Ann Althouse reminds us of a fascinating account of what was going on in President Gerald Ford’s mind when back in 1976 he made his ruinous observation (at least probably ruinous for his election chances) that there was "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe":

JIM LEHRER: Let’s go back at the time you said that. I’m sure you’ve replayed this in your mind a million times. I don’t have to remind you what happened. You gave that answer, and then there was a follow-up, and you repeated it, so my question is did you have any idea that you had said something wrong?

PRESIDENT GERALD FORD: Not at the time. Not at the time, because as you may remember, I included Yugoslavia, and Hungary, I believe, and Poland in the initial answer, and I said the Soviet Union does not dominate these countries. They’re autonomous, and of course, it related to an earlier comment I had made about the Helsinki accord, which had established the borderlines of all the Eastern and Western European countries. So at the time, I did not feel that I had made an error. In retrospect, obviously, the inclusion of a sentence or maybe a phrase would have made all the difference in the world.

It seems that he wanted to convey the idea that Soviet psychological domination would never succeed in these plucky places. Though that is not what in fact he said.

And even then it made no sense to put Hungary and Poland as two Warsaw Pact countries (whose political, security and military systems were for most practical purposes steered by Moscow) in with supposedly ‘non-aligned’ Titoist Yugoslavia. ‘Autonomous’? No.

Still, central and eastern Europe are tricky places, where a misplaced word or phrase can create a serious mess. As now President Obama has found with his bungled ‘Polish death camp’ remark. Look at this Telegraph piece and behold the nearly 1400 comments, and rising (the effect of a Drudgealanche)