George W. Bush said the reason the Oval Office is round is there are no corners you can hide in.

If we practice hard enough, we can become thoroughly interested in even the simplest things of daily life, the way a child would. The smallest things would become so meaningful, they might even be worth a few words or a photograph, whatever method you use to capture them.

Politicians have done some grim things in pursuit of the office. President Franklin Roosevelt was a philanderer; nevertheless, he pushed aides to use his opponent Wendell Wilkie's affairs to hurt him. He even tutored aides on how to spread rumors without getting caught.

Chess masters don't evaluate all the possible moves. They know how to discard 98 percent of the ones they could make and then focus on the best choice of the remaining lot. That's the way expertise works in other fields, too: Wise practitioners recognize familiar patterns and put their creativity, improvisation, and skill toward the marginal cases.

In the modern presidency, the Chief Executive is expected to respond to anxious national moments with words that stabilize the country. President Trump chose a different route. He did not give a stirring speech of unity or create a national gathering point around common ideals. He spent his passion on other things.

Inaugural speeches are supposed to be huge and stirring. Presidents haul our heroes onstage, from George Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. George W. Bush brought the Liberty Bell. They use history to make greatness and achievements seem like something you can just take down from the shelf.

The walls of our upstairs hallway testify that we once had photogenic children. There are rows of framed pictures that show them playing baseball, basketball, holding a toad, and smiling in the sunlight at their eager parents. Everything is orderly and bright.

My mother, Nancy Dickerson, was a reporter for CBS and NBC and the first female star of television news; my father, Wyatt Dickerson, was a successful businessman. Their parties, from the '60s to the '80s, attracted cabinet officials, movie stars, and presidents.

CBS's Major Garrett writes in 'National Journal' about a new version of the 'stray voltage' theory of communication in which the president purposefully overstates his case knowing that it will create controversy.

In 2008, Senator John McCain forbid his staff from using an ad that referred to his opponent Barack Obama's inflammatory former pastor Jeremiah Wright or from raising that issue in any other way. He believed it was a sneaky way to use Obama's race against him.

Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

In addition to surviving the Forrestal, McCain has survived three other plane disasters, including being shot down over enemy territory.

An old theory holds that air conditioning ruined Congress. Members no longer had to flee the Washington heat to spend the summer back home. The long vacation forced them to bond with their constituents.

Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination on a platform of 'self-deportation' for illegal immigrants - and the Obama team never let Hispanics forget it. The Obama campaign also branded Republicans with Romney's ill-chosen words about 47 percent of Americans as the party of uncaring millionaires.

The culture of undermining sends signals of disrespect. This approach not only saps motivation and undermines teamwork, it also lowers the motivation to work extra hours anticipating what can go wrong.

After President Obama took office, his campaign book 'The Audacity of Hope' receded into his past fast. Its sweet, naive, bipartisan 'let's reason together' passages fell away, too.

During the 2008 campaign, Hillary Clinton ran a blunt television ad asking whether Barack Obama could handle a foreign policy crisis.

My children are vampires. I don't mean that they are going to dress as vampires for Halloween. I mean that, like vampires, they cannot be captured on film.

A number of Donald Trump's supporters told me during the campaign they had faith that he would be a good president because he would be helped by the experts around him. But the president's improvisation saps experts of their key skill: pattern recognition.

For Hillary Clinton, Iowa was a tough state for her in 2008, and she's put a lot of effort into fixing those mistakes.

Mother's Day is a welcome event in partisan times. Nearly everyone agrees that we should show mothers gratitude.

In the end, Obama won, stealing the change message from John Edwards and beating back Hillary Clinton's focus on experience. And the race turned on a remarkable speech Obama gave on the night of Nov. 10, 2007, in Des Moines.

To be the windowpane - this is basically a bastardization of what Orwell said about good writing - so you can get the conversation going and frame it the right way and make sure people aren't lost. And then you let the candidates illuminate the issues themselves.

