We have to do our jobs better, more tirelessly and stop whining about it.

A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.

I don't want to romanticize the world in which everybody watched three networks and the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were incredibly dominant. That time has passed.

Ronald Reagan came to office and had already been an experienced politician as governor of California, whose ideology and ideas, no matter how simplistic or no matter how much you may disagree with them, were fairly well-developed and fairly consistent. Donald Trump is a real-estate branding operator and a reality-show television star whose entrance into big-time politics, as a victor, as someone who will now wield tremendous power, was as shocking to him as it was to everybody else.

I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.

Maybe Santa Claus is real. Here's the problem: reality.

The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.