Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into; a decent, compassionate, lovely person; pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.

I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.

There's something so remarkable in the intensity of taking care of somebody who can't take care of him or herself. And then watching that little person bloom into adolescence.

I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.

Whether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves.

It transmitted because on the campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was recruiting, was organizing. Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Michigan just a couple years before I got there. So, there was a kind of a churning of political awareness. It was just beginning.

When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad.