Racial tensions in New York - 14 May 1993

Last Wednesday, a friend of mine looking suddenly at his watch at the end of an early lunch said, "My God, it's 1.30, I better get back to my office before 2 o'clock". "And stay there," I said, "till 9." "That's right," he said.

The point is that from 2pm to 9 ,we'd been warned by the police that mid- and downtown traffic in Manhattan on the East Side would be tied up in what we now routinely describe as gridlock. I had no cause for panic because I was going uptown, I was going home. And I live in a part of a town, which to fashionable people is way uptown beyond the pale, in fact at the very pale itself.

In the 90s, during the scary nights of the 1960s, the howl of a siren can just as well have signified a Harlem riot as an emergency patient being hurtled off to the hospital two blocks north of me. Certainly during the tumultuous year of 1968, our street, 96th Street between Madison and 5th was locally known as the Barricade, the rampart between the uptown white world and the black and Spanish world beyond.

1968 was the heyday of the more free-wheeling black activists and their bawling hippy allies. And even taking the dog for a night-time walk, I mean two blocks to Park Avenue, could be a hazardous undertaking, a warning I thought ridiculous until I ran into a covey of wandering young blacks who were quite unmoved by the brave little barks of my poodle. It was a race for our apartment house and it we made it just as the doorman stood ready to slam the front door behind us.

Well, it would be unwise, a very foolish boast to say that times have changed in the sense of declaring that no such thing could happen again, it might happen tomorrow night. The day after the shattering riots in Los Angeles a year ago, the working population of New York feared a general rampage of poor blacks with a grievance and rowdies of any colour battening on that grievance, so much so that by the shank of the afternoon, taxi drivers in midtown were switching on their off-duty signs refusing all fares and beating it home, but today we don't feel quite the same apprehension.

There have been in the past year, ugly riots between fairly well defined mobs. One atrocious brutal attack on city Jews after one of them had accidentally run over a black boy. We never noted which ethnic group usually of fairly recently immigrants will feel oppressed and breakout into a noisy or a bloody expression of it, but I believed that in the past few years we've seen a great deal of the sheer physical and economic waste that even a small riot can cause. And more important, there is a great variety of comparative newcomers who think and act as separate embattled groups. We don't have, as we once had, a single victim – the Irish, say – that we can beat up on and one that genteel people can rebuff with absolute confidence that the victim wasn't going to talk back let alone pull a knife, so today we we go our ways, we try not to insult anyone and we stay wary.

We can no longer chant that proud sentence. I must surely have recited to you in a very early talk, a sentence from a charming essay about New York written by the late E B White, oh my, 40 years ago. The great thing about New York, he wrote, is not the battle of the racists but the truce they observe no more, not really much more dependable than the truces in Bosnia.

Well, along the way you may have wondered what my luncheon friend was running away from? My friend was not running from any threat of a riot, he was running from the president of the United States. That's right; President Clinton came to New York on Wednesday to make a speech to the New York City fathers and a posse of business leaders. Now it doesn't matter who the president is, a sudden day-long visit from him costs the city at least a quarter of a million dollars in diverted and therefore jammed traffic, beefed-up security, police cars along his 20-mile route from the airport to his hotel, the auditorium, the luncheon club or whatever and back to the airport.

The puzzling item here maybe the cost of traffic jams that's one of those nasty bills that can never be figured on, but comes in later. Namely, the late deliveries of merchandise, the alarmingly extra cost of petrol for all the diverted cars, trucks and vans. Of course that's something which if you don't have an exact record you can be fairly imaginative about.

