Mahatma Gandhi in a Cadillac

He was a Jewish kid from the streets of the Bronx, making a big success in America, an engineer with a Wharton M.B.A., one of the elite few flown out to Seattle to work on America’s newest missile. But why was he feeling lost and getting drunk every night?

She was a poor German-Catholic farm girl from Idaho, just kicked out of convent for reading Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. She arrived in town on a freight train with her ideals of peace and love, her Thomas Aquinas, her tawny port wine, and her trombone.

They met on the jazz scene, the most unlikely couple imaginable.

But I was 1961. John F. Kennedy was in The White House. Martin Luther Kind had taken to the streets. Anything seemed possible…