In the spring of 1993, I paid a visit to my older son, James, then a sophomore at Harvard College. He had always been a “techie” and was then majoring in computer science. James invited me to visit his computer science building which was located in the distant reaches of the Harvard campus, We went to his work station, and he called up the web site of the Library of Congress, which had on the computer screen a picture showing…..
Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, I began to brood a bit, thinking wrongly that there would be little excitement left in foreign reporting. In fact, at the end of 1992, I sent a memo to the foreign staff: “What has spurred this memo, of course, has been the breakup of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev’s resignation last Christmas which followed so closely upon the collapse of the Communist system in Eastern Europe two years earlier. Not only have…..