I had been asked to give a key-note speech at a conference at Columbia University's Journalism School. It was January 2002. Two planes had been flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre months earlier and you could still feel how wounded the city felt. You could read it in the faces of New Yorkers you spoke to.
In my speech I made a few opening remarks about what the United States had meant to me. "I was born 15 years after the Second World War," I said, "in a world America made. The peace and security and increasing prosperity of the Western Europe that I was born into was in large part an American achievement."
American military might had won the war in the west, I continued. It had stopped the further westward expansion of Soviet power.
I talked briefly about the transformational effect of the Marshall Plan, through which the United States had given Europe the means to rebuild its shattered economies, and to re-establish the institutions of democracy.
I told the audience, composed mostly of students of journalism, that as a young reporter I had myself witnessed the inspiring culmination of all this in 1989 when I'd stood in Wenceslas Square in Prague.
