Carter's first Europe visit

As everybody must know by now, Mr Carter is about to make his first visit to Europe as President of the United States. Well, since the Second War, there wouldn't seem to be anything very spectacular about that, thought it's difficult now to recall the shock and exhilaration that Americans felt when Harry Truman made his first post-war visit to Europe, simply because there had been the firmest and longest tradition that, while he's in office, no American president is ever expected to leave the country.

There are probably subtle diplomatic reasons for this tradition, but it's certainly had to do also with two simple facts of life. First, that until you could cross the Atlantic by airplane, a trip to Europe took three weeks out of your life and that was too long for this country to be left without its chief executive in the event of any national emergency. Also, after the First War, especially, Americans turned very sour and cynical about Europe. Woodrow Wilson was the first president to cross the Atlantic during his term of office. He went over in 1919 with the lofty idea – the missionary idea – to save the world for democracy. In the rude collapse of this vision, Wilson returned a disillusioned man and a defeated president. 

And between the two wars, many of even the most intelligent Americans grew petrified with fright whenever a high official of the government, let alone a president, went on a mission to Europe. Americans wanted to stay out of Europe forever. And the popular fear was that if an American Secretary of the Treasury went to London, or Paris, or Berlin, he would have his pockets picked, and an American Secretary of State would be seduced into some alliance that called for American help in time of war. 

Well, thank goodness, there's today no question among Republicans, Democrats or practically any other stripe of American, there's no question of isolating America or retreating, as a famous American publisher advocated as late as 1940, into what he called 'fortress America'. America, since 1941 at the very latest, has been one of the two world superpowers and isolationism, as a practical way of life, let alone a theory, is as dead as the horse and buggy. 

Even so, the recent presidents have held very different judgements, not so much about the importance of Europe to America as about which of the European allies had enough effective power to influence the turn of history. For a few years after the Second War, and because, I'm sure, of the sentiment that had been born of the fighting alliance between Britain and America, Britain was assumed to be the main ally. 

This assumption of Anglo-America being the hub of world power was really a hangover from the pre-war world, but once the Marshall Plan had put Europe on its feet and we began to face the rising industrial power of Germany and Italy and then Japan, the assumption wobbled and was knocked flat on its back by the rude remark of the late Dean Acheson that Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role. 

What worried succeeding American governments though was that Britain had not somehow found her way into a thriving post-war economy and could no longer afford to maintain armed forces that could make her THE most powerful member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. 

And thinking back now to the Kennedy days and, to put it very bluntly the American presidents who followed Eisenhower, ... inherited the conviction that while Britain could bring to the councils of the United Nations and American discussions with Europe a lot of commonsense and intelligence and diplomatic expertise, none of these things seemed to work very well in restoring Britain to her former power in Europe, let alone in the world, and therefore you had to look around elsewhere for the leadership of Europe. Which was the country, who was the man America could turn to to speak for Europe? 

Let me say, by the way, that if it seems odd or dangerous for a democratic nation to be looking always for 'the big man', this was a reflex form of hero worship after our experience of big men during the Second War. There'd been Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin. Dictatorships, by definition, must breed big leaders, otherwise there'd be no dictatorships. And we produced our own 'big men' – Churchill and Roosevelt – who were able and allowed to make big, sweeping decisions, precisely because during a war for survival you have to suspend much of the democratic freedom of choice that nips big men in the bud and makes big, sweeping decisions impossible. 

But the hankering for another Churchill to consult lasted through the 1950s and into the Sixties, and the oracle that Kennedy chose, and after him Nixon and Kissinger, was General de Gaulle. I remember, with a trace still of the embarrassment I felt at the time, a day in Palm Beach in, I suppose, it must have been the winter of 1960 when the new President Kennedy had a dozen or so members of the press in to talk about his policies, domestic and foreign, and especially to sketch out his plans for a visit to Europe. 

