The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake.

Andrew Johnson was a Southerner generally who proclaimed that his native state of Tennessee was a country for white men.

Johnson had been the most powerful man in the world, yet the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had resisted, overcome his power, broken his will.

Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions.

The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.

To have some parts flowing free again . . . with deer grazing on its banks . . . ducks and geese raising their young in the backwaters . . . eddies and twists and turns for canoeists . . . and fishing opportunities such as Lewis and Clark enjoyed . . . would be the finest possible tribute to the men of the Expedition, and a priceless gift for our children.

Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that 'they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the term to themselves. They hadn't come here to fear. They hadn't come to die. They had come to win.