend Kevin Harris the death penalty.

Throughout, Walter writes between the lines. Adamant in his intent to seek the truth, he avoids the easy answers offered by both sides.

In the passage describing the initial shootout, for example, he strikes a middle ground: “In a thicket of who-shot-first stories,” he writes, “both sides agreed that everything just went to hell.”

Walter’s fairness would lead a reasonable person to believe that the Weavers bear some responsibility for their misfortunes. Their bunker-mentality paranoia amounted to a near death-wish.

Yet while he pays respects to the deceased Degan and a few other federal officers both as family men and law officers doing their duty, Walter also works hard to demonstrate that the siege at Ruby Ridge represented government abuse at its worst.

Much of that abuse centers on the FBI’s so-called “rules of engagement,” which were changed unaccountably to fit the Weaver siege. Based on inaccurate information, believing that U.S. marshals were themselves under siege, FBI officials changed the rules from purely defensive measures to those resembling open warfare.

Thus the specific wording “could be the subject of deadly force” evolved to “can and should be the subject of deadly force.”

That is the directive that the FBI snipers took with them into the trees and rocky outcroppings surrounding the Weaver cabin on Ruby Ridge. It is the directive that is now at the heart of the Senate investigation, which, partisan politics aside, is causing the higher levels of the FBI to scramble in shame.

But all of this is in the book, and all of it is better presented than it ever could be here. Walter, who at age 30 has covered a variety of beats during his nine-year career as a reporter for The Spokesman-Review, is too much a pure writer to let “Every Knee Shall Bow” become a simple recitation of the siege and resulting trial.

Much of the book reads like a novel, complete with strong narrative flow, colorful characters and, always, Walter’s fresh prose.

“The sun bakes the forest floor and the crowns of ponderosa pines until nightfall, when the tired heat slips away and the deep chill of granite bedrock refills the forest,” Walter writes of the area around Ruby Ridge. “Cold gusts run like liquid off those wooded peaks, merging into wind-whipped rivers of air that can tip the plume from a cabin woodstove and defy common sense by dragging smoke downhill.”

In addition, with a true reporter’s eye Walter provides the minutiae that should please every voyeur among us. Walter tells us, for example, what Degan packed into his pants pockets on the last morning of his life (a Camel Club lighter, a pack of Kools, three $100 bills, a $10 bill and three ones).

We learn that one skinhead supporter of the Weavers wet his pants when arrested by federal agents. We learn, too, that the Weavers’ dog Striker, killed in the initial shootout, lay on the road and was run over 27 times by armored personnel carriers.

As for characters, Walter couldn’t have created a more colorful cast, from the complex mix of love and hatred that was Vicki Weaver to the blend of bombast and legal prescience that is Gerry Spence, the buckskin-wearing, attention-seeking attorney from Wyoming who defends Randy in court.

But in doing all this, Walter labors to be fair. Instead of using what has become the Joe McGinniss (“The Last Brother”) style of nonfiction journalism, which amounts to created dialogue and imagined thoughts, Walter uses only language from taped recordings or interviews with the people being quoted.

The result is as balanced a retelling of a headline-causing event as you’re apt to find anywhere.

As Walter writes, “You come to the Weaver story along the same trail Randy and Vicki took, from the heart of Christian Iowa to the deep woods of North Idaho. There is much to ponder along the way - the accountability of government and the danger of paranoia, the villainy of coincidence and the desperate need to decide, every day all over again, where our society’s lines will be drawn.”

, DataTimes