i am absolutely thrilled to have these three authors here with us. as a child of the 60's about 40 years ago i remember the political action of mark rudd at columbia, and i remember reading joyce maynard and 18 year old looks back on life on the front page of the new york times in 1972. and martha tod dudman has been my friend for more than 20 years. so i would like to a just briefly introduced the panelist, and then we will get started. joyce maynard, immediately to my left grew up into new hampshire and now lives in marin county. her book that came out of that new york times magazine piece is at the ten -- at "looking back: a chronicle of growing up old in the sixties". i had this book. it has been with me a long time. joyce has ridden the second memoir called at home in the world which was written in 1998 and updated last year. in the middle of our panel is martha tod dudman who lives on mount desert island, maine or as we call it, mount desert island. she has been in business, a fund raiser, but all her life she has been of writer. she has written four books. i forgot to say that joyce has ridden for works of nonfiction and seven novels. then we have mark rudd, who goes way back to colombia, political action, and also seven years underground. he was the leader of the sts, or one of the leaders for the students for the democratic society and the weatherman at columbia and broke his memoir last year called underground. so, i want to start by asking each of our panelists, why did you read your books? if we can start with torres. >> my answer, sheila, probably does not have a lot to do with the 60's, but more with the realities of being 18 in whatever. you find yourself 18 years old then. i grew up in a small new hampshire town and always wanted to get out of the town. i wanted to hit the big city. i was always writing. at 18i think i understood that there was only one subject about which i was fully equipped to right, and that was my own life. so i began writing young as my ticket out of new hampshire. what proved to be my one and only a year of college. i sent a letter to the editor in chief of the new york times saying how would like to write for you. interestingly he wrote back and said okay. he also understood that there was only one topic i was an expert on. he said why don't you write about growing up in the 60's. that became a cover story in the new york times magazine section that really did sort of overnight change my life. good and troubling ways. alternately bid led to my publishing that book one year later before i got too old. they were rushing me. it did not want me to be 20 when it cannot. [laughter] >> well, none of us are 20 now. i wrote this book expecting to fly after another book i had written about my daughter. i was a business person. i was running radio stations and working as a professional fund-raiser in maine. i had a pretty nice life. the 60's were four behind me. i was president of the bank or rotary. it might not mean much to you, but it meant a lot to me. with a business person and a responsible citizen and had gotten over telling people about stuff used to do because i thought everybody did that stuff. sometimes i would see somebody with long and messy hair and say, you know how we all slept with everybody. they would look at me like this. you no all that lsd we took. , no. and so i shut up about it. i guess not. then when my daughter was a teenager she started getting into a lot of stuff. it was horrible. suddenly it was not be having a fun trip, it was my daughter, and it was scary. we went through, really terrible time. i wrote a book about it. and and i guess and the course of going through that with my daughter and myself writing about it i started thinking, what was all that about and how do i feel about it now has an adult but i am so different? was that just stupid and dangerous? of the stuff we did and all the stuff we believed then? was there something magical and wonderful about it? i wrote this book expecting to find out. [applause] >> thank you. mark. >> well, i am probably, like a lot of people in this audience, i have a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, pst, which is that every time the united states starts another bork i get profoundly depressed. i also get active. first depression and then activity. the alternate or simultaneous. in 1985i became aware that the united states was doing this and then in central america that we had been doing, that our government had been giving and vietnam and indochina. so i set out to write a book on vietnam. i studied the war in vietnam and thought about it and fought, what did i know about it from having been in that anti-war movement, which actually was quite a lot. it occurred at some point in the process, i realized that nobody wanted essays. they wanted a story, a personal story. i wrote that in the 80's. however, i was not satisfied with it because a friend of mine said, well, a 40-year-old always beating up on a 20-year-old in the story. i put the book away for 15 years. then in 2003 the united states started another war. i thought, well, and this time, though, the movie came out called the weather underground. i happened to be featured in the movie under not -- oddly enough. some strange coincidence that these things would happen together. it was the first time i gave an interview, 1999. and i found that young people really wanted to know the story. they wanted to know what it was all about. the wanted to know my story. i was going around to dozens of college campuses with this movie answering questions. so i sat down to write the story this time and took the old manuscript out of the closet, literally out of a back shelf on the closet and started reporting it. and so my goal was told young people what happened then and, perhaps, some lessons that they could learn, that might be useful about what to do or what not to do. i can talk more about that. >> so, martha, i have a question for you. an "expecting to fly: a sixties reckoning" you talk about history, perhaps, making our lives seem more important. to follow up on what mark just said, could you comment on that? did you feel that time in history made our lives, those of us growing up in the 60's, somehow more important, did history affect your life that way? >> at the cue our misquoting me, sheila. no offense. i'm not sure i said that. in no, and when i think of the 60's i think of being really young. we were really young. i think of the 60's as being 67-73. i think we were just so young. we felt that everything was very important. at seven. [laughter] we felt we were important