The first measure of a journalist is a nose for news, and in this you have no contemporary equal. You were in Washington to cover the nation’s response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic depression. In Berlin when Hitler’s divisions swept across Europe and in London when Neville Chamberlain declared war. In Honolulu for the attack on Pearl Harbor and in Australia to record Gen. MacArthur’s “I shall return” speech. You reported from the liberated death camps of Europe and on the Cold War from behind the newly-erected Iron Curtain. The second measure of a journalist is the ability to explain, and at this you have been equally stunning. Robert MacNeil has credited your “knowledge and . . . sense of history extremely rare in journalism.” And Bill Moyers has called you “one of that handful of journalists to whom legions of us are indebted.” As a reporter and columnist for the Christian Science Monitor and as a pioneering correspondent for each of the three major broadcast networks you have shaped as much as has any journalist the American public’s understanding of the breathtaking events of the 20th century—an era correctly described by the title of your critically acclaimed memoirs as being At the Hinge of History.
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