After watching the television coverage yesterday and reading news accounts this morning of the Obama/Hillary Clinton love fest in the tiny town of Unity, New Hampshire, it occurs that I’m one of the few journalists following this campaign who had another association with the proper noun “Unity.” Let me tell you about it…

Unity, N.H. was, of course, the perfect backdrop to the Hillary and Barack kiss-and-make-up session, and not just because of that little burg’s priceless name: In the 2008 New Hampshire primary, Unity’s Democratic voters split 107 for Clinton and 107 for Obama. “Today, we look back at the votes cast here in the snows of January not as 107 votes for Hillary Clinton and 107 votes for me, but as 214 votes for change in America,” Obama said. It was a nice line; moreover, he uttered it in a state where John McCain is popular and hopes to carry in the autumn. So it was good politics, too. And yet.

Senator Clinton, resorting to her default rhetorical position, which is partisanship, lashed out at John McCain by name—as if he had anything to do with her primary loss—and impugned divisive motives to the Republican nominee. McCain had hoped, she maintained, that Democrats would keep fighting amongst themselves, adding, “In the end, Senator McCain and President Bush are like two sides of the same coin, and it doesn’t amount to a whole lot of change.”

That’s integral calculus, and that particular formula was memorized by Bob Shumaker, a POW in Hanoi, tapped with one finger via Morse Code through a prison wall to James Stockdale by another prisoner named Nels Tanner, and passed along to the other men, including Orson Swindle and his good friend and fellow POW, Navy Lt. Cmdr. John S. McCain III. These men were held in Hoa Lo Prison, famed for conditions so vile that its American inmates sarcastically dubbed it the “Hanoi Hilton.” The wing of the prison where these downed American aviators kept each other’s spirits up was called “Camp Unity.”

(For those wanting to know more about this subject, there are many superb accounts of these years, including McCain’s own autobiography, as well as his first-person account published in U.S. News & World Report in 1973. A superb book about the Vietnam prisoners of war is John G. Hubbell's P.O.W. I borrowed the calculus anecdote from Robert Timberg’s The Nightingale’s Song, which is simply one of the best modern political books, period.)