From Goldwater Republican to McGovern Democrat, transformed by Vigil
The Silent Vigil of 1968 gave rise to an eloquent protest that cemented the evolution of my peers from the Silent Generation of the 1950s to the activist generation of the 1960s. That certainly was true for this son of a North Carolina textile company executive, born and bred in Mount Airy, N.C., the real-life Mayberry for the fictional town that native son Andy Griffith made famous. I arrived at Duke in 1966 as a Goldwater Republican and, transformed by the Vigil, many of my peers, and the protests of the times, left a McGovern Democrat—which, I might note, put me on the opposite, losing side of two of the more lopsided defeats in electoral history and on the same liberal political track as Margaret Small, one of the Vigil’s leaders, and Hillary Clinton.