THE CLASSMATES follows a group of boys from the St. Paul’s School (located in Concord, NH--the school was a boy's prep school, it's co-ed now) class of 1962 through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s to the present. The elite, the wealthy, the talented, these young men were groomed to be the nation’s leaders. So how did things go so wrong for so many of them? Douglas, himself a member of the class of 1962, takes us on an insider’s journey to the heart of the story. The last of the Eisenhower generation, these young men were groomed to be titans of a world that, by the time they graduated, no longer existed.The book, based on interviews with a large group of his classmates, traces the educations and the subsequent lives of approximately eight of those men, including the author and notable classmate John Kerry. While much of the book concerns itself with the men’s lives in high school, it offers a provocative look at how their individual characters and the choices they made affected their lives in decades to come; and how the events of the 1960s and following decades shaped these men’s lives, and the country.