Some of our best journalists take themselves even more seriously than the politicians they write about.

Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia. For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable.

Success in war underpins the claims to greatness of many presidents.

The sense of national catastrophe is inevitably heightened in a television age, when the whole country participates in it.

A first hint of the power of the electronic media to bring disaster directly into living rooms came with the radio broadcast of the explosion of the zeppelin "Hindenburg," in 1937 . . .

American Danish can be doughy, heavy, sticky, tasting of prunes and is usually wrapped in cellophane. Danish Danish is light, crisp, buttery and often tastes of marzipan or raisins; it is seldom wrapped in anything but loving care.

Mr. Reagan spent World War II, the global conflict fought and won by his generation, making training films in Hollywood.