Deadline: A Memoir

pp. 308-309

President Lyndon B. Johnson told his guests at the White House one night that he was going to give up alcohol and take up golf.  Considering all his other problems, I wrote, with mock alarm, he should have been doing the opposite.  As every Scotsman knew, golf inevitably added to man’s sorrows while ‘a wee nip o’ the strong stuff’ was intended as a relief.  Did the President not know, I asked, that the Scots invented golf as a punishment for man’s sins, and that they invented whiskey as a consolation so that he could suffer another day?”