I was in second grade during the Kennedy Nixon race. My best friend that year was a republican--his grandfather was a founder of Nordstrom's, and his mother was interior ddecorator to the hoi polloi of Seattle, including one John Erhlichman, then a future Nixon aide, and Ralphie and I occasionally argued politics as 7 year olds. My parents were quite liberal--they'd wanted Stevenson over JFK. (My mother's uncle was head of the Colorado Democratic Party for most of the fisrt half of the last century, something I didn't know back then.) Both parents were Harvard trained economists.

As you may remember, Nixon had smeared Helen Gahagan Douglas in the '46 election, which he won to become a California senator, by calling her a communist. I'd heard about that, hadn't really understood it, but I knew Nixon had done a bad thing.

One day Ralphie, and I were in the car with my mother driving. I said to him, "You know, Ralphie, you really shouldn't vote for Nixon, because he called that lady in California something like an economist."

I'm quite certain I'm quoting myself accurately because my mother, who did not have much of a sense of humor thought this was hilarious, and told the story often!