Fathers and Sons

In 1980, I began to keep a file of letters from my father. I don’t remember exactly why I decided to preserve the letters, to treat them as historical documents and not just as his re¬sponses of and for the moment. Perhaps it was the heart bypass operation he had about that time—and my first recognition that the torrent of words would someday stop coming. Perhaps it was my marriage that summer, a sure sign that, at thirty-two, I was finally taking adulthood seriously (that’s my wife’s interpreta¬tion). As a political obsessive, I am inclined to emphasize the fact that 1980 was the year my father and I began sidling—ever so gradually and seldom without mutual complaint—to the same side of the barricades.

In 1980, part...