He would go, he said then, and whether or not he followed this itinerary and (the) sequence he anticipated doesn't matter, he would go first to General de Gaulle, then to Berlin and he would certainly pay a sentimental visit to his forefathers' village in Ireland. I should have waited till the get-together broke up and put the question privately, but I was so puzzled at his not mentioning Britain that I ventured, as casually as possible, to say I assumed a trip to London was part of his plan. He looked half curious, half amused and said, to a wave of laughter, ‘London? No! What's in London?’ 

Well, we let it drop there, but that evening I got hold of one or two of his night-time cronies – they were the so-called Irish mafia, quite different from the policy highbrows whom I always thought of as 'the graduate school' and with whom he spent his days. ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘had he brushed off London so glibly?’ And one of the cronies said, ‘It's very simple. London simply doesn't count any more. He's got to brace the Berliners against the Russians and he's got to see de Gaulle. And maybe, as a courtesy, he'll drop by Downing Street, but at the moment it's not in the works.’ 

I apologise for recounting what must sound like a brutal anecdote but it's always useful to know what's on the mind of powerful men whose public statements must cover up, with eloquence or politeness, what they really think. I mention it now because once that famous trip was over, Kennedy began to think again about the power and influence of de Gaulle and he was encouraged to have deep misgivings about him by none other than that same Dean Acheson, no longer Secretary of State but an advisor, always on hand. 

The standard cliché about de Gaulle at the time was that he had, more than any other European then alive, a 'sense of history' and the compliment was parroted automatically for the next eight years – it was a favourite of President Nixon. Acheson said one day to Kennedy, ‘A sense of history is a dangerous weakness in a public man. He plans his actions in order to appear well in a great pageant of human life reaching back into the mists and moving into the clouds. Too often it's a concern with oneself. And I say’, said Mr Acheson, in a sudden descent from his usual, cultivated irony, ‘I say the hell with it!’ 

Now, what this pungent opinion did was to make Kennedy think again, and after him, Johnson, about the danger of bypassing the State Department, ignoring your own staff of experts, in the course of searching for 'the big man'. But I'm afraid that this healthy misgiving was abandoned again – and for the longest time – during the reign of President Nixon, who thought there must always be a single key to everything, and saw the key as the latest hero, whether it was the Shah of Iran or Mao Tse-tung. And Dr Kissinger... any man on a foreign affairs desk, whether in Washington or Bangkok, could tell you that Dr Kissinger would not delegate responsibility or inform his subordinates. He was temperamentally so attracted to the commanding nineteenth-century diplomatic figures, like Metternich and Talleyrand, that he revelled, and we ought to say sometimes rewardingly, in being the one-man band. But for all its successes, it's no good as a system. Today's big man is too often tomorrow's exile. Or worse. 

Which brings us to President Carter. He's been in office now for that hundred days that has become, for no reason I can discover, the mystical period of a president's apprenticeship, and during that time we've seen him reiterate many of his campaign promises and then, when the departments began to brief him, to retreat from them. And this habit already alarms the many people who expect a new president to maintain the missionary fervour of the speeches that elected him. But to give him the benefit of the doubt for the time being, it can be that Mr Carter is learning how the idealism of the men outside the White House is bound to be tempered by the realities that buffet the man inside. 

Only one thing's for sure. He has, throughout the campaign and during his hundred days, not wavered from his view that for the past decade, the European alliance has been belittled in the rush of dealing with the Middle East, with Russia and with China. He brings, I should say, not a whisper of sentimentality to bear on reviving that alliance. If he wants America to think again about safeguarding the life her children will have to cope with by way of arresting the nuclear insanity and having enough energy to warm our toes with, he also wants Europe to think again about invigorating its defences and about the way Europeans might work as a team towards a stable economic life together. 

He is not wooing any special leader. He's not searching for the big European spokesman. He's been remarkably well briefed and he will listen to everybody and, in his cool way, commit himself to nobody.

It's not a change that lends itself to dramatisation but it is one, and one that should quicken the initiative not only of the leaders but of the men and women under them, and after them, the people.

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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