The Protracted Conflict

I write this column at a time of war and turmoil in the Middle East, which prompts me to look back, and ahead, to better times.

I am often amazed at how quickly adulation turns to vilification once some journalist somewhere has successfully set the fashion. Once the press and television turned on Nixon, he was doomed. It did not take long for Mihailovich of Yugoslavia to lose his heroic image and find himself presented as a traitor (though he has since been vindicated by David Martin in Patriot or Traitor, Hoover Press).