Anxiety over Soviet superpower

I suppose it was at least a dozen years ago, it was about 5 p.m. and all the office workers were pouring out of the skyscrapers in midtown, down around Grand Central Station and suddenly there appeared an oddity that's no oddity at all in London – a boy, with a batch of newspapers under his arm, shouting out something.

They've never had newspaper posters over here bill boarding the big feature or, for the afternoon papers, the scariest item of the day's news. You know the sort of thing, it's one of the American tourist's favourite London sights, the posters scrawled in mid afternoon with nothing less than 'Europe Bomb Plot' or 'Film Star Sensation' which turns out when you read the fine print that Robert Redford, or perhaps even only Sam Redford, has signed a new contract or grazed his shin. 

Well, as I say, they haven't discovered such come-ons over here and please don't tell them. About 15 years ago, a city father went to London and came back and said, 'Say! They have advertising on the buses in London!' So, shortly thereafter, the city council decided if it was tasteful in London, it was tasteful in New York. So our chaste green buses sprouted splashy invitations to smoke this and drink that and now, I regret to say, on the imitative of Boston, another cultured city, advertising boards have started to be planted on the roof of our taxis. 

Well, so it's ten, fifteen, years ago and we're minding our business and crossing Park Avenue near Grand Central Station and the thousands are on their way home. And this boy comes screaming out of the railway station, bawling something that's very audible but nonsensical. It may have been that he'd just coined a new verb. It was one that we soon learned. It was, 'Skyjack'. Some people had seized control of an airplane flying to Miami and had forced the pilot to go on to Havana, Cuba. Can you imagine such a thing? It was a real shocker at the time, till the Havana detour became almost a part of the airplane timetables and then other maniacs with television sets saw the rumpus it had kicked up and it became a worldwide hazard. 

I know a little boy, well, is ten years old, anyway, who's bright and something of a whiz at mathematics who'd assumed, till he was enlightened, that airports had always X-rayed luggage or searched handbags. So quickly do we adjust to outrage. 

That day near Grand Central Station is the one I always remember as the historical date when anarchy moved out of the history books as an occasional bizarre horror committed by Central Europeans with unpronounceable names and became a regular tactic of the dispossessed and the demented. Yet, last Tuesday afternoon, three masked men wearing ski masks and gloves came briskly out of a stairwell in the basement of the New York Daily News building, drew guns on two guards and made off with 20 bags of money. The name on the delivery truck – it was just about to deliver the bags to a city bank – was Wells Fargo. It made New York seem, more than ever, like a frontier town. In all the books I've read about the hazards of the Pony Express and, after it, the Transcontinental Railway, I don't believe I've ever read about such an impressive haul – $851,000. 

Well, the New York Times had it tucked away at the bottom of a column. They don't report the subway bombings in London any more. A friend of mine, just back from England, went on and on the other night about sandbags and other desperate protections. We've come to absorb outrage as a hazard of daily life. It says something for our capacity to cope, though not much for the civilisation we're having to cope with. 

I mentioned a week or two ago how the resignation of Mr Wilson had been given most impressive reporting in our papers and ever since there's been – in Washington, at any rate, where it counts – the most alert interest in who would be the new prime minister. And though Mr Callaghan is now barely a name to most Americans, his election caught the first spot on the nightly television news round-ups. It's been stressed here and I hope it's true that, of all the original candidates, Mr Callaghan is the one who is most concerned to strengthen the alliance with the United States. Maybe that's why he's getting such generous coverage. If so, it is not a sentimental gesture which it might have been ten, a dozen years ago. 

There has been only very recently a sequence of events that, to Americans, anyway, traces the symptoms of a new anxiety. More than anybody, Mr Solzhenitsyn started it with his BBC broadcast which was not heard or reported much here until Lord George Brown retired from the party. That made news. Then the Solzhenitsyn interview was played here twice and the columnists took it up. And, by osmosis, so did three of the presidential candidates who are stumping the country. On the Democratic side, Mr Henry Jackson and on the Republican side Mr Ronald Reagan and, at a seemingly reluctant distance, President Ford. 