I once not so long ago, asked the mayor, the then mayor of New York why he didn't do for New York what they'd done in Rome. What was that? All commercial traffic, that's to say all deliveries between sunset and dawn. He thought for a while and said, "Well, it wouldn't be a bad first step toward bankrupting the city." How so? First, you'd have a ruinous bill from the unions, their drivers and delivery men would automatically go on double time, maybe golden time on Saturday and Sunday nights, we'd have to double night-time police protection, pretty soon you'd have deafening squawks from the thousands of firms that have always done their trucking by day think what it would mean to their whole employment rota and their payroll, the re-jigging across the continent of the teamster's long-distance schedules, not to mention new night-time staffs for the shops, the stores and the warehouses at the receiving end and think of all the uproar from all the wives and families who couldn't sleep at night, the thousands of lawsuits emotional distress and so on. "My friend, it's a beautiful pipe dream. By the way, I didn't hear about this in Rome, when did they do it?" "Oh, about 65, 70 BC," I said. The Mayor sighed, "Yeah," he said, "in those days you did get an awful lot done with non-union labour."

Well, it's certainly a wonderful example of the difference between an ideal and the reality of expressing it in government.

Well, what was so special about the president's coming here? It was part of a campaign, he announced a week or more ago in response to two general criticisms that have lately been epidemic that either he's taken on too many themes/policies he hasn't had time to work out in detail or that he's dithered and dallied on Bosnia so as to give aid and comfort to possible enemies.

Certainly, it's been said by some foreign affairs experts, given great comfort to tyrants everywhere who might be tempted to bite off a country, a province, a tribe they've long lusted after. In the fairly secure knowledge that it's not commander in chief Bush in the White House, but a man who works himself into exhaustion, which he does, figuring and debating every proposed move in Bosnia from total invasion to nothing at all and then spends the next week or two calculating all the conceivable outcomes. The president speaking to the press last week sensibly parried these two charges, in general terms, he admitted that his administration was out of focus. What does that mean? I don't know, it's a current buzzword and like all buzzwords it fills in a blank while you're trying to work out what you mean.

By the way, have you noticed that no politician today distinguishes between a suggestion, a proposal, a policy; everything is an agenda, whether or not it's on the agenda. We don't get down to making peace; we hope to proceed with the peacemaking process. In the Kennedy administration, they never formed a committee, they appointed task forces and they decided nothing, they described their wrangles, discussions, arguments – however fine, however crude – as the decision-making process.

I do believe that the Vietnam War was lost in a swamp of jargon, which buried some huge simple and un-faceable facts such as that we were losing. The main function of this political and especially military jargon is not to prettify the language but to prettify unpleasant or ugly truths. Thus in the war of Desert Storm, it was possible every morning to catch a mention in print or on the telly perhaps from the briefing room in Riyadh of something called "collateral damage". When I first heard this, I felt no emotion at all probably the misfortune of aiming at Saddam Hussein's headquarters and hitting the end of a schoolhouse, it doesn't mean that at all. "Collateral damage" means blowing women and children apart.

So and back to the harmless but still fuzzy explanation of President Clinton's administration and what he means to do about it, he's going to focus it. I think this means either that he's going to set aside for the time being the blueprints of policies that are still rather bleary and sharpen his eyes and intelligence on, for instance, the prime promise of his campaign reducing the deficit or, he hints, maybe for sometime he'll have two policies to expound reducing the deficit and the result of Mrs Clinton's hard labour in working out a national health plan.

Having said so much, the president gave us his "Gee folks I'm sorry" little boy smile, his frank admission followed. He has been out of touch with the country or as he put it, "It's been too long since I've been out there" – that means the United States – and recalls if I may say so a point I made in the first talk I did after Mr Clinton moved into the White House, namely the danger in acquiring the habits of life in the White House and becoming a monarch isolated from the people by an attentive and fawning court. Mr Clinton must be aware of this and to that extent, his impulse to start travelling the country is a good impulse, just so long as he's not actually giving in to a routine and exercise of performance he loves and is good at, which is renewing the experience of campaigning for the presidency, to be bold and eloquent and earn everywhere you go vast and thundering applause. Campaigning is great and rousing fun, it is not governing and what Mr Clinton has to begin is to govern.

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