On March 14, 1980, Dennis Sweeney, a hero of the civil rights struggle, walked into the office of Allard Lowenstein, Sweeney's mentor and the architect of the "Dump Johnson" campaign. Sweeney shot Lowenstein in the chest, emerged from the office, put the gun in the receptionist's "out" tray, sat down, lit a cigarette, and waited for the police to arrive.In Dreams Die Hard, journalist David Harris brings us a stunning insider portrait of the sixties, using the bizarre murder as a catalyst to examine the issues that are as vital today as they were decades ago. The story unfolds through the lives of three men: Allard Lowenstein, a dean at Stanford at the beginning of the decade, and at its close a New York congressman who still believed in working within the system; Dennis Sweeney, a Lowenstein protege at Stanford and key figure of the Mississippi civil rights struggle, who abandoned traditional political activism for a full-scale countercultural assault on society, by the end of the decade beginning his descent into madness; and David Harris, with Sweeney, a leader of the draft resistance and also a protege of Lowenstein's, Stanford student body president, a one-time all-American boy who ended the decade in a federal prison. Read Less