Socially, Philadelphia was still a fairly provincial city, its business community governed by the mores of the Main Line. Politically, it was a cauldron of ethnic rivalries, dominated by competing Irish and Italian constituencies.

Washington was not just a city of marble buildings and smoke-filled rooms and power brokers, but also a town full of people who do care about each other, in good times and bad.

I learned everything I ever need to know about questioning artful dodgers by covering the most artful of them all, Ronald Reagan. For Reagan, performance was as much a part of governing as understanding the details of the federal budget.

Haiti is the kind of place that grabs your heart, and never lets go ... When you arrive in Port-au-Prince, the first thing that strikes you is how vibrant the colors are. Buses, buildings, fences, clothing, everything is brightly painted in primary hues. On closer inspection, you see the reality behind this brightly colored landscape: a dark, grinding poverty, the worst in the Western hemisphere.

... I still have sympathy for some of the people who've fallen from grace in Washington. The feeding frenzy can be so unforgiving, especially in this day of nonstop cable news.

Senator [Bob] Corker has been, first of all, discreet and loyal. He has not signaled the internal mechanisms. He`s been pretty honestly saying, I wasn`t a real insider in the campaign.

Bob Corker was not the inside man that, certainly, Senator [Jeff] Sessions was. And he doesn`t telegraph what`s going on. He`s been much more discreet about that.