MARK PACER is an outsider from Mocking Bird, Georgia, when he arrives in Washington, D.C. for diplomatic training in 1976. His fellow Georgian, Jimmy Carter, is running for president, and the Vietnamese conflict has ended, but legacies remain from war protesters and hippies.Mark's academic credentials from a Southern university are brilliant, but he pronounces words like "my" with an accent as long as the distance from Mocking Bird to the Atlantic...