I came to love the question-and-answer period, but there would typically be one that threw me for a loop. Yes, the ones I wish I had answered better.

For example:

How could you sleep after writing some of the sections?

I did quip that a martini before bedtime helped. I could have mentioned the realities of working as a newspaper editor and having to face daily atrocities abroad and close at hand.

You developed ways of putting it behind a plexiglass shield, so to speak. Not that it always worked.

What was it about Quakers coming back for more trouble?

They had a lot more in common with the Puritans than we’d like to admit and no doubt saw them as falling far short of the goal they proclaimed.

The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut weren’t the worst, by the way. Historian John Carroll suggests colonial Virginia may have been even more severe but undocumented.

I wish I had mentioned that the concept of a loyal opposition springs from the Quaker Peace Testimony, and that the two-party system originated in Pennsylvania.

Do you need to be a protester to be a Quaker?

Nope.