The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it's like being in a Days Inn; it's very clean and very nice.

I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking on doors, handing out literature, trying to talk to people who didn't agree with me, trying to get them to see the war was wrong. And by 1968 a majority of Americans did oppose the war.

Fairly apolitical. Kind of aspiring to participate in life. I'm 18-19 years old. Wanting to dive into the world and finding the world opening for me in ways that were unimaginable. I didn't sleep for the whole first year at university because it was too much going on. Too many films to see, too many concerts to go to.

It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn't elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months - people camped out at his house, and wondering who's coming to visit, who's going to be the Secretary of State - that all struck me as inane and stupid.

I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.

The great example, the killer example in history, is of course Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. Read his speeches. Read the debates. Wendell Phillips called him "the great slaver from Illinois."

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.