My father never spoke of her and turned quietly away if I asked questions I understood very young that this was a topic too painful for him to discuss. My mother had died when I was a baby, before my father founded the Center for Peace and Democracy. To begin with, I was motherless, and the care that my father took of me had been deepened by a double sense of responsibility, so that he protected me more completely than he might have otherwise. It seems peculiar to me now that I should have been so obedient well into my teens, while the rest of my generation was experimenting with drugs and protesting the imperialist war in Vietnam, but I had been raised in a world so sheltered that it makes my adult life in academia look positively adventurous. He preferred to know that I was sitting attentively in class at the International School of Amsterdam in those days his foundation was based in Amsterdam, and it had been my home for so long that I had nearly forgotten our early life in the United States. In 1972 I was sixteen-young, my father said, to be traveling with him on his diplomatic missions.
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