Back in the Pleistocene, at military school in the South, some of my dorm-mates and I started a mimeographed – remember mimeographs? – broadside called the Trusty Tribunal. We were pamphleteers in the 18th-century sense, with approximately the same tech, but at a military school -- M.A.S.H, basically, minus the operating rooms and the grownups. I accidentally learned German, then studied in Berlin, which drove me to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall. This determines the larger part of my political reporting year being spent in Europe to this day. Currently at work in Berlin on a book for Alfred A. Knopf Publishers about the Cold War in East Berlin, I have since reported from London, Warsaw, Prague, Istanbul, Moscow, Hong Kong, Lima, Manila, Beirut, Tel Aviv, St. Moritz, Granada, Mindanao, and from my native South for Town and Country, Garden and Gun, Conde Nast Traveler, Men’s Journal, Departures, and a host of other magazines in the States and overseas.