As an undergraduate, Stephen Banker held the H.V. Kaltenborn Scholarship and cut his teeth in the news division of WHRB. His first interview was with Walt Kelly in Harvard Square at the height of the Pogo riot. Later, he attended Columbia University as a CBS Fellow, where he concentrated in Latin American affairs. For CBS News, he covered the Kennedy Assassination while based in Washington and also covered stories in Spain, France, Mexico, Cuba and Haiti. He then spent 20 years mostly on a cultural beat with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. But he kept one foot in hard news. During that period, he frequently reported on Watergate and provided live coverage for NPR of Nixon's departure from the White House. He was an on-air columnist for the PBS series The New Tech Times with a series called "The Technoklutz," which was also printed in Popular Computing magazine. Other articles have appeared in Smithsonian, Fortune Small Business, PC/Computing, Byte, TV Guide and Penthouse.

William Beecher has spent most of his life in Washington, as a correspondent for such papers as the The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Mr. Beecher broke the story about the secret bombing of Cambodia in The New York Times. He also made many multi-week reporting trips to the former Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East and Far East, including five trips to Vietnam. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

Besides his experience in reporting, he has also had two tours in government. His first job with the government was as an Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs in the Department of Defense. The second job that Mr. Beecher took with the government was as the Public Affairs Director for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Mr. Beecher retired at the end of 2003 but returned from retirement three months later to work as a principal in a Park Avenue strategic communications company. He was surprised at an international conference in Malta two years ago, being made a knight in the ancient order of St. John of Medina.

Richard Burgheim joined Time Inc. in 1959, after a stint in the Coast Guard, and never left the organization. He wrote at Time, primarily in the Show Business section, and later edited Life and Money. Mr. Burgheim is currently working as the Consulting Editor at Time Inc. In between, he served on corporate research & development teams that incubated HBO, a wire service and four magazines. Of the print start-ups, the sole survivor was People, of which he became the first executive editor.

Mr. Burgheim's prouder legacy is his consulting role on New York Times Upfront, a news magazine for high school students, and a generation of mentees now flourishing in journalism. He is also a board member of the Doe Fund which raises money to help homeless individuals re-enter the workforce and find stable careers.

David Burnham, an investigative reporter with the New York Times from 1968 to 1986, is the co-founder and co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Established in 1989, "the purpose of TRAC is to provide the American people and institutions of oversight like news organizations, Congress, public interest groups and scholars-with online access to comprehensive information about the operations of the federal government." (TRAC website) Mr. Burnham is a member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Advisory Board. He has also worked as an Associate Research Professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. In 1968, he received the George Polk Award for Community Service from Long Island University. In 1987, he received the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship. In 1992, he received the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in Bellagio, Italy. He has written three books: A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and the IRS (1990), The Rise of the Computer State (1984), and Above the Law: Secret Deals, Political Fixes, and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice (1996).

David Halberstam was born in 1934 in New York. He began his working at a small daily newspaper, Daily Times Leader, in Mississippi. He was fired after ten months. He then spent four years on The Nashville Tennessean, covering the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. He joined The New York Times in the fall of 1960, and was soon sent to Vietnam. Mr. Halberstam received a pulitzer for his work in Vietnam. He left The New York Times in 1967 to work for Harper's Magazine.

Mr. Halberstam is an accomplished writer and has written thirteen Bestsellers. He has written 19 books total to date including The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (1965), The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era (1965), Ho (1971), The Best and the Brightest (1972), The Powers That Be (1979), Breaks of the Game (1981), The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal (1985), The Reckoning (1986), Summer of '49 (1989), The Next Century (1991), The Fifties (1993), October 1964 (1994), Freedom Fighters (1998), The Children (1999), Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made (1999), War in a Time of Peace (2002), Firehouse (2002), The Teammates (2003), and Bill Belichick: The Education of a Coach (2005). He has concentrated on writing books ever since 1972, when he published The Best and the Brightest.

He is a member of the Society of American Historians, a fact that stunned fellow member Arthur Schlesinger who gave him a C- in American Intellectual History when he was at Harvard in the 1950s.

Jack Harrison grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and six other national writing awards. The American Jewish Committee honored him for successfully combating bigotry in Atlanta. He was Vice President of The New York Times Company for 23 years, a director of The International Herald Tribune and a Harvard Overseer. He and his wife mentor bright but financially needy children to whom they provide scholarships through their charitable foundation. Jack retired and he and his wife Bonnie live in Sarasota with their soft-coated Wheaten Terrier, Shanae.

Jonathan Randal worked as a foreign correspondent from 1957 to 1998 for a variety of outlets, starting with United Press before it became International, the old Paris Herald (now the International Herald Tribune), The New York Times and for almost 30 years for The Washington Post. He is the former Senior Foreign Correspondent for The Washington Post.

He covered war and pestilence in many unpleasant climes, mostly the Middle East, Africa and two spells in Vietnam. He also lived in Paris for about 40 years on and off.

Mr. Randal remarks, "Hard work, but fun and it beat working for a living. I was lucky to work many years for Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post. The best years were before the direct dial telephone, the satellite telephone and other inventions of the devil, which put editors and others who had never missed a hot meal in the driver's seat. The late Joe Alsop got it right with the title of his memoirs, "I'd seen the best of it.""

Following graduation, Sydney Schanberg went to Harvard Law School for two months, found it wasn't a fit, and left. He was soon drafted into the Army, spending two years in Cold-War Germany. Afterward, he took an I.Q. test at The New York Times and was hired as a copy boy. Better things followed, he worked as the bureau chief in Albany covering Nelson Rockefeller, and then several years in India and Pakistan. Next was Southeast Asia, where he focused on the war in Cambodia. He later worked as The New York Times City Editor, and then as an Op-Ed columnist for the same newspapers. After The New York Times, he took his column to Newsday and also explored the digital world as investigations editor at APB.com.

He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his reporting in Cambodia. The Academy Award winning film, Killing Fields, bases its central character on Sydney Schanberg and his work in Cambodia.

"It's a good life. I'm still at it, writing at the Village Voice. And, I have a great family, who cheer me on and make me smile as they tolerate my storms and eccentricities."