Author's Note --

Several years ago, I published a slender little volume called Letter from Washington, an informal account of my early life and career. Since it covered only the first 38 years of my 95 years so far, I called it “half a book”. The first volume dealt with boyhood in Washington, student years at Cornell and Harvard, newspaper reporting in San Francisco, flying Navy torpedo planes in World War II, starting a new magazine, writing a daily newspaper column, and broadcasting news on radio and television in Chicago.

Picking up where that left off, this volume—another “half book”—deals with people and events that I have been involved with as editor of the Kiplinger Letters and Magazine in the second half of the twentieth century, and as a member of the community surrounding the nation’s capital.

One of the things that I have learned as a journalist over three quarters of a century is that every writer needs an editor. Fortunately, I have had a good one: my son, Knight Kiplinger, a highly talented professional writer himself, who has kept me free of a number of pitfalls of memory and interpretation.

To all the readers of this book, I say: “Write the story of your own life. Along with other accounts, it will be the history of our time.”

Austin H. Kiplinger
Washington, D.C.
April 2014