Mr Ford's apparent distaste for getting into a brawl over the strength or weakness of America's national defence is very understandable. He backed both Johnson and Nixon all the way on Vietnam and he doesn’t want to start rattling sabres just now and give the large Democratic and liberal vote the idea that he's drumming up any other overseas adventures. He did beg the Congress for money for Angola and he didn't get it and history, not us, will have to decide whether Angola was only a squalid African incident or a fateful turn in our joust with the Soviet Union. 

But neither the right-wing Democrat Mr Jackson, nor the right-wing Republican Mr Reagan, has anything to lose by scaring the daylights out of us and suggesting, as Mr Reagan does, that we have yielded the world role of superpower to the Russians. Mr Reagan last week went farther. He quoted an old admiral as testifying that the Secretary of State, Dr Kissinger, had privately admitted that part of his job was to arrange to accommodate the United States to the role of number two. This is surely nonsense. Nothing in Dr Kissinger's background or his thoughtful prose suggests that he has jibbed before the notion of Soviet superiority in naval power, in conventional arms, in nuclear capability. Even if he believed it was so, it would be an impossible position for an American secretary of state. 

Well, Mr Reagan's quote, or accusation, let off a storm. Dr Kissinger said he'd never said any such thing and then a most awkward and lamentable thing happened. President Ford's campaign manager, an old politician, Mr Rogers Morton, told a private meeting that he was sure that the president had every intention of firing Dr Kissinger once the election was over. This is just what the Republican right wingers have been yearning to hear. And it may have been Mr Morton's ploy for swinging the party's right wing over from Reagan to the president. 

But, like practically everything confided in private by a public man these days, it was leaked and printed in no time. And President Ford, reminding us of his principle that he's a good footballer and a team player, said that Dr Kissinger was a fine team man and could stay on as long as he wanted. Well, at several thousand miles, this might sound like a very domestic squabble and a storm in a teacup, but it turned out to be a very lucky break for Dr Kissinger. And, perhaps, for all of us. 

It made him mad, mad enough to recall what he said to a meeting of 28 American ambassadors gathered in London last December. A long summary of what he said was 'obtained', in quotes, by the New York Times. Of course, that meeting had been a private meeting but, for once, the leaking or the 'obtaining' of a private talk is very much in the public interest. And by 'public', I mean the public interest of every citizen of the United States AND Western Europe. 

After the spate of secret documents 'obtained' by some reporter or other and spread out for all to see, I find it difficult, in this case, to believe that Dr Kissinger regrets the five columns the New York Times gave the other day to printing the 'Official State Department Summary' of Dr Kissinger's remarks in London which, of course, the State Department neither published nor perhaps ever sanctioned. 

Anyway, Dr Kissinger's position was elaborately expounded in London. It is, I have no doubt, a summary of his deepest convictions and because they concern nothing less than the survival of the West, they're very important news for all of us. In the first sentence, he says, 'The problem of our age is how to manage the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower at a time when Western Europe is (as he puts it) the backbone of our foreign policy.' 

This is no 'hands across the sea' minuet. Dr Kissinger is thinking of the North American Treaty Alliance and he's deeply concerned about it enough to fear and to say 'that if Communist parties of whatever national variety came to power in West European governments, the NATO alliance could not survive and the United States would be isolated in its own values.' 

He does not attribute this parlous situation to anything that has gone wrong with détente. What disturbs the United States is the evolution of left-wing domestic policies in Europe. He sees no hope in truculence towards the Soviet Union with everyone beating his chest – see Reagan and Jackson. The Soviet Union, he says, must be drawn into relationships which are both concrete and practical and a fratricidal conflict would be folly. 

But the United States is trying to resolve a paradox. We are asked to be tough with Moscow but to have a dialogue with Communist parties in the West. He doesn't believe it can be done. It doesn't matter whether or not these parties follow the Moscow line, 'the impact of an Italian Communist party that seemed to be governing effectively, would be devastating on France and on NATO, too.' He believes, in a word, and it is surely not fanciful, that NATO cannot survive with Communist partners. This, indeed, I'm saying now, would be like the Britain of World War Two surviving while Austria, Italy and the Nazi-occupied countries had full access to Britain's military plans, the plans, say, for D-Day. We have been warned. 

If NATO goes, he's saying, then Britain and France would be on their own and so, 3,000 miles away, would be the United States – an island in its own values.

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.

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