Phil Gramm had a stump speech about how his mother’s devotion kept him from being an academic failure in life. She got him into a special school that turned him around – under a government program for the children of deceased veterans. He was repeatedly asked at press conferences why he would then turn around and support draconian cuts in federal funding for education. He never had an answer.

I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information

The paramedic called the press and sold me like a loaf of bread. This was news, and he wanted to be the one to report it.

When I first arrived in America, in an effort to drum up enthusiasm, I was billed by the media as ‘the White Pele’…I decided to put everything right, though, at my first press conference when I told the assembled media that I was not ‘the White Pele’ and that Pele was in fact ‘the Black George Best.