Historic Turning Points - 19 May 2000

I once had a history master, a rather supercilious but funny fellow, never quite taken seriously by the other masters.

Came the day when we would have our first class in modern European history. Said my master, beginning the new class:

"Now, it says here in your books: '1453, Turks enter Constantinople. Fall of Constantinople. End of East Roman Empire. End of the Middle Ages. Beginning of modern history'."

We obediently licked our pencils - this was, I ought to say, before the triumph of the mouse - and wrote down: "1453, fall of Constantinople. End of the Middle Ages. Modern history begins."

"Now," said the master, "the first thing for you to understand is that in 1453, once the word got out about Constantinople, the Europeans didn't rush around or set off fireworks and say: 'Listen chaps, that's the end of the Middle Ages. Let's start some modern history'."

In effect he was saying there were no such things in history as "periods" - they're rough divisions, probably wrong, invented by historians.

God didn't invent periods any more than he invented countries or states or counties, so take the 1450s as a very vague time when certain changes slowly began to take place.

You know, once a year journalists are routinely asked by their bosses to do a piece listing the one or two most "historic" stories of the year.

And in the same way well-known historians are invited, every decade or so, to look back and out of their great wisdom pick out certain turning points in history.

What I'm saying, as a grateful pupil of the late W I Curnow, is that the historians are as much at sea as the rest of us, at the time, because all history is hindsight.

Historians too are victims of the big headlines.

For instance, I'm sure that most of them would say one of the great turning points of modern history was the dropping of the first atomic bomb.

I have another historic turning point about that. It's a letter, sent in a hurry across the Atlantic in the early summer of 1939, from a young German woman, a Hitler refugee living in Sweden, who wrote to three extremely obscure Hitler refugees in New York.

She was a crack radium researcher and the obscure ones were physicists.

Her letter told them terrifying news: Germany had just banned all exports of uranium ore from Czechoslovakia, which the Nazis occupied.

Don't be embarrassed by this item. Not more than half a dozen people in the United States or Britain at that time would have had the foggiest notion what uranium did or what that news signified.

But the three refugee physicists went into a sort of panic. They must get the news to the Old Man. The old man was Albert Einstein.

And they were so much out of touch that they didn't know where he spent his summers. They found out. They tracked him down.

They told him what the uranium ban meant - he hadn't guessed - and they urged him to write a letter to President Roosevelt hinting that the Germans could well be on their way to the making of a weapon of stupendous destructive power.

They dictated a letter. So maybe the real turning point was Einstein's letter from Nassau Point, Long Island, to "F D Roosevelt, Dear Sir...".

That's how we came to make the bomb before Hitler.

The name of the young Jewish woman who fled to Sweden and who sent the letter to Szilard, Wigner and Edward Teller, was Lise Meitner. Where is her statue?

I thought of my old history master when, this week, it seemed time to tackle a topic I'd long felt ought to be discussed.

It's a taboo which the American press anyway maintained certainly to the latter half of the 19th century on through the 20th, I'd say till the 1980s.

Only since the failed impeachment of President Clinton has the taboo ended once and for all.

How? Well, the taboo quite simply was the rule - never written, never sworn to, never even mentioned by good journalists. The rule was you didn't ever print an item, even a well-founded rumour let alone a fact, about the private life of a prominent politician.

Well, you may have heard that the mayor of New York City is in a mess. With disclosures about his private life made not by the media but by himself - and that in itself is startling.

So, as briefly as I can because it's not inspiring stuff: Mayor Giuliani has been called "the best mayor since the immortal Fiorello La Guardia, another Italian American Catholic, tough, destroying the corrupt democratic political machine in New York, just as District Attorney Giuliani was the first to break the Mafia.

Both effectively reduced crime rates. Both claimed to be compassionate. But there were for both of them minorities who wished they'd been more compassionate toward them.

