It is early on a June morning in 1934. My father has taken me by trolley car and on foot to the shore of the Hudson River under the new George Washington Bridge. The great armada of the U.S. Navy—eighty warships strong—rides at anchor in mid-river after a month-long passage from the West Coast via the Panama Canal. I am interested only in the biplane I see perched on the f oredeck of the battleship directly opposite us. My father explains that the plane is launched by catapult from the ship and it can return by landing in the water and being craned back up on board. I listen, then turn to watch a man farther down the strand who is repeatedly tossing a stick into the river for his German shepherd to retrieve. So much for my first memory of a historic event.

Eleven years later I am at the Hudson again. Now it is the victorious wartime fleet that is on display—including the U.S.S. Missouri , back from Japan. It is a clear, windy October day with Navy blimps and Air Force squadrons aloft; hundreds of thousands are crowding the embankment to watch Harry Truman take the salute from the deck of a fast-moving white destroyer. I think I see Truman wave his hat as he goes by. He is the second President I have laid eyes on. In 1944, on the final afternoon of FDR’s last campaign, his rain-drenched open car passed within a few feet of me, and I will never forget his exhausted face.

Does anyone ever forget seeing a President? In college I find myself sharing a Christmas eggnog with Ike, then head of Columbia, and a hundred other students, many of whom had served under him only a few years before. Kennedy (by now I am a professional journalist) speaks to reporters at a State Department briefing a month before his assassination. He ends with a speech from Richard III , delivered as well as any actor I’d ever heard, and he looks like such an ace, of course. I spot Richard Nixon during the Johnson years, with the expected sunken eyes and dark jowls but surprisingly slight in stature. He sits alone in an Italian restaurant on East Forty-ninth Street and then rises graciously to greet his party as it enters.

I am a boy in a little world; then I am a man in the great world. And when I find myself trespassing on an occasion of historic interest, I am both man and boy at the same time. At lunch with Dean Acheson he tells me that what he likes most in a magazine is a leavening of humor. I accidentally witness Churchill receiving an academic award and am struck by how much he resembles my father in build and in coloring. I am present at a huge press conference at