The murder of Bill Stewart - 22 June 1979

Do you remember a photograph so widely published that it became the photograph of the Vietnam War of a child sitting up, alone, in a street in Saigon, I think that was, swirling with gun smoke?

There was no other human in site, just this wretched, howling child not bowed with grief as an old person might have been not, not alert and cowering like a healthy grown-up, but sitting up with that wonderful straight back that babies have and yet a figure of helpless panic. Out of all the thousands of Vietnam films and photos, it brought home the human desperation of the war to more millions than ever read battlefront despatches.

I think it ought to be in any history of the war, not as an emotional banner waving over a procession of words, but as a reminder that photography and, today, television is in itself a powerful protagonist in any war.

Well this week, there was another a 40-second bit of film shot by a television crew in Nicaragua that began showing the reporter talking into a microphone to us and ended seconds later with him being told to lie flat on the street and then being shot in the head and collapsing dead, his right hand clutching a press card signed by President Somoza.

If we'd simply been told or read that a corporal of President Somoza's national guard had killed an American television reporter, things would have been bad enough, but to sit down for the evening news to see once again the chunky, handsome figure of Bill Stewart, the American Broadcasting Company's man in Nicaragua talking to us one moment and flat out dead the next was more shocking and, I think, more unforgettable than Hollywood could have made it.

Only the most sensitive scriptwriter could have invented the opening shot, Stewart squatting in a shady corner under the protection of three lounging and relaxed national guardsmen, the one behind him strumming casually on a guitar. The guitar lulled us into expecting a routine, at least a reassuring report. If it had been staged, I felt that only Hitchcock would have thought up the guitar, which set us up in a comfortable mood and made the corporal's unhesitating shot all the more shocking.

Well, the effect of it has been to rouse and anger the American people in one bound. Now the troubles of Nicaragua, the regime of President Somoza, the advancing threat of the guerillas, the situation of something close to civil war in the capital city of Managua, they've all been reported every night on television and everyday in the papers for weeks on end, months. Most people I believe are fairly fuzzy about the issues and the details of the rebellion, but they've seen a good deal of President Somoza, he's been very amenable to interviews. This bulky, moustachioed alert man is quite unruffled by the most audacious questioning, he admits he owns the airways, the main industries, he has vast foreign holdings, confesses to being immensely rich, says glibly he wishes he were richer still so he might be able to guarantee all his people better food and jobs and homes and he brushes off, with a chuckle, the mere suggestion that his troops used torture in spite of many televised interviews with ordinary, desperate people of the towns and villages giving names and dates of sons and husbands found dead or maimed.

But suddenly, 40 seconds of film, the steady nerve of one cameraman in staying with a quick gruesome incident have done what no amount of careful and learned reporting could do. Those 40 seconds may well have doomed President Somoza.

In the Columbia Broadcasting System's Sunday evening show, 60 Minutes, which I praised a few weeks ago for its crisp and brave reporting of all sorts of crookery, President Somoza was asked and, I must say, I myself felt at the time the reporter was getting a little beyond himself. Somoza was asked "if President Carter asked you to step down, would you do it?". Instead of boiling over with rage, he looked at the reporter steadily in the eye and said "Certainly, provided he'd step down if I asked him to".

After the murder of the American reporter, Mr Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State, called an emergency meeting of the Organisation of American States and urged it to ask Somoza to step down, to stop shipping arms to Nicaragua, to send a delegation to arrange a ceasefire and to form an OAS peacekeeping force. The Organisation of American States is a regional alliance, which is allowed by the charter of the United Nations, it was formed just over 30 years ago, it has 26 members starting in the north with the United States linked in the Caribbean by Mexico, Jamaica, Barbados and Grenada and then embracing all the South American republics from Venezuela down to Chile and Patagonia.

Considering the instability, not to say the combustibility, of many South American governments and the variety of dictatorships they harbour, the OAS could hardly be an actual force united for anything, certainly not for a crusade to get rid of a single dictator. But even the most arbitrary of Central and South American rulers want to be approved to get good notices north of the border. And there are rules, just as there were rules carefully observed by the best gangsters in the old days; one rule is that whoever you hurt or, as the saying goes, take out a contract on, the press, the reporters are to be left alone.

The Nicaraguan guardsmen's shot was a blunder of the first magnitude, whether rightly or not it reflected the callous cruelty of the Somoza regime. And the American protests didn't stop with Mr Vance and the old OAS, a clutch of the most powerful Senators – Kennedy, McGovern, Frank Church, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – drafted a letter to President Carter asking him to press for President Somoza's resignation.

This letter may seem irrelevant and impulsive, but it could carry more weight than a resolution of the OAS. If impoverished Nicaragua wants economic and military aid from the United States, it had better not bate or anger the members of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee.

Well that chilling 40-second television film had people next morning gasping, "Did you see it?", the way they buttonholed each other the day that we saw live on television Jack Ruby break through a little crowd in Dallas and shoot Lee Harvey Oswald as he was being transferred from one jail to another.

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.