My father was pretty independent. He was - he was arrested once in Nashville when he was on one of his sales trips because he had a black - guy to lunch. So that took a fair amount of courage at the time.

A.J.[Muste] died in the late '60s, I think. He was 81, something like that.

Here is a guy who's supposed to be the Genghis Khan of the church, the pro-choice people hate him, and I don't know about his labor background so I figured there must be more to him, and there is. I wrote a book about [John Cardinal O'Connor].

[Margot Hentoff] stopped [writing]. She decided that she had nothing more to say. And yet, every day, she has a whole lot to say, and I wish she'd write it down.

The [George W.] Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued.[Barack] Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.

Bob Dylan was really mad with my wife. I had asked by Rolling Stone - the only assignment I ever had for them - to do a story on the Rolling Thunder Review, which was Bob Dylan, Alan Ginsberg, Joan Baez and a host of stars. My wife, some weeks before, had written in The New York Times that The Kid wasn't The Kid anymore and he wasn't all that winning anymore.

I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.