You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.

In 1996 he served as the conservative commentator in the point-counterpoint segment of 60 Minutes. He recounts that during his student days he was a left-leaning hippie but that in the 1970s his political views underwent a volte-face. Y.

In the United Kingdom he is known as the face of a long-running series of television advertisements for British Airways in the 1990s. This was preceded on September 21 2010 by Don't Vote!-It Just Encourages the Bastards and on September 1 2009 Driving Like Crazy with a reprint edition publiP. J. O'Rourked on May 11 2010.