Americans stay at home

Blazing but balmy days in the 70s, the existence of clouds long forgotten, the for-s-ith-i-ya – and the fors-eye-thia – suddenly bursting in showers everywhere, the wary conviction that the winter is dead and gone. I say 'our' wary conviction because the only really bad blizzard, we, in and around New York, have had in recent years came on 7 April three years ago, about a week after the farmers had taken down their snow fences.

All this splendid weather – the atmosphere is dry and clear as the fall – makes one (one being me) say, 'Forget Gaddafi and the terrorists and get down to the serious business of the ageing back swing'. I went down the island this past week to greet our pro who's back from his winter job in Florida and is busy reseeding the greens and seeing that they've carted away all the trees uprooted by last September's hurricane. He was doing this when he was not busy telling me to get off the right leg sooner and lead with the body.

Enough! Other people with other obsessions are busy riffling through their flower catalogues. Others are wishing they'd been present to see Boris Becker beat Ivan Lendl for the first time. The fishermen are out in their little boats, casting for an early run of weakfish. The newspaper today has six new recipes for cold soup. Central Park is humming with the drone of electric saws pruning the dead branches. Out on the meadows of the park, the small fry are winding up and practising the motions, the peculiar unique motions, of the all-American ballet which is known as baseball.

People who don't normally take much interest in tennis are saying, 'Whatever happened to John McEnroe?' He hasn't played since January and even his father says he doesn't know when he'll start up again. 'John', he says, 'has personal problems.'

It all reminds me of the time, the balmy spring days, long ago – a little later in the year, as I recall, in England – when my father and I stopped worrying about the war debt due the United States and began to fasten every morning on Neville Cardus's cricket reports in the Manchester Guardian and wonder whether Hobbs' days was done and would the incorrigible clown, Cecil Parkin, make the English team.

On the way back along Long Island, we went past a thoroughbred farm as beautiful and trim as anything north of Kentucky and, shortly after dawn, they had the mares out there and the little foals trotting along as close as kittens. All this renewal of life which the heedless young take for granted, but which gives a wonderful lift to the winter-bound oldsters, is all very well but I'm aware that there must be listeners who, poor retarded souls, take no interest and have never taken any interest in any sort of sport.

I'm thinking of what my old newspaper, edited for I think 57 years by a man so unsporting, so grave and splendidly serious that he looked like God, I'm thinking of what he called 'the well-informed man'. In those days, a well-informed woman was, if she existed, a freak.

What does the well-informed man or woman want or need to know about America today? This week, that is. Well, I regret to say that when the enormous red ball of the sun sinks over the reservoir and leaves us with a sky like the burning of Toledo and when the lights come on and the ice begins to tinkle and it's time for the telly, there is plenty to agitate the calmest of all well-informed persons.

And, just now, there's one thing fretting an awful lot of people and that is airplane terrorism and security. It springs from – at least it renews – the continuing row about Gaddafi and the American Sixth Fleet. I said last time that the first declared aim of the administration was to prove that the Gulf of Sidra was within international waters and was not the private lake of Colonel Gaddafi. Then, since the despatch of 30 warships, including two aircraft carriers, seemed like a rather elaborate way of making a point in international law, the administration said the manoeuvres were done to teach the colonel a lesson, to persuade or force him to desist from sponsoring terrorism.

I had a talk the other evening with an old friend of mine, an airline pilot who, sitting around for the weather briefing at his base airport, had expressed the opinion that the Sixth Fleet's manoeuvres, and even sending a couple of ships over the line of death, was a mad exercise more likely to provoke terrorism than to squelch it. His colleagues turned on him. 'What are you?' they complained, 'Some kind of pinko?'

Well, among the 67 per cent of Americans who backed the president on the exercise, there must be many macho males who feel the same way, who agree in however vague a manner that the president is right in meaning to meet force with force.

And this led an international lawyer to chime in and say that international law does, indeed, require nations to defend their rights against wrongdoers, but it does not require anyone to provoke a wrong, and that the immemorial practice is for a nation to lodge a formal protest against any assertion of a private sea and if the point needs to be stressed, quote, 'the symbolic passage of a single naval vessel would suffice'.

'If,' said this learned man, who's a professor of international law, 'if international law demanded forceful exercise of legal rights as the price for preserving them, blood and destruction will be a daily occurrence on disputed borders.'

I went on to say last time that the administration, getting very little sympathy from its allies on the international law exercise, then admitted that the main aim was to deter Gaddafi from further terrorism. This assertion was, to say the least, confused by a series of orders to every American embassy and to American officials all over the world to brace themselves with tighter security against a wave of terrorism the exercises had meant to deter.

So, now, after the event, there's a new rationale. The administration has not announced it but some sources in the White House and members of congressional committees who are well-informed on these matters now say that the naval manoeuvres were undertaken to encourage the ranking officers of the Libyan military to overthrow Gaddafi, to say among themselves that their leader's terrorism was coming at too high a price and only heightened the threat of an attack from Egypt.

Apparently, the administration has tried several times to persuade the Egyptians to attempt a joint military effort to oust the colonel. The Egyptians have so far refused, but the idea is that if the United States mounted an outright attack on Libyan bases – never mind the law of the sea – the Libyan military command would say, 'We've had enough!'

Well, we can only accept the purity of these newly announced motives and wait and see. And this brings us, obviously, to the bomb that exploded in the TWA jet that was flying on Wednesday from Rome to Athens. And the claim by yet another splinter terrorist group, the Arab Revolutionary Cells, that they'd done it in retaliation for 'American arrogance', is the way they put it, in invading the Gulf of Sidra.

No official here is accepting this claim at face value. Practically any terrorist, having an American for a target, would now be likely to use the Libyan clash as a pretext, but the effect on the American people is naturally to see, or fear, cause and inevitable effect – anyway, to take a renewed and increasingly frustrated concern for terrorism anywhere and, especially, in the Middle East and in Europe.

The travel agents here who normally find this to be their busiest season for summer bookings admit – and they obviously hate to do it – that American travel to Europe could be down this year by as much as 40 per cent. And people who are on the fence about going to Europe are tending to drop off on the American side. That's to say to travel in America. They're all the more persuaded to do this by the colossal drop in the price of petrol.

When I left Long Island at the end of last fall, regular petrol was $1.35, $1.40 a gallon. I filled up the other day at 79 cents a gallon. This has brought great cheer to the agents who deal in domestic travel and compensating groans from the overseas' agents. The airlines that fly the Atlantic routes report a similar slump and enough of them are in financial trouble to feel that this is a new and devastating blow.

This led the other evening to a long and frustrated discussion on television between a whole range of experts – travel people, top men in the pilots' union, federal security experts, airport security managers and so on. The pilots of 60 nations are meeting in London next week to go into the whole knotty mess.

The upshot of the TV discussion was that every nation will have to do much stricter screening of airport maintenance and catering employees, the ground personnel, on the guess that the planting of most bombs is an inside job, that pre-boarding security must extend to the checking of everything that goes into the hold, that it may be necessary, if there's more and more airplane terrorism, for several nations to band together to isolate by way of banning – aviation, trade, banking, marine traffic – the nations most responsible, for instance, Libya, Syria, Iran.

As an afterthought, they conceded that the screening of ground personnel would be a Herculean task, since in the Middle East, certainly, they include fundamentalist Muslims, Palestinians, religious sects and splinter groups of every sort.

Finally, their sad conclusion was that if somebody is determined enough to get a bomb aboard, he'll do it. There is no longer any way to guarantee risk-free travel.

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.