The validity of the government, in my own mind was seriously jeopardized by the experience of the war and the divisive reaction to it within the United States.

I didn't believe I came not to believe in the government.

The government was not, uh, an instrument of constructive purpose.

It was an instrument of misjudgment.

Political repression.

Uh uh.

And moral question.

Uh, however, I did not adopt the radical perspective that you had to fundamentally alter the society itself in order to solve the problem.

I just believed he had to alter the policy.

And there's nothing wrong with the political system.

Uh, there was nothing wrong with American society itself.

There was just a misjudgment of cosmic proportions that have been made and needed to be corrected.

Um, so I was one of those people who felt caught between the warring camps, defending the system and criticizing the policy.

Political issues in the late 19 sixties intruded themselves into personal relationships in the way that I had never experienced before, so that close friends who happen to be taking a different political tact, particularly a radical one could no longer be close friends.

And indeed some of them came in something that approximated an enemy.

And it was a shock to have somebody that was close suddenly denigrate you for political reasons.

S I did have some of that experience, Ah, politicization of one's personal relationships, which is a very unpleasant experience.

In 1967 68 the Vietnam War began to the issue began to transform itself from one oven assault or ah, critique of government policy to a critique of the government itself.

On the reason basically, is that, uh, the Johnson Administration, uh, was stubborn ling and hearing to an increasingly controversial line of policy, uh, which was resisted from both sides by the conservatives because it was not belligerent enough and by the by the liberals, because it was unwarranted and unproductive intervention in the domestic affairs of another country.

Um, and the political mechanisms for changing it we're not working.

Uh, the administration was deeply enough entrenched and willful enough to resist political challenge, and therefore the mechanisms of government itself came under assault.

Students who were subjected to the draft and prone in any rate to cosmic views of things began to believe that the root of evil was in the nature of American society itself and in the political system itself, and that radical alteration of those things are required in order to end the war.

Um, and they were pitted against people who were defending the system, Uh, in resisting the policy.

Uh, and there was a very sharp collusion of perspective and judgment and obviously an emotion and that all began to emerge in this in 67 68 plus a TTE the same time and interacting with that, the civil rights movement was beginning to establish truly dramatic Momenta MME also raising the question about the moral legitimacy of the society itself on DDE.

So we had a debate about the nature of the United States and a questioning of it that we have not seen, uh uh, either before or since in quite a long period of time.

The atmosphere in Cambridge was increasingly tense at that time, in part because students who for one reason or another, normally would have taken some time off to cool off in Aryan personal dynamics, couldn't because the war made it unacceptable to them to leave college.

Uh, and in part because the universities were the first target of protest since the government itself and the political mechanisms were more or less impervious to that, the universities were chosen his instruments of bringing political pressure to bear on the society.

So the universities in Cambridge at the time became very tense places people with profound moral disagreements attacking one another in a in a way that is not very conducive, actually doing at academic honesty.

People really challenging a basic legitimacy of other people on the basis of their political beliefs.

I suppose it was the breakdown in civility and restraint was caused by the intensity of the issues.

Uh uh, and I don't know, maybe it's the sort of thing that the nation as a whole was undergoing.