The songs of Pete Seeger, Joan Biaz and Bob Dylan contained the important messages of the era, Ganz says, messages about the need for young people to become socially active.

"[Music] was part of the language of the era," he says. "It was a cultural critique becoming a political critique. It was very challenging to hear it that way."

That challenge was the first step in Ganz's political transformation.

Ganz says he returned more "Politically minded" to a Harvard campus "that had gotten a lot more political."

One of his roommates had spent the summer of 1963 in Virginia, working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), while another had joined the Harvard chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Ganz, too, decided to get involved. He joined a group called Friends of SNCC, and started hosting visits by civil rights workers from the South.

Then, in the fall of 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

"I was in my room at the top of Winthrop House," Ganz says. "Somebody came in and said, "The President's been shot."

"It was like, Jesus, how could this be," Ganz remembers. "People began crying."

Ganz, whose father was a rabbi, sought solace in St. Paul's Catholic church.

"I just wanted to sit someplace where [I] could deal with it," he says. "The place just seemed to fill up."

"His presidency kind of communicated...a sense of the possible in a moral sense--to make things better, to make it a good world," Ganz recalls. "When he was killed, [there was] a tremendous sense of loss."

It wasn't uncommon for young people in the 60s to be inspired by Kennedy with a surge of idealism. But for Ganz, Kennedy's death was a formative moment in an unusually idealistic life.

Ganz says the president's death challenged him to get more involved in the civil rights movement. In the spring of 1964 he went to Atlanta for a SNCC convention. That summer, he and several other Harvard students worked for SNCC, registering voters in Mississippi.

"In Mississippi, Blacks still couldn't register to vote," he says. "After the Freedom Rides, the Civil Rights Act...registering to vote was still a problem."