A decade later, I watched on a grainy black-and-white television set as President Kennedy led us through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the very real danger of nuclear holocaust.

We soon awakened from the euphoria of 1945 to find America's sons dying in Korea in a proxy conflict with the Soviet Union. But World War II had been succeeded by a perilous Cold War. Overseas, we were basking in the afterglow of victory in World War II and through the Marshall Plan we were rebuilding the economies of our former enemies. Joe McCarthy trampled on civil liberties and invoked a fact-free Red Scare at home, which divided and distracted us in dangerous ways. It took years, until I was in college, for Congress to pass bedrock civil rights legislation. Women were devalued and LGBT Americans had to be invisible to avoid persecution. But we were also a country where Jim Crow was still the law and 'Whites Only' signs dotted the landscape in half our country, and were unspoken but just as real in the other half. For most, jobs came with pensions and economic security. The 'Leave It to Beaver' America of the 1950s had much to admire. I share this because I was tempted to write that I was born into a gentler or simpler era at home and abroad. I tried to avoid those traps in writing my story. It's easy to put on rose-tinted glasses, look back at earlier days and say 'those were better times' or easier times, when the truth is, they weren't. The winter soldiers of Valley Forge inspire not because they knew they'd win their determination is more awesome because they had every reason to believe they might end up at the end of a British rope, and yet they persevered. But history-real history, not the phony demagoguery about the mythical past calculated and propagated to mobilize unthinking retro movements-real history inspires because it reminds us that times weren't always easy. I was encouraged to live it-and perhaps even to help make some of it. It's always easy to believe things were better 'back when.' My parents instilled in me great respect for history.

A memoir is a tempting venue to look back and see the good outcomes in life as preordained. As I wrote this book, I tried hard to fight the numbing power of nostalgia.

Every Day is Extra by John Kerry