With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it’s much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

Because history became his (Keenan’s) genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation’s character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the...

Peterson thought it an unusual friendship, one only the Army could forge.

The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.

The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the...

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for...

Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing

[On writing:] “There’s a great quote by Julius Irving that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.'”(One On 1, interview with...

Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.

I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.

Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefiled and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that,...

The Patriots had picked Brady in the sixth round, and he soon turned out to be one of the two or three best quarterbacks in the League, and absolutely perfect for the Belichick system and...

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

No son of mine is going to be a goddamn liberal, Kennedy interjected. Now, now Joe, Luce answered, of course he’s got to run as a liberal. A Democrat has to run left of center...

DiMaggio’s grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human...

Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years...

Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.

Gen. Matthew Ridgeway “intended not to impose his will on his men, but to allow the men under him to find something in themselves that would make them more confident, more purposeful fighting men. It...

If you’re a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The...

If he (George Keenan)felt on occasion more than a little uncomfortable when being listened to, then he was truly unhappy when not being listened to.

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did.

The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what...

Nixon, who spent much of his career attacking the press and saying he was a victim of the press, was in fact created by the press, in this case the L.A. Times.

he [Robert Lovett] knew that those whose names were always in print, who were always on the radio and television, were there precisely because they did not have power, that those who did hold or...