DREAMS DIE HARD. Three Men's Journey Through the Sixties

Hardback. An important work of stunning reportage, filled with revelations, high drama, and disturbing "might-have-beens," it is the story of 3 men who, as friends and opponents, made up the distinctive strands of that long-ago time and whose paths tragically converged 10yrs. after the decade was done. Allard Lowenstein, a dean at Stanford as the Sixties began, widely acclaimed for his pivotal role in "Dump Johnson," closed the decade as a congressman who still believed one could work effectively through the system. Along the way, he introduced literally thousands of young men to the politics of social change. Dennis Sweeney was one of those young men: a Lowenstein protoge at Stanford, a heroic figure in the Mississippi civil rights struggle - where he broke with his former mmentor - and a founder, with author David Harris, of the draft resistance against the Vietnam War. By the end of the decade, he was descending into madness, crushed by his inability to find again the high purposes of the past. David Harris was both a onetime protege of Lowenstein's and a friend and compatriot of Sweeney's. He had entered Stanford as an all-American boy from Fresno, became the school's most notorious student body president, and ended the Sixties incarcerated in a federal prison for violation of the Selective Service Act. On March 14, 1980, when both his former friends were fading outlines in Harris's memory and the Sixties were rapidly becoming a cliche, Dennis Sweeney walked into Lowenstein's law office and shot his former mentor to death. This murder provoked Harris to look back across that long dusty plain to the Sixties, to try to remember who they had all been and how it had come to such an end. With Sources. 341pp. 8vo. h/back. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. F. in f. dw.