Book excerpt: "She was born during the Jazz Age and grew up in Paris and the American Midwest after her father's death on the polo field and her mother's later suicide. As a young war reporter, she waded ashore on Omaha Beach and witnessed the liberation of Dachau. She spent the 1950s hobnobbing in Hollywood with Marlene Dietrich and Gene Kelly. She went to West Africa as an ambassador's wife as the New Frontier dawned. She comforted a distraught Lyndon Baines Johnson in Washington, DC, as the Vietnam war turned into a quagmire. And today? Today, it's June 6, 2006: Pamela Buchanan Murphy Gerson Cadwaller's 86th birthday. With some asperity, she's waiting for a congratulatory phone call from the president of the United States. Brother, is he ever going to get a piece of her mind"--Publisher description.