Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Cramoni. inspiring and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Kramon Institute.

I call this one as time goes by.

We'll always have Paris.

Here's looking at you, kid.

Round up the usual suspects.

We were sitting around clustered tables, smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking cheap

scotch and beer in a neighborhood pub in London. College students from around the world,

Irish, English, French and German students,

all sitting together in peaceful conviviality.

There was even an Afghan Muslim and an Indian Hindu, a Canadian Jew. Really?

I mentioned that he was a Jew because getting the Afghan Muslim to sit down with him at the same table

was harder even than getting him to sit down with the Indian Hindu. But he did and

they became friends. We played soccer with students from every African country of the

former British and French empires, including Morocco, but none of them was with us

that night.

We were all in our 20s,

born sometime in the decade after the end of World War II.

We were studying all kinds of different things,

...