from Minnesota Public Radio.

I was born on the night, John F. Kennedy was elected president.

Relidiously, spiritually, I was a child of my time.

I grew up in Oklahoma, the granddaughter of a southern Baptist preacher.

Through him, I experienced the drama of faith.

But my parents had turned their backs on his stern rules for a fallen creation.

We went to church on Sunday.

Monday through Friday, I was raised to win, to perfect myself,

and to do so in the American way of accomplishment and accumulation.

My father listened to election returns as my mother gave birth.

He was a political operator in a culture where politics is ruthlessly provincial, a blood sport.

I watched him wage wars on the pages of newspapers and by way of radio ads.

As an Oklahoma Democrat, he was more conservative than most Massachusetts Republicans.

But he imprinted me with what in the wider world are hybrid instincts.

In that decade of my birth, he was a true believer in civil rights and the war on poverty.

I loved his passion and idealism.

They became entangled with cynicism and pain in the years of my childhood in which good men and high ideals fell one by one,

shot down all too easily and finally by other men.

Later I landed in the heart of divided Europe, confronting the Cold War clash of good and evil as a young journalist,

and then at the level of diplomatic and strategic high policy.

This was the era of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain,

and terrifying enemies who in contrast with our current enemies now appear wondrously civilized and contained.

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