Americans fly abroad again

As a lifelong, incurable, addict of newspapers, if the big city newspapers of America or Britain are not available, I will eagerly settle for the Kalamazoo Chronicle or the Little Piddletrenthide Gazette, if they exist.

As an addict, I don't tend to pounce, at breakfast time, with joy on small items tucked away on inside pages, but I did pounce today on two such stories and once I'd read them, I had to ask myself why these two very different stories should have given me unusual pleasure. Or better, I should say, why they relieved an anxiety, a regret, that's been nagging away at me since I got back from a recent swift trip to England.

Briefly, then, these were the headlines that caught my eye and soothed my anxiety. The first was in the business section of the New York Times and was headlined, 'US Travel to Europe is Rebounding'. The second was also in the Times, was a column on the sports pages and datelined Monterrey – Monterrey with two Rs and therefore from Mexico.

The story from the Mexican Monterrey, then, was based on a headline in El Sol, which is the big newspaper in that city of over two million inhabitants. El Sol had a blazing headline, 'Los Animales Atacan' which, being translated means the animals are upon us. And who are the animals?

They are vividly described in the first paragraph of the New York Times columnist. They take off their shirts in public and fry their white skin until it's the colour of the red on the Union Jack. Some of them parade through the streets in shorts made of their national flag and some of the them were fetching chartreuse tights and little else. These are the young men of England that every mother in Monterrey warned her daughter to avoid.

They are, in fact, the animals of the El Sol headline. They are the English football fans that went to Monterrey for the World Cup to root for the team that was preceded by its reputation for not having lost in, I think, 12 matches over the past two years. The Mexicans were amazed and greatly relieved when England lost by a single goal to Portugal, but only because, after the match, the English fans went back on the streets to sun and drink beer with, as the paper put it, no particular malice towards Portugal, Mexico or life itself.

The report adds to this sentence the remark that this is no small miracle. The population, the mothers and daughters, of Monterrey were evidently vastly relieved. Because, today, any foreign city is vastly relieved when a crowd of English soccer fans behaves like the fans of old, that is to say, decently, quietly, with good humour. By now, every listener will appreciate what caused the Mexicans to await the visiting English with fear and trembling.

It was nothing less than the unfortunately unforgettable memory of the stampede of Liverpool fans in Brussels. The Mexicans expected an incoming pack of Draculas and, on the contrary, found a bunch of cheerful, amiable, harmless fans. So the Mexicans were not merely relieved, they started to protest against El Sol's headline. Cab drivers, restaurant owners, tortilla peddlers, television commentators, all echoed the remark of a smiling, high school girl who said, 'Animales? Ah no! Los ingleses son guapos' (the English are handsome).

The Mexican coordinator of the city's committee for the World Cup who had shared the general anxiety before the English contingent arrived, watched them, as the report puts it, lurch and chant, harming nobody. 'They have been', said Senor Gomez Junco, 'ideal guests.' It has to be said that the Mexican precautions before the game must have had a steadying influence on any visitor – tanks and jeeps and sirens and rifles and helmets were at the stadium before the crowds arrived. The people were delighted that none of this hardware needed to go into action.

So, that is the first cheering story. I bring it up because it goes to show that when one awful incident happens inside any nation – a terrorist bombing, a murderous stampede, a blunder of foreign policy – all the nationals of that country are blamed for it for some time to come.

I think you'll now guess easily at the connection with the second story, which for me, anyway, lifted the pall that fell on relations between Britain and the United States after the administration's aerial strike on Libya. When I went over to England a month ago, I was depressed by a general wave of anti-Americanism such as I can't remember since the shabby heyday of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. At least it's sobering and consoling to think that since Senator McCarthy died in the early 1950s, there must be at least one generation, both here and abroad, which has no feelings one way or the other about the senator and his ruthless witch hunt.

I used to get very nasty letters from listeners in those days, even though I'd departed from my job as a reporter, to make very clear my own feelings about that disreputable time. Now, for the first time in 30 years, I began to get equally abusive mail from people who assumed that all Americans, not just 60 per cent of them, let off hosannas and cries of 'Hail to the Chief' when the attack on Tripoli came out of the night sky.

Those letters are now dwindling and a new bag of complaints come from people who blame me for not responding to Mr Gorbachev's new proposals about reducing strategic nuclear weapons. It reminds me of the time during the Second War when some Americans used to rail at me as a British correspondent for not giving India its independence. All I could say was, 'It's not at my disposal. You'd better take it up with Mr Churchill'.

Well, just for now, without going into the very knotty arguments on both sides, I'd better say that Washington, indeed the administration, is divided on whether Mr Gorbachev's offer is a trap to free the Soviets in a superior arsenal or whether, in exchange for an American promise to keep on observing the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty for, let's say, another 15 years, the Russians might be willing to drop their objections to the Americans proceeding, as the Russians have been proceeding, with anti-missile research based in space.

For the moment, I revert with, as I say, relief to the topic of American travel to Europe. At the time of the Tripoli attack, I talked at length about the arguments which raged here far more than the pollsters' figures indicated, about whether the attack was a bad thing or a good thing.

The dissenters thought it was a bullying adventure, hitting at the one Arab state that, however appallingly ruled, was weak, vulnerable and, for that matter, not conclusively or exclusively associated with the one or two notorious terrorist bombings which the administration attributed to it. In the result, even the supporters conceded in undertones later that it was not a particularly brilliant military exercise, since the greatly touted F-111 didn't seem to perform with their well-advertised deadly precision, hitting a school, the compound of an allied embassy and, fatally from a propaganda point of view, wounding some of Gaddafi's family.

On the other hand – and for once, 'on the other hand' does not indicate a timid wish to straddle the fence –the supporters of the administration, including at least 60 per cent of the American people, came to believe that the attack gave pause to other terrorist groups and shook the Western allies out of their settled habit of getting out endless resolutions deploring terrorism and promising to do something positive at a later date. What it certainly did was to strengthen security at international airports beyond anything, any country, except Israel, previously thought of doing.

In the short run, I hope in the short run, it did look as if Gaddafi had won, in the sense that the magnitude of his terrorist threats had been so successfully advertised that, with American help, so to speak, he had managed to bankrupt quite a lot of American and allied travel agencies and plunge the transatlantic airlines into a totally unexpected economic slump.

When I was in London, the papers and the telly were full of mocking statistics about the – five, was it? – people murdered in London since the first of the year against the average 1400 murders in New York City in one year. Fair enough. For anyone who likes to gloat over these chilling discrepancies, I ought to say that New York is 12th down the list in homicide rates. New Orleans, which every European tourist wants to visit, is number one. Las Vegas, number two. Miami, another tourist favourite is number four, and so on.

An American actuary worked out the relative chances of being knocked down by a car on Fifth Avenue as about one in 800,000, as against being bombed by a terrorist in London as one in 20 million. But these true, if preposterous, comparisons were aired in Britain, not in America. They never even occurred to New Yorkers who had planned a visit to Rome or Paris or wherever and who decided to stay safe in good old New York. Chernobyl didn't help. The steward on the plane that took me to London told me that 30 per cent of the reservations on that very flight had been cancelled during the previous week.

Well, time has jogged on in its steady way and now the news is that, in the past several weeks, there has been a resurgence in American bookings to Europe for the summer.

Let us pray that even if there's another murderous incident, enough Americans, unlike Sylvester Stallone and other braves, will weigh the infinitesimal chances and repeat the retort my wife gave, just before she took off for Italy, to a young American couple who'd plumped for California instead: 'Ridiculous! Stay out of Harlem at night and come fly with me to Venice!'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.