Reagan backs Palestinian autonomy

Something I said in a talk two weeks ago – it has been a joke for some time in our family, not a great joke but a serviceable one – that the only two states of the union I've not been in are Niagara Falls and Martha's Vineyard. Everybody knows about Niagara Falls, the honeymooners' Mecca, if only by Oscar Wilde's comment, 'Every American bride is taken there and the sight must be one of the earliest, if not keenest, disappointments in American married life'.

Martha's Vineyard is a small island, twenty miles by ten, that lies off the Massachusetts coast, or rather off the elbow of Cape Cod which lies off the Massachusetts coast. It was settled in the mid-seventeenth century and in the eighteenth century was one of the famous New England whaling centres. I went here last weekend to visit old friends who rent a cottage every August. Maybe if these words ever reach them, they would rightly take umbrage since it's a substantial colonial house built in 1720 to overlook a boat slip down by the water. It suffered grievously from high tides and was dug up complete and moved a mile or so up the hill a hundred years later by mules or oxen or whatever. Later on, it was moved again into a field above the main street.

I didn't know till now that Americans started so early doing something that always shocks and delights a contemporary visitor to this country. You'll be driving calmly along a country road or an expressway and suddenly there looms up on the horizon the mirage of a floating house. It comes on alarmingly at you and solidifies into the real thing, sitting placidly on top of a flat truck, mother maybe sitting with equal placidity in the living room window. By nightfall the thing will be planted on its new site and, in no time, there'll be nothing to show that it hadn't always been on its native ground.

Well, a generation or two ago, a New England writer described Martha's Vineyard as 'a land of old towns, new cottages, high cliffs, white sails, green fairway, salt water, wild fowl and the steady pull of an ocean breeze'. Even as late as 40 years ago, the population was only six or seven thousand. Its permanent population is now more like 25, 30,000 and in the summer, the half-dozen small towns are jam-packed with the carefree, employed young, with people mad for fishing or sailing or just living it up at the weekend. And the old houses which you could buy 30 years ago for, say, $10,000 are now commandeered at Beverly Hills' prices by successful actors, writers, chic photographers, television stars and such. And recently, the island received the supreme accolade, rather like the Kaiser appearing at Bad Nauheim or George V recuperating at Bognor, of having one of its houses bought and done over by Jacqueline Onassis.

But in case the descent of the beautiful people should give you a mental picture of velvety lawns, sweeping ball gowns and nearby mansions taken over by the rock aristocracy, I hasten to say that most of the island is a cluster of scrub pine and what looks like forests of tundra, infested by mosquitoes the size of MiG jets and that, consequently, all the character of the island lies in the boxy houses, colonial or plain Victorian, balancing themselves against rock outcrops or rising above tumbling narrow streets and looking out over splendid coves and slips and slivers of blue water and wheeling gulls against a heavenly blue sky lapped by a dry breeze. Rather like an American Rye – the Sussex town that is, if it's still called Sussex and not Danegelt.

This long weekend was meant to be a holiday but, as a newspaper man from a tender age, I cannot go anywhere without tracking down the cigar stand, a drug store or wherever that sells the local newspaper and buying it. These days, of course, the New York Times is available almost everywhere. I see that the west coast, the California edition, which used to be flown 3,000 miles for fussy people who don't believe anything unless they read it in the New York Times, I see that it's now published in a small California town, Torrance, the whole paper beamed by lasers from the word-processors in New York and set up simultaneously with the New York edition.

Well, they get it on Martha's Vineyard by airplane still and it's a refreshingly quaint sight to see the bundles being unloaded from a two-engine prop plane. The friends, our hosts, get up very early in the morning – at first light, I think the boat people call it – but they are, thank God, not the type which keep saying that early morning is the best time. They listen to radio, I presume, since by the time I got down, they were up on the latest deaths of eminent persons. Nothing much else though. We never saw the evening news and though the master and I ambled down the hill to get the Times, it was more of a ritual than a necessity. We were too busy relaxing and chasing a white ball, one white ball, one orange ball, to read much of anything.

