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place in his middle teens, but evidently it burned itself out rather quickly. I was always impressed by his familiarity with the Bible (both Old and New Testaments), and perhaps he started reading it back then, during that period of inner struggle. Sachs was more interested in politics and history than in spiritual questions, but his politics were nevertheless tinged with something I would call a religious quality, as if political engagement were more than a way of confronting problems in the here and now, but a means to personal salvation as well. I believe this is an important point. Sachs’s politicalideas never fell into any of the conventional categories. He was wary of systems and ideologies, and though he could talk about them with considerable understanding and sophistication, political action for him boiled down to a matter of conscience. That was what made him decide to go to prison in 1968. It wasn’t because he thought he could accomplish anything there, but because he knew he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t go. If I had to sum up his attitude toward his own beliefs, I would begin by mentioning the Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century. Thoreau was his model, and without the example of “Civil Disobedience,” I doubt that Sachs would have turned out as he did. I’m not just talking about prison now, but a whole approach to life, an attitude of remorseless inner vigilance. Once, when
Walden
came up in conversation, Sachs confessed to me that he wore a beard “because Henry David had worn one”—which gave me a sudden insight into how deep his admiration was. As I write these words now, it occurs to me that they both lived the same number of years. Thoreau died at forty-four, and Sachs wouldn’t have passed him until next month. I don’t suppose there’s anything to be made of this coincidence, but it’s the kind of thing that Sachs always liked, a small detail to be noted for the record.
    His father worked as a hospital administrator in Norwalk, and from all I can gather the family was neither well-to-do nor particularly strapped. Two daughters were born first, then Ben came along, and then there was a third daughter, all four of them arriving within a span of six or seven years. Sachs seems to have been closer to his mother than his father (she is still alive, he is not), but I never sensed that there were any great conflicts between father and son. As an example of his stupidity as a little boy, Sachs once mentioned to me how upset he had been when he learned that his father hadn’t fought in World War II. In light of Sachs’s later position, that response becomes almost comical, but who knows how severely his disappointmentaffected him back then? All his friends used to brag about their fathers’ exploits as soldiers, and he envied them for the battle trophies they would trot out for the war games they played in their suburban backyards: the helmets and cartridge belts, the holsters and canteens, the dog tags, hats, and medals. But why his father hadn’t served in the army was never explained to me. On the other hand, Sachs always spoke proudly of his father’s socialist politics in the thirties, which apparently involved union organizing or some other job connected with the labor movement. If Sachs gravitated more toward his mother than his father, I think it was because their personalities were so alike: both of them garrulous and blunt, both of them endowed with an uncanny talent for getting others to talk about themselves. According to Fanny (who told me as much about these things as Ben ever did), Sachs’s father was quieter and more evasive than his mother, more closed in on himself, less inclined to let you know what he was thinking. Still, there must have been a strong bond between them. The most certain proof I can think of comes from a story that Fanny once told me. Not long after Ben’s arrest, a local reporter came to the house to interview her