Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Kentucky, where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse's vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.

'We were all shocked,' Swerczek said. 'I've seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I'd ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I'd ever seen. And it wasn't pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.'

I threw myself with a passion into that final week before the Belmont. Out to the barn every morning, home late at night, I became almost manic. The night before the race, I called Laurin at home and we talked for a long while about the horse and the Belmont. I kept wondering, What is Secretariat going to do for an encore? Laurin said, 'I think he's going to win by more than he has ever won in his life. I think he'll win by 10.'

I slept at the Newsday offices that night, and at 2 a.m. I drove to Belmont Park to begin my vigil at the barn. I circled around to the back of the shed, lay down against a tree and fell asleep. I awoke to the crowing of a cock and watched as the stable workers showed up. At 6:07, Hoeffner strode into the shed, looked at Secretariat and called out to Sweat: 'Get the big horse ready! Let's walk him about 15 minutes.'

' Sweat slipped into the stall, put the lead shank on Secretariat and handed ) it to Davis, who led the colt to the outdoor walking ring. In a small stable not 30 feet away, pony girl Robin Edelstein knocked a water bucket against the wall. Secretariat, normally a docile colt on a shank, rose up on his hind legs, pawing at the sky, and started walking in circles. Davis cowered below, as if beneath a thunderclap, snatching at the chain and begging the horse to come down. Secretariat floated back to earth. He danced around the ring as if on springs, his nostrils flared and snorting, his eyes rimmed in white.

Unaware of the scene she was causing, Edelstein rattled the bucket again, and Secretariat spun in a circle, bucked and leaped in the air, kicking and spraying cinders along the walls of the pony barn. In a panic, Davis tugged at the shank, and the horse went up again, higher and higher, and Davis bent back yelling, 'Come on down! Come on down!'

I stood in awe. I had never seen a horse so fit. The Derby and Preakness had wound him as tight as a watch, and he seemed about to burst out of his coat. I had no idea what to expect that day in the Belmont, with him going a mile and a half, but I sensed we would see more of him than we had ever seen before.

Secretariat ran flat into legend, started running right out of the gate and never stopped, ran poor Sham into defeat around the first turn and down the backstretch and sprinted clear, opening two lengths, four, then five. He dashed to the three-quarter pole in 1:0945, the fastest six-furlong clocking in Belmont history. I dropped my head and cursed Turcotte: What is he thinking about? Has he lost his mind? The colt raced into the far turn, opening seven lengths past the half-mile pole. The timer flashed his astonishing mile mark: 1:3415!

I was seeing it but not believing it. Secretariat was still sprinting. The four horses behind him disappeared. He opened 10. Then 12. Halfway around the turn, he was 14 in front . . . 15 . . . 16 . . . 17. Belmont Park began to shake. The whole place was on its feet. Turning for home, Secretariat was 20 in front, having run the mile and a quarter in 1:59 flat, faster than his Derby time.

He came home alone. He opened his lead to 25 . . . 26 . . . 27 . . . 28. As rhythmic as a rocking horse, he never missed a beat. I remember seeing Turcotte look over to the timer, and I looked over too. It was blinking 2:19, 2:20. The record was 2:2635. Turcotte scrubbed on the colt, opening 30 lengths, finally 31. The clock flashed crazily: 2:22 . . . 2:23. The place was ) one long, deafening roar. The colt seemed to dive for the finish, snipping it clean at 2:24.

I bolted up the press box stairs with exultant shouts and there yielded a part of myself to that horse forever.

I had told a couple of the editors about the autopsy report revealing the massive heart, and they loved it. When I wrote the end of the story as it finally appeared, about me finding out the horse had died and my reaction to the news, I then spent three more exhausting hours trying to figure out a way to flash forward to the autopsy, but none of my ideas worked. The ending with me standing in that room sobbing with my back against the wall was the natural end of the story, but I was determined to get that anecdote in.

Around noon, the magazine’s executive editor, Peter Carry, called and said, “Bill, What are you doing? I heard you are trying to write a new ending to include that autopsy report.” I said I was. “Don’t. Stop. Leave the ending alone. We’re considering using the autopsy at the beginning of the story, as a precede.”

An hour later, editor David Bauer called and asked me to write a 200-word precede about the horse’s death and the autopsy that followed. “Where are you going to put it?” I asked. “At the beginning. As a precede that will run in large type before the actual story.”

“This is going to ruin the lead,” I said. “It’ll be like we had two leads and couldn’t decide which one to use, so we ran both of them.”

“No, it won’t,” David said. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see. And don’t mention the horse’s name. Just call him ‘The horse.’ The reader will figure it out. We want to use the autopsy story but it does not fit at the end. You couldn’t have written a better ending and any kind of postscript would ruin it. So just give me 200 words about the horse being put down and then the autopsy. Very simple and straightforward.”

And so, somewhat skeptically, I wrote those 200 or so words. That precede was a brilliant idea, I must confess, and the autopsy story became one of the most oft-told tales in the lore of thoroughbred racing. Secretariat became the horse who had the giant heart, the biggest motor, the engine that never stopped beating. And it was all true.

In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite -- notably excepting the scholar and former head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan, the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan.