Guilty As Hell. Free As A Bird.

I'm An Optimist In My Heart - I'm A Hopeless Pollyanna Just Like My Mother - But A Pessimist In My Head. I Think That's The Dialectic We All Need To Be In.

I Knew Barack Obama, Absolutely. And I Knew Him Probably As Well As Thousands Of Other Chicagoans.

I Don't Know That I Ever Bought Into The "american Dream." I Was A Child Of Privilege. I Grew Up In The '50s And It Was A Quiet Time In America, At Least On The Surface And I Grew Up In A Kind Of Feathery Bed Of Privilege.

It Transmitted Because On The Campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Was Recruiting, Was Organizing. Students For A Democratic Society Was Founded At Michigan Just A Couple Years Before I Got There. So, There Was A Kind Of A Churning Of Political Awareness. It Was Just Beginning.

The Fact Is That In My Prep School, I Went To A Boarding School, 39 Young Men Graduated From That Prep School. Five Years Later, A Quarter Of Us Were In Sds, In Students For Democratic Society. Not Because We Were Particularly Chosen Or Because We Were As I Say, We Were Lucky But We Were Mainly Luckily To Grow Up At A Time Where This Black Freedom Movement Was Really Defining The Moral Character Of What It Meant To Be A Citizen And A Person.