Ratings don't last. Good journalism does.

The American Dream is one of the greatest ideas in the history of human achievement . . . It thrives today in an age when its core components of freedom and opportunity are open to more Americans than ever before. It holds a real, identifiable place in the American heart and mind, and it informs the aspirations of everyone from farmers to software developers, from detectives to bankers, from soldiers to social workers . . . It defines us as a people, even as we add to its meaning with each new chapter in our national experience and our individual actions.

And now the sequence of events in no particular order.

Covering the civil-rights movement was a mind- and eye-opener for me. Houston was a segregated society, as was Texas as a whole - some of it by law, a lot of it by fear and tradition. But there was no violence where I lived, and if there was hate, it was either concealed from me or I just didn't recognize it.

I'm part of nobody's world except Brezhnev's.

This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It's, on its best day, is a crude art. We make mistakes; I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist, I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories, make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television.

Very big business is in bed with very big government in Washington, and has more to do with what the average person sees, hears and reads than most people know.