(The Weekend Financial Times Saturday had a nice feature featuring stories from contributors about a summer that changed them. Reading, I was prompted to write my own recollection.)

The Summer That Changed Me

It was the summer of 1971. I was teaching at Western Michigan University and it had been a tumultuous year. Needing to decompress and ponder my future, together with my girlfriend I spent two weeks at a cottage on a serene lake in Allegan County.  There I spent days absorbing The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, a book that changed my life.

We had just come through May Day in Washington, DC, yet another protest against the war in Vietnam. Following from the Pentagon march in 1967 and the Moratorium in 1969, the slogan for the much bigger May Day was “stop the war or we’ll stop the warmakers.” 

It was a huge exciting event. The target for the Michigan contingent was Washington Circle west of the White House.  The largely peaceful protests went on for three days during which a stunning 12,000 arrests were made. The protests were on the covers of Time and Newsweek. 

I was not among those arrested and days later found myself in Paris where activists from DC were asked to address a student rally at the Sorbonne. It was heady stuff to speak to a multitude, your words translated and greeted with cheers. Later I was among the thousands who marched to Pere Lachaise Cemetery commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Paris Commune.

Returning home, the world had gone silent. It was over. The war went on, the government functioned. There was a palpable sense of finality. Energy was used up, exhausted from that hopeful, brief moment in Washington.

Into the gloom came Lincoln Steffens, 35 years dead but words still blazing from a book published in 1931. I was riveted by Steffens accounts of artsy love and optimism in Greenwich Village, conversations with corrupt politicians, café talkers at the Paris peace conference, and meeting Lenin in Russia.

It was like a hammer blow. I’d had enough of academia and Kalamazoo.  I wanted to be Lincoln Steffens, not just a muckraking journalist but one who got on the inside, understanding what was going on and how events are shaped.

I submitted my resignation and gave up pursuing a doctorate in economics. I moved to Cos Cob, Connecticut where Steffens had lived for a time. I began writing a Steffens biography but it came to nothing. It was a difficult time but I had set a new course. When the revolution in Portugal came in April 1974 with the certainty that Angola and Mozambique would be independent, I thought my time had come.  Profound changes would be coming to southern Africa.  I convinced the girlfriend—by now my wife–to join me on a freighter bound for Cape Town.  It was there that I became a journalist. #