In fact, this was the first time of three or four days I can remember that I didn't scour the papers or twitch the knob. By the morning of the fourth day, all I knew before we took our plane home was that Ingrid Bergman had died. There's not much specifically American to say about her but I knew the lady and I would simply like to add to the memorial pieces on her that of the hundreds of actresses I ran into at one time or another by way of being in the television game, she was one of the three least actressy actresses I have ever known. No side, no showbiz gossip, no hint that she'd ever been on the stage unless you pressed her for memories. These three were Ingrid Bergman, Celia Johnson and Peggy Ashcroft.

Well, we'd been lucky with the weather – the luck, at this season over most of America, being that it wasn't hideously hot and rancid with humidity. In fact, we had a marvellous foretaste of the fall – balmy breezes, brilliant dry light and, to a long-distance spectacle wearer, the sudden, magical ability to see four miles and count the leaves. And then back to New York and the athletic movement required to climb over four days newspapers banked outside the kitchen door. Since the Sunday edition of the Times, alone, carries something like 250 pages, or the original cutting down of two saplings, the world outside Martha's Vineyard (looked) very large.

So, hello! What's this? My secretary claims to be overcome by fatigue and an itch to take a break in Mexico. Why Mexico? Because a month ago, and for all I knew, today, the exchange rate was 24 pesos to the dollar. Now, it says here incredibly, 129 to the dollar. I read on about this preposterous move. It seems Mexico has a foreign debt of $80 billion and can't begin to repay. In fact, the more you read about the solvency or the impending bankruptcy of small nations and big companies, the more solvency becomes defined as the ability to pay the interest on an unpayable debt.

Read on beyond the first paragraph of this shocker and you see that the nine biggest banks in the United States have at least 40 per cent of their capital and reserves on loan to Mexico alone, which last year, this year, looked like the most stable country of the Third World, the outer world, the satellite world or whatever you care to call the countries that are incapable, alone, of threatening the big boys.

Well, we have to wait and see how the rescue operation goes with the banks, the governments, the international monetary fund and anybody else who, in the marvellous, mysterious world of international finance, is eager to lend more billions to a country so many billions in debt. My secretary has dipped into this strange world long enough to discover that, while Mexico depends on tourism a great deal, it will not, at the moment – the moment that the humble peasant's tortilla costs twice what it cost yesterday – it will not welcome with bands and banners the visiting Yankee going on a spree with a collapsed exchange rate. She's having second thoughts.

Then I've no sooner unpacked and settled to the usual seven o'clock half-hour on the tube than the word comes through that Mr Reagan had sent a letter to Mr Begin, that the letter had been leaked to the press, that it contained a proposal for freezing the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and linking Jordan with the idea of a Palestinian homeland, that Mr Begin was furious at what he takes to be a double-cross of the Camp David accords, that before Mr Begin could get on the air or proclaim his anger, Mr Reagan has to leave his horses and his holiday in the Santa Inés mountains, rush to a television studio outside Los Angeles and repeat for the American people and the Israelis to hear that he does indeed look toward full autonomy for the Palestinians now living in the West Bank and the Strip and would like to see their autonomy supervised by Jordan.

I've so far carefully avoided all comment on the war in Lebanon because the issues that swirl around it are so complex and are equally well understood abroad. What has to be said now is a word about the prejudice or rumour that riddles discussion of the subject in every club and pub in Europe, namely that the United States government is, at all times, terrified of giving offence to Israel, no matter what she does because of that sinister so-called Jewish lobby in Washington, or even more vague and threatening, the Jewish vote.

There is no such thing with any separate power, except in New York City. It's not enough to bind American policy. There are many Jews who applaud Israeli policy, there are many who deplore it. The prevailing fact is that the United States has sworn, through seven presidencies, to protect the sovereignty of the state of Israel and that Israel is far and away the strongest ally of the United States in the Middle East.

But now, the crunch has come. Under Mr Reagan and Secretary of State Shultz, the conviction has settled in that the Palestinians, too, never mind the separate or even mixed-in entity of the PLO, must have a land to call their own.

I doubt that this conviction or policy will crack and sooner or later, it's felt in Washington, Mr Begin or his successor is going to have to swallow it.

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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