Closeness to power heightens the dignity of all men.

When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.

Politics in America is the binding secular religion.

When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he’s nobody’s friend.

I saw Chungking for the first time more than 40 years ago - a city of hills and mists, of grays and lavenders, two rivers shaping it to a point and the cliff rising above me like a challenge.

I, alas, must present myself somewhat ignominiously as a chef in a busy kitchen. Somewhere a novel is bubbling on a back burner, an old attempt at history may come out of the freezer.

Those 40 or 50 national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps - they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers.