ABSTRACT
Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed that year and I was shattered. It was only a few months after the assassination of Martin Luther King and not that long after President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas. These were vital young leaders, reaching the prime of life, moving many of my generation to political awareness and public service. I was 28, married to Lynn, living in Palo Alto, and halfway through a psychiatry residency at Stanford. I had no idea how young I was—how uninformed and undirected. Surely it was the triple slaying of those particular men, JFK, MLK, and RFK, at that particular time of my life, mid-20s, that focused my emotions and my attention on human cruelty and tragic loss. The whole decade was tumultuous, and 1968 was the darkest year, with race riots at home, battlefield deaths in Vietnam, and drug use turning from playful experimentation to hard-core abuse and dependence.
