[On writing:] “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.'”, March 25, 2007.)
Officers came and went and were never a part of daily life.
The men were always wary of an officer who took form more seriously than function.
It was the kind of country that made you feel better about yourself.
When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job.
He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted.
All professions have some element of theater to them.
Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was—by Time corporate standards—just a little lazy.
Being well known for being well-known did not necessarily imply intelligence.
Bobby Kennedy said that when he had been a boy there were three major influences on children – the home, the church, and the school – and now there was a fourth – television.
Newspapers might have as much to do in shaping the course of public events as politicians,
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.
Until he (Time’s founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.
The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.
Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.
Nixon under pressure turned only to reporters from publications already favorable to him; Kennedy, in trouble, turned to those most critical and dubious of him, and if anything tended to take those already for him a bit for granted.
They (the media) found little quality of depth to him, that when she said on the platform with that which he said to them in private. The qualities of introspection and reflectiveness that they particularly treasured were missing.
The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what he DID NOT know.
Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.
She was young and scared, and hadn’t realized there was time to spare.
The closer journalists came to great issues, the more vulnerable they felt.
He was “more passionate than most intelligent men, and more intelligent and reasoned than most passionate men.
If the Times gave readers far more news, then Lippmann at the Trib made the world seem far more understandable.
(I. F. Stone had once called it an exciting paper to read because you never knew on what page you would find a page-one story),
Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.
The author writes that the central conflict within journalist and seller of the American way Henry Luce was between his curiosity and his certitude.
he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.
he was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance.
Young man, Mr. Aubrey has made us so rich that we can now afford to worry about our image.
He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy.
This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.
It was the responsibility of a senior fireman to teach as well as to do.
In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity.
He was perceived to be intellectually promiscuous, a little too eager to please all groups.
Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous.
Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person—the two are often different.
He could tune her, bringing out her better instincts and filtering out her lesser ones.
The faster the motion, the less time to think. Fuselage journalism, Hugh Sidey of Time later called it.
Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.
Elliston thought consistency less important than vitality and intelligence and passion.
he was almost joyously what he had always been, a lot of gee whiz, it was all new and fresh even when surely he had seen much of it before, and it was as if he took delight in not having been changed externally by all that he had seen.
It was a wonderful combination for a reporter, the exterior so comforting, the interior so driven.
If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.
He was very good, it turned out, at outlining the flaws in the government as long as someone else was in charge of the government.
The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.
the ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter’s career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished.
If he (George Keenan)felt on occasion more than a little uncomfortable when being listened to, then he was truly unhappy when not being listened to.
his was a profession in which a good leader constantly had to adapt to new weapons, whether he liked them or not,
One successful writer said he would never be a millionaire because he liked living like one too much.
What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.
[On writing:] “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 t
He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.
Peterson thought it an unusual friendship, one only the Army could forge.
Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing
David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: “I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.
Do you know what the greatest test is? Do you still get excited about what you do when you get up in the morning?
Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.
You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.