This is a thoroughly entertaining memoir by a heralded raconteur, a card-carrying member of The Greatest Generation.

Born in Houston, Texas, Jack Valenti was the youngest high school graduate in the city (age 15). He earned his B.A. from the University of Houston and served as a highly decorated pilot in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He graduated from Harvard with an M.B.A., and in 1952 he co-founded the advertising/political consulting agency of Weekley & Valenti.

In 1955 Jack Valenti met the man who would have the largest impact on his life, the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson. Valenti's agency was in charge of handling the press during President Kennedy and Vice-President Johnson's ill-fated visit to Texas in November of 1963. Jack was actually in the motorcade in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was shot. Within hours of the assassination, Valenti was on Air Force One flying back to Washington, the first newly-hired special assistant to the new President. On June 1, 1966, Valenti resigned his White House post and was elected president and chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America. For the past 38 years, Jack Valenti has been the face of Hollywood and active in every facet of the entertainment industry - from lobbying in Washington to acting on screen to earning his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Jack Valenti's memoir is a sweeping and important historical record written by a brilliantly successful man who constantly found himself at the center of the storm. It is the dynamic, often dramatic, occasionally amusing account of one man who was present as the landscape shifted--the all-encompassing, historical changes wrought by the Johnson White House and the world-wide sea-change in the motion picture industry that has radically altered the entertainment industry, here and abroad.