The house was big enough for my brother and me to have firecracker wars at one end and leave Mom and Dad undisturbed at the other. When firecrackers weren't available, we attacked each other with pennies and marbles and clumps of Crisco, which made brilliant greasy asterisks when you missed and hit the wall.
Mom would talk about Eric Sevareid and Murrow and Howard K. Smith the way other parents talk about sports figures.
I am always looking for material - whether for my notebooks or for Twitter or Instagram - which means I'm looking for meaning.
To be the windowpane - this is basically a bastardization of what Orwell said about good writing - so you can get the conversation going and frame it the right way and make sure people aren't lost. And then you let the candidates illuminate the issues themselves.
When the news broke that John McCain had been diagnosed with brain cancer, the outpouring of well wishes all hailed his toughness.
George W. Bush said the reason the Oval Office is round is there are no corners you can hide in.
Every president makes the Oval Office theirs.
After President Obama took office, his campaign book 'The Audacity of Hope' receded into his past fast. Its sweet, naive, bipartisan 'let's reason together' passages fell away, too.
The swashbuckling independence of my childhood was not all good, and as a father, I'm puzzling out how to be part of my children's lives rather than shoehorning them into mine. But there's a risk that I'll overcompensate, of course.
The most important connection I can see between my faith and my work is that in the progress of my day, I try to be restrained and mindful of every person's humanity and of the overwhelming challenge of pride.
Mr. Obama said that he personally told Mr. Putin to knock it off and vows to retaliate. But the Obama presidency is coming to an end, and his successor still won't accept that Russia is guilty of tampering with U.S. elections.
There's kind of a Tom Harkin aspect to Bernie Sanders, even though Harkin is supporting Secretary Clinton.
If we practice hard enough, we can become thoroughly interested in even the simplest things of daily life, the way a child would. The smallest things would become so meaningful, they might even be worth a few words or a photograph, whatever method you use to capture them.
In 2008, Senator John McCain forbid his staff from using an ad that referred to his opponent Barack Obama's inflammatory former pastor Jeremiah Wright or from raising that issue in any other way. He believed it was a sneaky way to use Obama's race against him.
In their day, no man worthy of the presidency would ever stoop to campaigning for it. George Washington was asked to serve. Decades later, his successors were also expected to sit by the phone.
My mother, Nancy Dickerson, was a reporter for CBS and NBC and the first female star of television news; my father, Wyatt Dickerson, was a successful businessman. Their parties, from the '60s to the '80s, attracted cabinet officials, movie stars, and presidents.
I've talked to several who have been approached for short- or long-term duty in the Trump administration. The evidence of the work environment that mounts with each passing day makes them highly wary.
