I must confess. I served on a committee with a domestic terrorist who was wanted by the government. You might say we “palled around” since we shared a few drinks at cocktail parties.

I served on the Great Lakes Basin Commission’s Public Involvement Group with a man named Barry Freed in the late 1970s. Freed was an environmental activist from New York work to protect the St. Lawrence River and I was a weekly newspaper reporter from the Lake Superior region of Wisconsin. We served with small town mayors and business people on the panel that considered new plans for protecting Great Lakes water quality.

Freed’s real name was Abbie Hoffman.

The co-founder of the Youth International Party, a part of the radical anti-war movement, Hoffman had been convicted of inciting a riot during the 1968 Democratic Convention along with other radicals in the famous Chicago Seven trial. The charges were later dropped.

The McCain campaign has made a lot of hay about Barack Obama’s association with former 60s radical member of the Weather Underground, William Ayres. The group preached revolution and went underground in the late 1960s committing acts that led to the deaths and maiming of police and public officials.

Ayres once bombed the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War. He and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for years until the charges were dropped because of excesses by federal prosecutors. Now he is now a highly acclaimed education professor at the University of Illinois. Obama, was only 8 when Ayres and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were what Sarah Palin calls terrorists.

But Ayres held a fundraiser in his living room when Obama first ran for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and served on two different boards with the then community organizer Obama that directed charity spending in Chicago. Palin describes that as “palling around with terrorists.”

Hoffman didn’t bomb the Pentagon, he tried to levitate it with 50,000 other protesters. He replaced anger with laughter, staging guerrilla theater events like dropping thousands of dollars on to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, sending the traders scurrying around to collect the money.

But when I knew him as Freed in 1978, he was on the lam for cocaine charges, living a secret life hiding in plain sight. We first met at a conference in Buffalo and I couldn’t help saying, “You look remarkably like Abbie Hoffman.”

“People tell me that all the time,” Freed replied.

Later, in Detroit, we worked on official comments on the commission’s plans. He worked well with people like the mayor of Silver Bay, Minn., who didn’t share his environmentalist views, in crafting our response. He had spoke to Rotaries and even testified to Congress.

In 1980, the same year Ayres and Dohrn turned themselves in; Hoffman surrendered to federal agents and served a year in prison. After his release he wrote, gave speeches and even continued to participate in protests until he committed suicide in 1989.

I can’t compare my relationship with Hoffman to Obama’s but neither was it as close as Palin’s own ties to the Alaska Independence Party . Her husband Todd was once a member of the group that advocates secession from the United States and whose founder Joe Vogler, expressed hatred for the American government and cursed the American flag.

As hard as younger generations like Obama’s try, we can’t completely get away from the stark division in our society in the 1960s and during the Vietnam War. This election may tell us whether those political winds will blow through yet another generation or finally be left in the past.