Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

Carolina tobacco grower, hooked up his jeep to a John
Deere tractor festooned with banners and an inverted U.S.
flag and towed it to Washington, D.C., to protest
government policies he thought were putting tobacco
farmers out of business.
When Watson got to the capital, he pulled his tractor into
a pond between the Washington Monument and the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial and threatened to blow it up
with the “organophosphate” bombs he claimed were inside.
The capital went into lockdown as the police blocked off
an eight-block area from the Lincoln Memorial to the
Washington Monument. Coming just months after the
Beltway sniper attacks and alongside the buildup to the Iraq
War, the ease with which Watson threw the nation’s capital
into turmoil freaked people out.
Talking on his cell phone, Watson told the Washington
Post that he was on a do-or-die mission to show how
reduced subsidies were killing tobacco farmers. He told the
Post that God had instructed him to stage his protest and he
wasn’t going to leave.
“If this is the way America will be run, the hell with it,”
he said. “I will not surrender. They can blow [me] out of the
water. I’m ready to go to heaven.”
The FBI deployed me to a converted RV on the National
Mall, where I was to guide a team of FBI agents and U.S.
Park Police as we tried to talk Watson out of killing himself
and who knows how many others.
And then we got down to business.