The President's very shrewd

Some days the competition would beat me and I'd go home thinking awful thoughts, want to hide under the bed, depressed. But of course, in the news business, when you're working a daily news broadcast, you get your victories and defeats every day.

I don't know many people, if any, who have had some straight line toward success. I mean, they start here, they work hard, they've got what it takes, and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.

The questions don't do the damage. Only the answers do.

In 27 years of reporting from Washington, I've never heard a President admit he made a mistake.

But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age.

If you have a setback, and you're not doing well and then you overcome it somehow, it always sticks with you. You know it could happen again.