Back at a Paper Changed by Watergate

Abstract

This chapter describes how the Washington Post granted the author a year's sabbatical from the summer of 1976 to write a book about Yugoslavia. He also had a fellowship from the Wilson Center. The author's goal with his book, The Yugoslavs, was to make sense of the country where he was born. He chose to write in a hopeful spirit, to attribute Yugoslavia's ills to the Communist dictatorship that had ruined his family's life. The author then returned to the Post in the summer of 1977, going back to his job at the foreign desk, writing stories and analysis from Washington, particularly on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. During this time, the Post had embraced post-Watergate success and celebrity. The Yugoslavs, published in 1978, garnered positive reviews, including a front-page review in the New York Review of Books.