The death of honest and courageous a reporter leaves America a little more vulnerable.

The further you get from power, the closer you come to the truth.

For David Halberstam journalism was a calling, not a job. You couldn't fire him and he wouldn't quit.

The Federalist Society is this conservative legal organization. And I think, for the Bush administration, being a member of the Federalist Society meant you were - a reliable, ideological, partisan Republican. It wasn't enough just to be registered as a Republican, or to be - have a generally conservative judicial philosophy, or prosecutorial philosophy. It meant that, basically, meant that you were a real movement conservative, a Party regular. That's what being a Federalist Society member means.

Officials and journalists live in parallel but separate realities; they see and talk to each other, may have a meal and gossip together, but their worlds never touch, because officials use words that don't mean what they say, while for those reporters in Vietnam - Halberstam, Peter Arnett, Morley Safer, and others - words were vessels of reality.

If you look at the people who are advising Rudy Giuliani it turns out that they seem to be all the people who were too insane or too extremist to even get on the George W. Bush team.

Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power.