Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction.

If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.

Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches.

The informed, unmanaged question. That's the most dangerous thing at a press conference anywhere.

It is one thing to rouse the passion of a people, and quite another to lead them.

[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.

Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions.