I met H. R. Knickerbocker way back in 1927 or thereabouts. Those were the good old days. They were the days of the Long Armistice. No one had ever heard of the Rome-Berlin Axis, Stuka dive bombers, or the Haushofer Plan. Mr. Roosevelt was out of politics, Mr. Churchill was a chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. Lindbergh had just flown the Atlantic. We talked of such neolithic creatures as Pilsudski of Poland and Alexander of Jugoslavia, and most of us thought that Hitler was a bad Austrian joke, more or less. Those were the good old days. Even so, thunderheads were gathering. I first met Mr. Knickerbocker in Berlin. This was fitting, since Berlin was his bailiwick. We all had bailiwicks in those days. Duranty was in Moscow, Raymond Swing was in London, and Dorothy Thompson had just left Berlin. I was bouncing all over the place. I didn’t have my bailiwick yet. We were all very good friends. We formed a kind of fluid international community. We were buzzards in every foreign office, and kings on every wagon-lit. We didn’t meet often, since we lived in different cities, and it took something of a catastrophe to bring us all together. When we did meet, the vault of heaven shook. I remember days--and nights--in Geneva, Bucharest, Cairo, Helsingfors. I think of Sheean, the Mowrers, Webb Miller, Shirer, Jay Allen, Fodor, Whitaker, and many more. Don’t let me sound nostalgic. I am thinking merely that we have all grown up. We are not cameras any longer. This foreword is not about Mr. Knickerbocker’s book. Let that speak for itself. Knick is the most pertinacious, plausible, and inquisitive question-asker I ever met. In this book he answers questions instead of asking them. I like to see the tables turned. I don’t know that I agree with all his answers. But let him answer them. This foreword is about Mr. Knickerbocker himself. His flaming red hair, his flaming red personality (I mean “red” chromatically, not politically) are famous on four continents. He needs no introduction. But certain nuggets of memory stay fixed in mind. I remember the time he fed me caviar inside a baked potato, at Horcher’s in Berlin, and I remember the time I fed him a dinner in London that, deliberately, we planned so that it would cost exactly five pounds. I remember the time that he took me to hear Putzi Hanfstaengl hammer out a tornado of Wagner in the Hotel Kaiserhof, and I remember the time I took him across the freezing Danube, on the way to Sofia, in what was supposed to be a rowboat. I remember week-ends on the Semmering, bad oysters in Madrid, evenings in the Café Royal, drinks in Rome, Budapest, and points beyond.