The look on his face was something you see only a few times in your life, ... This horror grips you, becomes almost unimaginable in your ability to live with it. But that is our job, to live with the risk. This is the nature of people who hold lives in their hands.

That is our job, to live with this risk, and some days it's bad.

I always looked at it as something broader than just the Cold War. I looked at it as the spirit of our nation.

In 1960, ... the Cape looked like an oil field, with towering structures, dirt, and asphalt roads newly carved out of the palmetto scrub. The alligators were reluctantly surrendering to the onslaught of newly arrived civilization. If you didn't have a good sense of direction, you were in trouble.

When you really think about it, I'm not delusional enough to think that what I do is important to life as we know it on this planet. No. But neither is what you do.

That was like nothing I ever experienced in my whole life. If the building had blown up, I wouldn't have been surprised.