Starting in '75, I got re-interested in the Bomb, which had been my original issue. I became re-engaged when India set off their bomb for nuclear testing in '74 or '75. I became interested in why the Cold War was returning. I began looking into how the media treat the bomb and how they restrict what is possible.

I have come back to the Bomb and fused to it my more recent interest in the media, taking it one step farther. I think the Reagan counterreformation is receding. A lot of what we did in the '60s was stupid, tactically unbalanced, and I didn't think that should be repeated.

Everyone thinks the '60s was glorious, non-stop politics. But the '60s took 10 years to happen. Often we felt that we were in the margins. The movement was a constant search, we were looking for some way to act with integrity and effect. It was not all bigtime jamborees.

The conditions were so unique; we were in the midst of an economic boom, America had a very strong position in the world economically and we thought we could drop out, do our thing and then come back any time. I've decided that serious radicalism thrives best when liberalism is in power because liberalism makes promises which it can't always keep and then disillusionment follows.

I wouldn't want to repeat the '60s. Students today feel burdened by the '60s, that they have something to live up to. The Baby Boomers are like the pig in the python, they'll be a big lump at every stage.

Q: How did Harvard differ from other campuses at the time?

Tocsin was a huge success. The hard-core beginning of 10 to 40 members grew. With our first walk, to protest nuclear weapons, everyone wore blue armbands. It was moving because it showed people were listening. Very few campuses if any had more technocratic rationalists.

There were people in Washington who listened to us, or so we liked to believe. We were more conservative than all of the other campus groups. We were respected but suspect.

There was a Tocsin reunion on Sunday night...People [who returned] were very diverse, but we all felt some deep linkage to Tocsin and that spirit. Politics is something that implicates you as a whole.

The great thing about Tocsin was that the leadership understood the Harvard state of mind, a cultivation of idiosyncrasies. Harvard was a space within to work, to cultivate yourself. Your personal energies were respected. It would have died if they had been heavy-handed.

In general there was the feeling that we are living out the extensions of the '60s, the better part. There is a definite root that can be traced. We were all engaged in the present moment. The Big Chill was nothing more than a Hollywood disgrace. There is no way that a group of friends who had been engaged in the politics of the '60s would have gotten back together and [made] no mention of today's politics. --Interview by Jennifer Griffin