After university, I taught secondary school for a while and opened a bookshop in Greenwich, just east of London.

Regularly, customers asked for a book on Greenwich, and there was none. After all, Elizabeth I was born there. The Observatory is known all over the world; the Royal Naval College is there. So I decided to do it.

My father had left school at 18, without enough money to go to college - and, with four sons after the war, said he could still not afford to do so.

It must have been the fall of 1952 when my father returned to London sporting a neck tie emblazoned with the words 'I Like Ike.'

To be sure, administrations since Ronald Reagan had gone out of their way to massage and 'spin' news to the president's advantage, while the media did its best to un-spin it.

Republican isolationists had certainly tied the hands of every U.S. president, year after year - berating Franklin Roosevelt in particular and his attempts to ready the nation for inevitable attack.