Wholesale Flouting of the Law - 19 March 1999

Coming back to San Francisco after much too long an absence and looking out every morning over the placid, the well-named Pacific, I notice something which, in the long ago - 66 years ago in fact - was a first impression.

Perhaps staying away from a familiar city for a long time has this odd advantage of renewing first impressions that you had long ago absorbed and forgotten.

Anyway it's the simple thought of how much the Pacific Ocean has affected the life and consciousness of this famous city by the Golden Gate.

Even today, a century and a half after the Gold Rush, the remembrance of it is a very solid one in the thriving community of the Chinese who were shipped in here in droves to build the railway east that would meet the one being built, mostly by Irishmen, going west. They met, you recall, in the middle of the Utah desert and the word was flashed, by a boy atop a rigged-up telegraph, that the United States was spanned and united and open everywhere for settlement.

Although San Francisco has sections named after some early groups of immigrants - Russian Hill for instance - there is really only one that is still compact and solid with its own race - China Town, with its own mayor.

Once the Chinese had done their job as railroad labourers the country wanted no more of them and there was, for a time, an almost hysterical campaign in the California State Legislature and in Congress to bar all Orientals - Asians, as we now say.

Those were the days when a western newspaper could flourish on the scary slogan 'The Yellow Peril'. It seems a long, a paranoid, time ago.

Today there's still a strict quota for Asians. Most are refugees from Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Hong Kong - and, by now, there are two generations of new Asians who are born Americans which presents a new puzzle for legislators eager to preserve the - the what? - that's it.

It used to be the Anglo Saxon purity but that's a joke now. Within this state alone barely 50% of the population is white. Better say a puzzle for legislators who want to preserve the non-Asian mix of America today.

The puzzle is this. In the past 25 years or so since the end of the Vietnamese War and the arrival of say a hundred thousand refugees here, their children have grown up here, gone to school and college here and demonstrated dramatically that they are superior as scholars to the whites and the blacks.

I go into a medical building downtown to see my oldest friend here, a doctor, and look on the printed board alongside the lift. There must be the names of 40 doctors. Fifteen at least of them I recognise as having Vietnamese or Korean or Chinese names. Surgeons, cardiologists, internists, dermatologists, neurologists - every speciality - and some of the best in town. All of them came here very poor, very poor children with no English.

A retired judge I know posed himself a question.

"The whole country," he says, "is in a stew about whether a preferential quota should be admittedly set for blacks and Hispanics over whites with the same scholarly results - the same marks.

"How about this: in view of the demonstrable superiority of the Asians why not take a gamble on every Asian kid who applies for college and set a strict quota for the whites? Don't ask me."

When I said earlier "the effect of the Pacific Ocean" I was thinking first of the never flagging interest of the Americans who live on this coast in what happens in the Pacific and what happens to the countries that lie on its farthest rim.

The other week I took up again, as bed books, some of the diaries of famous men written during the Second World War. They were all Europeans: De Gaulle, Harold Nicholson, the ever-fascinating, ever-maddening James Agate.

When we came to the end of the first week in May 1945 and VE - Victory in Europe - Day, even for these famous and presumably concerned men it could have been the end of the Second World War. The war in the Pacific, in one third of the globe, scarcely existed for them.

No mention of the Americans' appalling battle of Okinawa - an island which only one month before VE day had meant, for the Americans, an amphibious operation, an army, naval and air invasion bigger by way of manpower, tanks, airplanes, ships, equipment, than the invasion of Normandy - and entailed for the Americans the worst casualties for any single engagement of the Second War.

I was here in San Francisco weeks before the Victory in Europe at the beginning of that April, watching the delegates of 50 nations begin to assemble for the founding conference of the United Nations.

The newspaper headlines and main stories might be all about the German army's last gasp, and the decoration of this city for the new League of Nations, but everywhere you went here, if you had San Franciscans for friends, the dreaded news and all the anxieties were for the men just going out in the Pacific for ferocious battles.

I remember an irritable bit of dialogue reported in the diaries of Mr Churchill's doctor, in which the great man bawled out a junior for bringing him a report about some minor engagements in the Pacific.

"Why," shouted the prime minister, "do you go on about the name of a country I heard for the first time only a month ago?"

It's all very natural at 8,000 miles but you can see why so many Americans at 8,000 miles, especially Senators and Congressmen from the West, demand a pressing reason from Mr Clinton why American troops should be sent into Kosovo, as many first protested an American presence in Bosnia.

This week I see a professor of law at the University of California takes Bosnia as the point of complaint for a general protest against the refusal of three presidents - Reagan, Bush and Clinton - to abide by a law passed in 1973 and never repealed.

It was a law passed as a first protest against the apparent tendency of this country under the foreign policy of Nixon and Mr Kissinger to act as policemen to the world. It's called - I say is because it's still on the books - the War Powers Resolution.

It says yes, the president is defined in the Constitution as the commander in chief of the armed forces, but he can exercise those powers only after a declaration of war by Congress or a national emergency arising from an attack on American forces or territory.

Even then, the president must tell Congress what he proposes to do, say within 48 hours when the troops are deployed, and he must withdraw them within 60 days.

Nixon vetoed it and there was not a following debate to override him but when President Reagan said: "It's unconstitutional", he was such a popular president that there was not much more than a small chorus of howls from the Democrats when he, with nobody's permission, sent troops into Grenada, Lebanon, Libya, the Persian Gulf.

In the past three years, President Clinton has sent 20,000 troops into Bosnia, mounted missile attacks on Iraq, cruise missiles to bomb terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, 16,000 troops into Haiti, 20,000 into Somalia.

It's an interesting irony that during this wholesale flouting of the law the only big rumbles against the president have come from the Democrats, when a Republican president - Reagan or Bush - was in office. The Democrats have been silent as mice in the face of Mr Clinton's evasions of the law.

But, weirdly, the Republicans once tried to repeal the law and admit the president's overriding constitutional power. They then decided they didn't have to, since nobody was paying attention to the law anyway.

I look out my window in the late afternoon and see what, at first, seemed an optical illusion - the largest floating object I'd ever seen, the length of three American football fields. What could it be? It was the largest type of merchant ship they build - a bulk carrier. I don't think I'd ever seen one before. This one was sliding under the Bay bridge and out into the Pacific.

And wouldn't you know, next morning the full page cover story in the weekly science section of the New York Times was about the recent mission of a British-American team lowering robots two miles and a half down in the Pacific, 500 miles south of Japan, to look at the shattered remains of just such a ship - the notorious Derbyshire, whose sinking in a typhoon in September 1980 remains one of the great sea mysteries.

A new inquiry has opened up a monstrous additional statistic - that since the sinking of the Derbyshire, 180 other bulk carriers have been lost at sea. A score of reasons - technological, accidental, criminal - have been offered.

The head of the inquiry thinks there's strong evidence of a flawed ship's design and a certain belief that the break-up of the Derbyshire was sudden and violent. But just what the new and persuasive evidence is for all the other sinkings is something the marine authorities aren't talking about.

And now, will somebody please start an investigation into the most mysterious sea puzzle of all time - well, of modern times. The never-solved mystery of the Marie Celeste - the ship found floating in a calm ocean, the tables in the dining room all beautifully laid out, set for the evening meal. No passengers, no crew, not a human being in sight, just the Marie Celeste gliding smoothly along.

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.