The hardest thing I had to do at the start [of writing my book on Vietnam] was to take leave of my byline for the next four years. Ours is a profession built upon the immediacy of reward: we graduate from college, and our peers go off to law school and graduate school and medical school. They have barely started their first-year classes, and our names are bannered across the front pages of the nation's leading newspapers. They get their medical or law degrees, and start out in their residencies or as the lowest hirelings in a law office, and we are oldtimers, covering the statehouse, or on our way to Washington, by now, we believe, the possessors of a well-known brand name.

They byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification -- if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. It was hard enough to give so much of it up when I went to Harper's, where I would get only five or six bylines a year. But to go from the world of easy recognition, from the world of The New York Times and Harper's, to a world where I might get only one byline in four years, was a great risk. A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?

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