I've lost seven friends to smoking-related lung cancer. Each death was a long, agonizing experience.

After 50 years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, my father died, too young, of a massive heart attack. He was 69. It's almost certain that all those years of nicotine inhalation were a major contributor to his clogged arteries.

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.

John F. Kennedy, the man I had thought would define the political ideal for the rest of my days, was suddenly gone in the senseless violence of a single moment.

In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha television station. I had bargained to get a salary of $100 dollars a week because I didn't feel I could tell Meredith's doctor father I was making less.

ABC wouldn't be a player in the news major leagues until the 1970s, when Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and programming approach he had applied to ABC Sports.

We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.

You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.

Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.

In 1989, a lone and still-anonymous Chinese student stood unarmed in front of a Chinese tank and gave the world an enduring image of the determination of China's young to change their nation. He didn't text message the tank or share a video on YouTube.

My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the '70s, in the '80s, and especially in the '90s.

The daunting task of being a mother, a wife, and an independent career or professional person is really taxing.

I'm the father of three daughters, and they're all highly trained professionals. Two of them are mothers, and the other one wants to be at some point.

There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.

People are beginning to doubt the moral certitude of people on the right, especially the far right.

I think obviously we need to work harder at extending the women's movement. How do women who have prepared for careers and have a child get back to the workplace and still fulfill maternal roles?

I would say that we have not completely cracked the code of the '60s. We are still finding our way through that time.