The newspaper, I gradually discovered, was a different place from what it was when I had set sail on my first foreign assignment ten years before. It was more careful, more bureaucratic, more frightened, more vulnerable. These changes had been taking place over many years, but I hadn’t fully grasped them. When you’re overseas, you don’t really understand what’s going on back at headquarters. People tell you, but you don’t get it. Now I could see how much things had changed. The great explosion of journalistic energy of the 1970s—when reporters were emblems of America’s revolt against authority—had ended. Journalists weren’t the good guys anymore, the Lou Grants and Mary Richardses. Now they were the whiners and spoiled brats, inhuman stick figures who acted as if they were better than everyone else. Back in the eighties, when we were still flying high, I thought it would be good for us to be unpopular for a while. But not like this.

The worst of it was that the economics of the news business had changed. Not only were we unpopular, we were unprofitable. You could see it every time a reporter went to ask Bob Marcus whether he could take a trip somewhere. In the old days the answer was always yes. It was understood that covering the news cost money, and a hefty expense account was regarded as a sign you were doing the job properly. No more. Advertising revenues were falling—you didn’t need to see any numbers, you just had to look at the thinness of the paper—and circulation was down. Philip Sellinger had been saying ever since he became publisher fifteen years before that he hoped he would never have to order layoffs in the newsroom. But people were wondering whether he could keep that promise much longer. The best young reporters were beginning to drift away, to Hollywood as screenwriters, to Wall Street as investment bankers or to television as talking heads. The older journeymen reporters, like my friend George Dirk, were getting antsy, looking over their shoulders, wondering when the ax might fall. But not me. I was a rising star. Everyone said so.

One of the things I discovered when I returned home was that my ex-girlfriend, Annie Baron, had become a star, too. She had a weekly column in Newsweek now, and appeared regularly on one of the television talk shows that had fastened around journalism like boa constrictors. I learned of her television career soon after I arrived in Washington. I was channel surfing one Friday night when I saw the face of a beautiful woman, hauntingly familiar to me, who was in animated discussion with a panel of overbearing men. They were discussing the role of the First Lady in lobbying for social legislation, and the men kept interrupting one another to talk about the political costs and benefits for the president.