If Michael Flynn lost his job because of a gradual erosion of trust, shouldn't the easy and frequent production of official statements that are so many connecting flights from the truth also be concerning?

The house was big enough for my brother and me to have firecracker wars at one end and leave Mom and Dad undisturbed at the other. When firecrackers weren't available, we attacked each other with pennies and marbles and clumps of Crisco, which made brilliant greasy asterisks when you missed and hit the wall.

When former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote his recent book, 'Duty', it was full of tough assessments and candor.

Comey worried that the pressure from Trump to end the Flynn investigation or remove the 'cloud' of the larger investigation would 'infect' the investigation if he let others working on the case know about it. You don't need to believe the particulars of each exchange to see that this mode of management was not productive to a larger purpose.

When the news broke that John McCain had been diagnosed with brain cancer, the outpouring of well wishes all hailed his toughness.

When the campaign ends, and you are home, the alarm clock is the same, but you don't know where to start after it goes off: expense reports, new stories, the crusted paint cans that have to go to the hazardous-waste disposal site, the wiper blade on the Honda that has gone droopy.

In the 2012 campaign, the president successfully transformed the most intense conservative positions into liabilities on immigration and the role of government.

I believe that Jesus Christ existed and that He died for my sins. And I believe that what He said in the Gospels is a model for the way I should try to lead my life and that I will always fall short of that and, therefore, need Him to redeem me.

In their day, no man worthy of the presidency would ever stoop to campaigning for it. George Washington was asked to serve. Decades later, his successors were also expected to sit by the phone.

A picture excites the love of parenting that comes through meditation on a child.

When I interviewed John McCain in 2000 about whether he had taken medication for his anger, I remember thinking, 'Let's see how this is going to work.'

Mr. Obama said that he personally told Mr. Putin to knock it off and vows to retaliate. But the Obama presidency is coming to an end, and his successor still won't accept that Russia is guilty of tampering with U.S. elections.

People out there with pre-existing conditions, they are worried. Are they going to have the guarantee of coverage if they have a pre-existing condition or if they live in a state where the governor decides that's not a part of the health care, or that the prices are going to go up? That's the worry.

The locker rooms that Donald Trump is in are not at the cut-rate gym with the broken treadmills - they are at his swish golf clubs. They are places of stature.

When she died, Mom left me her letters and journals. Windows into things I would have been too young to understand when she was alive, or too busy, or too much of a know-it-all.

The Chinese, our allies, have been allies with North Korea.

I've talked to several who have been approached for short- or long-term duty in the Trump administration. The evidence of the work environment that mounts with each passing day makes them highly wary.

President-elect Trump says he's not even sure the Russians did the hacking.

Would most politicians have gone to a meeting with someone advertised as being an agent of the Russian government?

If you have children and want to give your future self a present, record their laughter as toddlers. When they're older and away from you, you might find that clip in the middle of the day, and it will transport you as surely as if you had a time machine.

Not everybody gets a chance to go fly around the country and spend time in places with people who aren't like them, where, again and again, you realize we're all generally alike.

Claims of a decisive 'turning point' in any election are often overblown - more often, such a moment merely crystallizes a change that's been days or weeks in the making. But you can make a real case that Obama's Jefferson-Jackson Day speech is a pivot point in America history.

The goal of the moderator is to illuminate the views of the candidates on the issues that matter the most to voters, and you don't need to be on the side of the party to do that.

When the kids were young, they just wanted to be around us. We were units of comfort and support. As they get older, we work the turnstile, helping the exasperated customer pass whatever temporary obstacle is keeping them from their next exciting thing. Now we're the ones who just like having them in the room.

My instincts for asking questions is to press but not to be a jerk about it.

That's what politics is. It's the story of what's happening, what does it mean, what's the conclusion, who are the interesting characters?

Mom would talk about Eric Sevareid and Murrow and Howard K. Smith the way other parents talk about sports figures.