NEW YORK, 1967.(Column)

By October of 1965, I could watch the opposition to the war in Vietnam forming up outside my bedroom window. Nearly a thousand American troops had already died in the faraway fighting, which looked so close on our TV screens every night, and upward of a hundred and forty thousand--drafted inner-city blacks and down-home white country boys, by the look of them--were there, without notable result. A month later, my wife, Carol, and I joined friends and strangers aboard a bus that took us in a caravan to Washington, where we became part of twenty-five thousand antiwar demonstrators outside the White House and then over on the lawns sloping up toward the Capitol, where we cheered speeches by Bella Abzug and Benjamin Spock and others, and even slipped away for a furtive cultural visit to the Smithsonian. We hated this blood-soaked war--for weeks at a stretch it seemed as if nothing else were on our minds--but the tone aboard the bus trip and during that long day's outing was upbeat, almost lighthearted. Our companions--my old college pal Spencer Klaw (he'd been the editor of the Harvard Crimson) and his wife, Bobbie, who was Carol's associate at American Heritage, and the Klaws' youngest daughter, Margy--were friends we sometimes joined in November for football games in New Haven and Cambridge, and this embarrassing sense of overlap and gala middle-class smugness about our protest was something we noticed and, in our ironic self-awareness, remarked on. War protesting was more fun than Ivy League football. When our bus stopped at one of the mall-like gas stations on the New Jersey Turnpike, it was a big laugh when the women aboard (who outnumbered us men by about three to one) liberated the men's rest room. If we sound naive now, it would be easy to assume that the most pathetic thing about us was our notion that we might make a difference, and change things. Only we did.

Caring about Vietnam made you feel good, and it brought you closer to your kids, as well. My older daughter, Callie, was a student at Goucher College, outside Baltimore, just then, and she came along on another weekend, when we joined a crowd of picketers walking slowly around the White House and chanting, "Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids have you killed today?" We'd voted for Johnson, of course, and had been big fans of his, going back to his time as Senate Majority Leader, but all that was gone now. At some point that day, our slovenly bunch came close to a trail of sightseers, docilely lined up to visit the White House, and Callie suddenly found herself face to face with a long bygone schoolmate.

"Callie, what are you doing here?" the ...