Probably no American journalist, man or woman, has had a more extraordinary career than Grace Halsell. Before President Lyndon Johnson personally hired her to work in the White House, Halsell had, over a period of two decades, written her way around the world - Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Orient, and the Americas.

Born on the windswept plains of West Texas, Halsell was encouraged from the age of five by her pioneer father, who had led cattle drives on the Chisholm Trail, "to travel, to get the benefit" of knowing other peoples. She began her travels at the age of twenty, going first to Mexico and then touring the British Isles by bicycle. Halsell studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and lived in London, Tokyo, Berlin and Seoul.

In Hong Kong, where she lived on a fishing junk with a Chinese family of nineteen, she wrote a column for the Tiger Standard; in Tokyo, where she slept on tatami mats, ate raw fish and took scalding ofuro baths, she was a columnist for the Japan Times. Moving to South America, she traveled on a tug for 2000 miles down the Amazon and crossed the Andes by jeep. In Lima, she became a columnist for the Spanish-language daily, La Prensa.

Halsell has been the Big Buddha, the Taj Mahal, the pyramids and Machu Picchu, has interviewed presidents, movie stars, kings and prime ministers. Her newspaper dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Post and the Christian Science Monitor have datelined war zones in Korean, Vietnam and Bosnia, as well as Russia, China, Macedonia and Albania.