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By Root 957 0

along every wall of our room, her expensive clothes hanging, tags still attached, on every door frame. Other than my younger sister, she was my first roommate, and I wasn’t sure my parents were going to let me—dressed head to toe in a peach Villager outfit, except for my red beanie—stay in a room with this…grown-up. But they did. I stayed, and Christine tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce me to coffee and cigarettes and, successfully, to bridge and to her circle of literary friends—Christina Askounis, as beautiful as she was eloquent, Linda Burton, sexy and mysterious, Susan Forbes, daffy and adorable and brilliant, and Ann Chatterton, maternal and warm. They were sophisticated; I was naive but smart enough to sit silently on the sidelines, learning as I was listening, the sponge all mothers hope their children will be—although I suspect this was not what my mother hoped I would absorb. I hoped I could, by osmosis, acquire their ease with words, with professors, with men. With the girls my own age—with Nancy Bolish and Karen Adlam, Ernie Kent, Debbie Oja—it was easy, weekdays of work and weekends of fun, fraternity houses and trips home, boys like Kellam Hooper and Toby Summerour, and vegetable soup in Ann Carter Lee Hall.

I wanted to be grown and sophisticated. And I wanted to be young and carefree. I succeeded at neither. I was still a girl, used to boundaries and rules, struggling with a complex world, made more complex by war. I tried to push aside the Vietnam War, which had dominated my life—and not in a positive way. But I could not, and not simply because it was still in the news but because it was still in my house. My father was in charge of all the Navy ROTC units across the county, and when I would call or come home, he would complain about “those college students” who had fire-bombed an NROTC unit at one school or were staging a sit-in at another. I was two people then—the carefree college student, hanging on to what I thought was a normal American life, and a military daughter. My political opinions were forming, but I was quiet. Or quiet at home. I was in Washington, in Georgetown at the Tombs, a watering hole frequented by Georgetown University students, when the word went out in March 1968 that Lyndon Johnson was withdrawing from the race for the Democratic nomination for President. The place exploded into celebration.

In the State of the Union address in 1966 Johnson had beautifully expressed his angst about this war. “Yet, finally, war is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate…therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in this world.” But since 1966, he had become a symbol to young people of intransigent commitment, a commitment that was written in their young blood. So the strangers in the Tombs, and I suppose in places like it across the country, linked arms and sang protest songs and celebrated, years too early, the success of protest. The next month, April 1968, brought the blood of Martin Luther King, Jr., followed by the blood of Robert Kennedy in June. Johnson had been right, and not just about the war: there was still madness in this world. Men of purpose were dying. Men of greatness and men whose names we’d never know. I wanted to do something, but not the something I saw that summer on the streets of Chicago. I didn’t want to throw a rock or burn a flag, certainly. But what could we do that would make a difference when men who might have made a difference were being killed?

The war and the protests were still going on in the fall of 1969. My father was assigned to the NROTC unit at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I transferred there with him. There was no one there to watch me, no one who might put my protests on my father’s fitness reports, but I was still self-editing, still taking care not to do anything that might hurt my father. My attendance at campus protests was just that: the almost invisible protester. Even on December 1, 1969, as we sat