Greetings!

I’ve been covering foreign affairs for many years, starting when I was chief diplomatic correspondent for the now defunct Washington Evening Star in the 1960s. Along the way, I picked up a Masters degree at Harvard’s two-year program in Russian studies, and as a result the Star sent me on two month trips to the Soviet Union and other Communist countries at that time.

In 1969, The New York Times hired me to go to Moscow and be its Moscow correspondent. When I returned to the United States in the fall of 1971, I joined the Washington bureau of The Times and eventually became its chief diplomatic correspondent, whose highlight was Henry Kissinger’s Middle East diplomacy. Eventually, in 1989, I became foreign editor and directed our superb coverage of the fall of Communism in East Europe.

In 1995, I joined the small team about to launch The Times’ web site. I eventually became editor of that publication at a time when the newspaper treated the web site with something verging on contempt. Now, of course, the paper depends on the web site for readers and income.

After I retired from the Times in 2002, I joined the Council on Foreign Relations where I did more than 1,000 interviews with experts around the world on different foreign policy topics. In 2016, I published my memoirs, which are on sale at Amazon and Barnes and Noble online. That book gives an accounting of the “old” journalism where I started, and the “new”–the world of the internet.