"early years at Time, I was assigned to work under the national affairs editor, Otto Friedrich, a wry man with a bushy red mustache who seemed perpetually amused by himself. He taught me a wonderful insight about journalism and later biography: Obscure facts and pieces of colorful detail, even though they may seem trivial, provide the texture and verisimilitude that make for a great narrative. It was something that Plutarch noted at the beginning of his Lives: "Sometimes a matter of lesser moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their character and inclinations, than the most famous sieges." Friedrich had expanded on the notion in a piece he titled "There Are 00 Trees in Russia." The "00" referred to the way a newsmagazine writer sticks in "00" or "TK" as a placeholder for a fact and then lets a researcher fill it in. From Friedrich, who wrote books on the side, I learned that writing biographies and histories could be a satisfying accompaniment to a day job in journalism. When covering the 1980 Reagan campaign, I was struck by the bug-eyed bevy of people who showed up on the fringes of rallies and handed out leaflets purporting to expose the insidious nature of the East Coast foreign policy establishment. The leaflets were filled with charts and arrows about the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefellers, the Bilderberg Group, Skull and Bones, and various banking cabals. I asked my Time colleague Evan Thomas about it, under the theory that as an East Coast preppy he could decode it. Eventually we began to talk about writing a book that would explore the reality and myths about "the establishment." We sketched it out in a summer cottage in Sag Harbor on Long Island. I'm a night person, and would try to stay up until 5 a.m., at which point I would hand over my notes to Evan, who got up around then. We'd go to the beach in the afternoon. We came around to the dual approaches that were at the core of our work at Time: Tell the tale through people, and make it a chronological narrative."