I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.

That's what [Abraham] Lincoln said. "The white man will always be above the black man. I don't want them to run for office, or have political rights, or vote. I want them to go back to Africa."

I'm not disappointed in [Barack] Obama. He said who he is; he's doing what he said he would do.

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.

In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we're told these guys are lazy, they're uneducated, they don't care, they don't have any political instincts - just like the working class in America, apparently - and then suddenly what the hell happened? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.

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

But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.