In the Name of the Son

And sure enough — the Internet triggering other media — within an hour, TV and print descended full bore: For five days and five nights, some 50 TV trucks camped outside the Bergs’ house, in a development a few miles outside West Chester, keeping their noisy, smelly generators going late.

It was unseasonably hot in early May, and the Bergs’ windows were open — no A.C. because it was Nick, who had an apartment in downtown West Chester, they needed to haul the window units down from the attic. Broadcast antennas poked through the tops of oak trees; technicians and reporters broke out lawn chairs to wait out some goodies from the devastated family. Their spotlights shone in above a dining room half-curtain, trying to catch Michael and his family in some pathetic act of mourning.

The first day, Michael honored his family’s need for privacy, stayed holed up with them and avoided the shouted questions whenever they’d poke outside. “Nobody is going to talk from the family ever again!” Sara, a Virginia lawyer, screamed at the assembled throng. Michael still went on his morning bike rides — that was his reprieve, his peace. The media let him pedal off alone. But then, coming back from the West Chester Y the third morning, it dawned on him that he wanted to speak — to talk about Nick and what he was doing in Iraq (there were wild theories, that he was in the CIA, that he was an Israeli spy) and to have his say. So he gave it to them — all those microphones and booms thrust around him in a neat semicircle on the edge of his property: “Nicholas Berg died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.”

Demands for more flooded in, as his family begged him not to speak. Michael was careful at first, rejecting the Today Show and Larry King — at that point, he was so far off the media map that he had never even heard of Larry King, who wanted him to fly to L.A. to tape a show before Nick was buried. He found a sign in the garage — WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER — to plant in the front lawn; it would show up in news shots of the house, he figured. He did NPR and BBC interviews, outlets he thought he could trust, avoiding the agendas of corporate-owned media.