I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source, retracing our steps out of the last bad dream era in American life.

Michael and Sarah was in the thick of that struggle, too, around war and justice.

The hard work of hope is his memoir of many losses and his own big mistakes that come back 50 years later as lessons

and light.

You know, I have to take us back to that year of 1968, which was so amazing.

A year of hope, a year of blood, a year of just surprise after surprise after surprise, and a year of hope, a year of blood, a year of just surprise after surprise after surprise,

and a year where history hinged.

And in that year, we made some critical mistakes that we are feeling the impact of to this day.

So we decided the anti-war movement, or certainly SDS and the new

left, that politics was completely corrupt and that there was no difference. We used to say

the lesser of two evils is still evil. And so when it came to the election of 1968 between Humphrey and Nixon, our position was

vote in the street, vote with your feet. Don't vote. Don't participate in the elections.

I must have heard you because I didn't vote.

Right. Well, the voting age was 21, so a lot of us were too young. I was 21, and I didn't even register to vote.

And, you know, part of that was our disdain for the corrupt liberals who had been managing the country and prosecuting the war.

And Humphrey's refusal to break with the war until the very last days of the campaign.

It was a half-hearted break. It wasn't a real one. And so I would say we weren't wrong in our

assessment of Humphrey, a tired, sad, liberal whose political life had been exhausted.

Where we made our mistake was that we really had a failure of political

imagination about how bad Richard Nixon could be. You know, what would happen if you had an

insecure man with tons of grievances who had no respect for the Constitution? And we saw

him start a series of things.

...