For all the wrong reasons, I loved politics and plunged into the campaign fight. Shivering in the October winds, outside a supermarket (“Hello, would you like some LBJ matches?”), Youth for Johnson tried hard to believe in the man with the ten-gallon hat. We were eager for a hero (we’d lost ours just ten months before) and willing to trust. Government deceit was not yet taken for granted—maybe because we ! were more naïve but also because the country was. Later, the war that never ended and the CIA and the Pentagon Papers and ITT would shake us, but in those days, when a man said “My fellow Americans …” we listened. At school I was a flaming liberal, holding lunchroom debates and setting up a ten-year-old’s dichotomies: if you were for Johnson, you were “for” the Negroes (we called them Negroes then, not blacks) if you were for Goldwater you were against them. Equally earnest Republicans would expound the domino theory and I would waver in spite of myself (what they said sounded logical) knowing there was a fallacy somewhere but saying only “If my father was here, he’d explain it …”