Mayor La Guardia never talked about family values. He lived them - with an Old Testament vengeance. Without hesitation or apology he banned and abolished the burlesque stripping theatres.

Mayor Giuliani has swept sex shops and stores off into prescribed depressed areas. He called the Tate Gallery Virgin painted with elephant dung "a civic disgrace".

Mayor Giuliani chose some time ago to run this November for the United States Senate against - surprise, surprise - Hillary Clinton.

They were neck and neck in the polls until early last week when Mayor Giuliani, at his normal daily press conference, announced, in a greatly subdued tone, that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

He would discuss treatment with his doctors and decide whether or not to stay in the Senate race.

Next day, for the first time in public, he was asked a question to which the City Hall press corps had known the answer for many months: Did he have a close friendship with a certain lady?

Indeed he did, he declared with alacrity. "She is and has been a very close friend."

She was his companion everywhere and would go on being so. Incidentally, he said, he and his wife had lived more or less separate lives for several years.

And then, out of the blue, came a bombshell - from nobody but the mayor.

He announced that he and his wife were going to be formally separated. All these nasty elements are now going to influence his decision whether or not to stay in the Senate race.

But there was a further, a bigger shock to come.

Next day a sad woman - handsome, dignified, rather distraught woman - came to a microphone, something she'd avoided all her life. She was Mrs Giuliani.

She was distraught, not to say stunned, to tell us that the coming formal separation was news to her also. The mayor had never discussed it with her.

She had tried to keep the marriage together but for several years the mayor had had a relationship with one of his staff. That was another woman.

Next day again when the most hardened city reporters were reeling in disbelief, one of them asked the mayor why he had not first told his wife about the separation, and he made the fairly breezy reply, he thought it was the most "honest" thing to do.

Well I've been covering American politics, as many of you know, for over 60 years and I can't imagine a time when I could have imagined this scene.

When these three or four lamentable days were over I thought back to try and discover when the taboo no writing about such things first broke.

I couldn't and I can't find a date. But there did come back a very green memory of a day and a date in northern Texas which was typical of its time and all the time for maybe a century before.

I had joined the White House press corps for a trip to the Pacific to watch, under President Kennedy's supervision, a display of airborne missiles hurled at pseudo-Soviet targets.

And we were on our way there when suddenly the speaker of the House dropped dead.

I should say that the White House corps was then about 10 guys and two young women. Today I believe after the overwhelming presence of television something like 300 people have White House credentials.

Anyway the president and his small entourage and the dozen of us made a detour to the flatlands of northern Texas to attend the funeral of Mr Sam Rayburn, the formidable Texan who'd been in Congress for 47 years, speaker of the House for 17.

The church was small and the only press who could get in were two: one agency man and the second, drawn by lot from all our papers.

The rest of us stood out on the sidewalk during the service and listened to the droning of loudspeakers.

One reporter had to his ear a little transistor radio and was listening to the noon news and suddenly gave out a high, penetrating whistle.

He gasped out: "Mrs Rockefeller is going to divorce the governor."

The governor was Nelson Rockefeller of New York And the news - the very idea of a governor or a senator being divorced was breathtaking.

"That," said the dean of the White House press corps, "is the end of his campaign."

Governor Rockefeller was about to seek the Republican nomination for the presidency. But he did campaign.

He was booed at the next Republican convention and, when it was all over, a national survey reported one stunning and, for Rockefeller, fatal blow: the most powerful Midwestern states - Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, the heart of what used to be called the "nonconformist conscience" - had been solidly against him on the grounds that they couldn't have a divorced man for president.

Today this is almost laughable, an echo of a quaint episode from colonial America.

An old historian said the other day: "Caligula appointed his horse to the senate. We're not there yet but we're on our way."

For now though, for me, the breaking of Nelson Rockefeller was the last gasp of public propriety about a sexual matter - what President Clinton calls "an inappropriate relationship".

November 1961. It could be called, if you'll excuse the expression, a turning point.

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