SIR David Frost, the late English journalist and media genius, launched his career on Nov 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of our admired president, John F. Kennedy.
He had a show, That Was The Week That Was, which was usually satirical and always widely watched. That Saturday night, a sombre group of distinguished Britons gave a memorable summation of what we had lost in the world, with the remarkable thousand day presidency so tragically concluded.
Well, I now feel like "that was the week that was" because of the symbolic events of last week. When an American president speaks, it is more than words. It is policy. That is why every agency in Washington scrambles to go over every word of a planned presidential lecture, press conference or major public address.
Barack Obama's speech in Warsaw went far beyond anything I had personally envisaged, with him not only assuring North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) members around Russia's borders, but making it seem like Nato had in a sense, "adopted" Ukraine, the violation of whose territory would be taken as an attack on the whole alliance.
During the D-Day commemoration ceremony in Normandy, we watched every nuance by Western leaders towards Russian President Vladimir Putin. I'm not sure that Putin is, in fact, enjoying the events, having been disinvited from the main show, the meeting of the G-8 in Brussels, or now, the G-7. It seemed as if Obama, in his Warsaw speech, had a virtual fist at Putin's jaw. All this while the president is getting terrible foreign policy ratings at home.
It seems as if Obama is not allowed by his critics to do anything right. It has been the time honoured policy of the United States military to leave no soldier behind. Why would men and women in uniform fight so courageously if they believed that their commander-in-chief would abandon them for a temporary advantage? Of course, it sets a bad precedence to trade terrorists for a single soldier. But that had to be weighed against the obligation the nation makes to every man and woman who pledges to risk his or her life in the defence of our country.
Obama did the right thing in ransoming a captured soldier, whether or not his record is tarnished. As for the 70th anniversary of D-Day, we have to accept that this will probably be the last time participants of the actual invasion are present. It was moving to see 1,000 roughly 90-year-old survivors of the biggest military event in history once again on the beaches of Normandy.
There were 18 heads of state or government, but only one who took part in the war effort. This was Lillibet Windsor, who was an 18-year-old mechanic during D-Day. She spent nights in a bomb shelter with her father, George Windsor, also known as King George VI, who repeatedly refused evacuation to the greater safety of Canada, of which he was also the sovereign. And last week, we saw Queen Elizabeth II, 88, bending down at the Arc de Triomphe with the president of France. All of the world that values the fruits of Western civilisation could well have been bending down to her, to acknowledge the central role that her country played in saving the world from fascism.
Although the queen makes usually triumphant state visits to friendly nations, to my knowledge, she has never herself attended a commemoration such as this; the prince of Wales or the duke of Edinburgh are the usual fill-in.
The commemoration at Normandy could not have come at a better time. It is not always the case that bullies bring their adversaries together; it took a long time for an alliance to take shape to defeat Adolf Hitler. But what we saw in Normandy last week was the remarkable solidarity of the Western Allies of World War 2 reuniting to stand against a new round of bullying.
Grabbing Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine is not the same as occupying and invading several independent countries. But it has the same smell.
Here's hoping that Putin returns to Moscow with an enhanced sense of what it would be like to go it alone in the world as it is today. Even little Latvia, with a significant Russian minority, is standing up to the big bad bear: breaking Russian codes, expelling Russian spies, in short, calling a spade a spade and Putin's bluff.
Latvia's leaders have gone on the record to say that conflict with Russia is inevitable; I guess they have decided to play it at their end with style. If called upon to do so, I hope we all do the same. What a week!