There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.
These days there’s all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.
No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did.
There’s a great quote by Julius Irving that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.’
Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don’t want to do it.
If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.
Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.
Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.
What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.
Always stay in with the outs.
The most dangerous thing about power is to employ it where it is not applicable.
A staff can be no better than the man it serves.
Up to then there had been something of a gentleman’s agreement among those who might be called The Good Journalists of Washington that the Kennedy Administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things and against bad things, and that when it did lesser things it was only in self-defense, and in order that it might do other good things.
It requires a certain kind of mind to see the beauty in a hamburger bun.
I added another chapter, the story of John Paton Davies, one of the most distinguished of the China hands who had had his career savaged during the McCarthy years. The section reflected my belief that in a better and healthier society he or someone like him might have been sitting in as Assistant Secretary of State during the Vietnam decisions.
Iacocca made his pitch: He wanted Ford to build the Fiesta, but with a Honda engine and transmission in it. Honda was delighted: He would like nothing better than this joint production with an American company, whose very name he revered. The price of the Japanese parts would be only $711. He could deliver 300,000 and do it quickly. Iacocca was even more delighted; he had an instant car and an unbeatable one at that. It could be in the dealers’ showrooms in only eighteen months.
You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.
The fury with which Japan unleashed itself upon international trade, the kind of economic Darwinism that was at the center of its impulse, originally came not just from each company’s desire to conquer the world but from its desire to take market share away from domestic competitors. In Japan there was always someone ready to undersell someone else, and there was always someone on the edge of bankruptcy.
If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.
I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.