because we were young and because everything was so new, the first war, the worst government, the most exciting time, all of our ideas were brand new. in that way i think we thought of ourselves as extremely important, and that time remains to us, to some of us, and important time because it was the time when everything was still new. at think your adolescence and early adulthood is lit with a certain light that is never replicated at another time. >> i do think, too, that there was in those years -- and it's so dangerous to generalize because there were some many different ways to experience that era, but the voices of young people were regarded as so much more important than they are now. young people, at least i'll speak for myself, had a real sense that someone was interested in knowing what i felt. i witnessed the fact that the new york times wanted me to write about my life. the summer after that i was on the panel at the democratic national convention talking about the youth vote. amazing. then i was listened to. i don't think that young people -- i'm thinking of my own three adult children -- have the same sense of being a part of the process. as i know that i did. >> yes, mark. >> i'm constantly kicking myself because i missed the punk movement. after 7i actually think punk is culturally probably more important than most of us and this from realize. i notice that they yawned anarchist kids relate to punk, neil plonk. that is their music. so i think oh, man, i missed something. no, i just about can maybe figure out jam it tarnishes sensibility, his movies. he is pawned. anyway, so i second what martha said about everybody thinking. on the other hand, there was something special about those of us who grew up in the 50's and early 60's and experienced the civil rights movement in the south because that was an example of a moment in history : what an individual did made a difference. that then informed us in the anti-war movement, women's movement, environmental movement, an anti-nuclear movement in the 70's and 80's, believe it or not, that said nuclear power plants are inherently dangerous and should not be built. i have not seen that on television lately. i've seen a lot of nuclear physicists and sang, don't worry about a meltdown. i won't get started. >> let's get started. let's bring in martha and choice. let me ask you, anybody who wants to respond to this, what about what informs your lives today, what you would have liked to have brought with you from the 60's in a political movement, a personal movement, whatever. what have you really brought with you and taken to heart from the 60's? >> go-ahead. >> and i would say enormous idealism in my case that i think , you know, the punk movement certainly have aspects of the complete your reference of what i'll call our generation, but without that sense of being able to perform change, to bring about change. almost a sense of futility and disenfranchisement. i felt very enfranchised. i really believed. i remember the first time i heard pete seeger. i was eight years old and i was ready to dedicate myself to wherever he was going. i don't think that music accomplishes that now. i think it takes us away. i would say for myself that along with -- i'm happy to say -- and idealism that does not seem to be squashed entirely by experience of sad history over the last many years, a lord ambition of what is possible. i believed everything was possible. i am much more inclined now to a work and a small and local way. >> is that because of age, getting older, or what? do you attribute it at all to the just being older? >> no. no. >> okay. >> i attribute it to experience and believe it is, that the more ambitious, global goals are less realistically attainable than the small, humble ones. i think i attributed in part to raising children. that when you spent the last 30 some years raising children you focus on small. those under the old emissaries to the planet. >> or we used to say, you know, we wanted to change the world and the 60's. we have all heard the saying, all we can do is change ourselves. would anybody like to respond to that? how did what he became maybe contribute to idealism or lost idealism of the 60's? anybody else wants to comment. >> i am a normal american. [laughter] i own three vehicles. one of them has the v8. i burned lots and lots of gas. i am a normal american, living like a normal american. however, i happen to have been part of a movement that helps end a war of aggression. that is an incredible historical event in the history of this country in the world. millions of us were part of this. unfortunately many young people have not themselves experienced these movements, and so they think nothing can ever change. and i go about the college campuses i here people say, well, nothing anyone does can never make a difference. now, that statement alone would have been absurd in the 60's or 70's, absolutely absurd. no one ever -- i never heard anyone say anything like that because it was obviously not true. that experience is invaluable. somehow or another young people are going to have to figure this out for themselves, that what they do can make a difference and they will have to learn how to join together with other people and organized. that old phrase, don't mourn, organize. >> thank you, mark. >> experiencing that in other countries. >> i think american kids must feel ashamed of themselves and then look at what can people in egypt and the middle east are accomplishing , intelligent man kids to think about the world, 5%, 3%. i don't know. the entertainment culture, another thing we have going for us, we did not have as all-encompassing, all-hegemonic and entertainment culture as the poor kids have now. i should not have gotten into this. anyway. please. >> thank you, marc. martha, you have a personal connection to the vietnam war. could you just tell us of little bit about that? >> i grew up in washington d.c. where my father was -- work for the st. louis dispatch and the washington bureau. he was a foreign correspondent. richard deadman. he spent a lot of time in southeast asia and other places in the world where there was trouble. he was against the war, skeptical of the war very, very early on and talked to my sister and i about it quite a lot so that we grew up feeling that the war it was very wrong. we were very active in the civil rights movement in washington and then in the anti-war movement. in fact, i know she let is also referring to later in 1970 my father was in cambodia and was taken prisoner and was missing for 40 days. i mention that in my book. and then eventually he was released. he felt that he had to report the facts, but in such a way that people would get the real story instead of what ever story people wanted them to get. and i spoke about it in this book, but i remember i think i am a little more cynical than either of these people. and i think part of that came from feeling that, yeah, i would like to think i still believe all this. i'm against the boards. i am skeptical of government, but i guess i just feel that it seems inevitable that when people get power they get corrupted. it just seems to happen again and again. we get rid of this war and get another. it is so important that we have to go and. i lived in maine. i lived on an island in maine. i tried to, you know, work and the local government. i worked in the local library. i try and be a good daughter and mother and friend and write books that have some measure of my experience and truth in them, but as far as being politically active at this point it is not for me. i remember in -- one last thing, i remember when i've as a kid saying to my dad, well, everybody is bad. noted. he said, there are bad people, but there are good people, too. you have to keep chipping away. that is how he lived his life. i have to tell you, he will be 93 in may still writing editorials. against the war. >> joyce, you were very reflective at an extremely young age about what you saw in society. were you involved -- i mean, i read a book's many times. could you tell our audience how, perhaps, you were either involved politically or how you saw all of this? a very reflective, introspective writer. >> well, in many ways, she let, for me i was a little bit down to go anywhere during debate years when people were heading to washington. in many ways i think the let -- lessons of witnessing -- and mark is absolutely right. i remember those images from first and second grade of marchers in the south and hearing chum by yet sang about the for murdered girls. those were powerful images and stories for me. when i was much older boy, in the 80's, i woke up one morning and there was a little tiny item, not on the front page, but the back page of my new hampshire newspaper mentioning happily, reporting on the good news that our area of new hampshire had been selected as one of 14 finalists for the first in the nation with a high-level nuclear waste dump. this was going to bring jobs. i wasted. i was a mother of three very young children at that point. supporting my family as a writer living in the country. i was also -- my identity was not that of an activist. i felt that i was raising children. i waited for the activists to do something. i was sure that within 24 hours the anti-nuclear people that have remembered would be out in force, and nothing happened the next day and the next day. i called my congressman's office, and they weren't doing anything. i called the governor's office, and somebody was foolish enough to say to me, we have decided. i said, where are the stores in the paper. this man actually said, we have decided -- is statewide policy from the governor's office not to disseminate information on the grounds it would create a statewide panic. [laughter] well, at that point i knew that the activist had to be me. everyone was waiting around for someone, and i'm happy to say that the next six months of my life and my husband's and that of an increasing number, including very died in the will citizens of my town and the larger community now looking at the appropriation of hundreds of thousands of acres of the granite state for the purpose of the completely untried technology, organized and eventually that policy was killed. not in my backyard way, nuclear waste continues to be a problem but, in fact, imagine the story because, in fact, that was a relic of my experience of an earlier time manifesting and my belief that i could get a little phone tree going with my neighbors and call a meeting in my local town hall. as it turned out on the night that the challenger exploded, a snowy new hampshire night, all of these local citizens showed up and decided to create a movement, and it was one that actually did stop the government. >> thank you. i want to ask mark because joyce brought up this would create a panic if we knew about this. now we hear all of this. it is all for national security, the fear that goes on in our country through the media is rampant, and of want to ask mark, would you tell us why the charges were dropped against you when you were underground and came back? >> i was underground -- i was a federal fugitive from 1970-1977. actually, though, the federal charges were dropped in 73 in the wake of watergate -- excuse me. it was exactly as ordered it was sort of beginning. a federal judge, judge damon keith in detroit who was one of the few black federal judges on the bench was very concerned with the rights of the accused. he believed in civil rights and civil liberties. and so he upheld our attorneys motions. the cases came up in 73. they were bombing, inciting riots, crossing state lines, conspiracy charges, a host of felonies stemming from '69 and '70. when the charges came up in 73i was not there, but our attorneys moved that the government had to disclose how it had obtained the evidence. then the feds moved to drop the charges on the grounds of national security but basically because they did not want to disclose the number is illegalities they had committed. later these actually came out in the form of revelations of fbi wrongdoing several fbi leaders, not hoover, but actually he had died by the in. the second-in-command people were charged and convicted. now, of course, that never would happen. now all you have to it -- of the feds have to do is declare the charges, the suspects having to do with terrorism or terrorists and their would be no habeas corpus, no evidentiary problems. it would go all the way to torture. so we live in a completely different environment, obviously. most of us in the room grew up believing that such things as habeas corpus were sacred in our system. now people can be held without charges or even undergo rendition and tortured. so you know, we have zero lots -- we have lost a lot of ground and we just have to keep working on this. >> thank you, marc. martha, there is -- i'm going to read this. she won't accuse me of misquoting. there is a section in her book, "expecting to fly." we talk about anybody who loves history or is a history teacher, a historical hindsight. you can measure what happened in the past only looking at society and what it was like in the past. i am going to ask martha and anyone else who