Haiti - 15 July 1994

Three or four years after the end of the Second World War, President Harry Truman appointed a new secretary of state, an impressive tall mustachio'd man, son of a bishop, he looked like a Spanish grandee in tweeds. And in a famous speech, he said a tactless but very quotable thing about Britain. He didn't say it with malice aforethought. Indeed, I don't think with any kind of forethought, it was a minor passing thought in a serious assessment of America's new role in the world as a superpower.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe at the time America was the only superpower, the Soviet Union being a year or two away from also having the bomb. Anyway, the United States was riding high and the most remarkable thing about the reversal of power in the world after the war was the plain fact that America was now top nation.

So this new Secretary of State Dean Acheson, it took him months to get over the explosion of rage that came at him from across the Atlantic after his casual sentence, "Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role". Of course it was the truth, but it was the sort of truth then that you soft-pedal between friends.

No such pandemonium greeted President Clinton's declaration the other day in Berlin that a United Germany was the chief American ally in Europe, the coming leader of a new Europe and a country with which from now on the United States had a special relationship. I don't think the phrase has much of an emotional history in German, but it most certainly does in English and has meant for at least three generations the relationship between the United States and Britain. President Clinton effectively on Tuesday uprooted the phrase from its English soil and replanted it in Germany.

As for the British reaction, as far as I can gather, it's what the old old Punch used to say, more glimpses of the obvious. Sticking the old label on a new ally is surely overdue, the strongest links between America and Britain still remain language, literature, the common law, two centuries of shared history, no switches of power in the world can break those ties, but what Mr Clinton has done has been to clear the air of those nostalgic fogeys, many of them in high places who go on decades too late trying to rekindle Winston Churchill's tender post-war vision of the United States and Britain together leading the world along, I think it was the sunny uplands of peace and prosperity.

All the ferment and the fears we've had over Haiti in the past six months or so, still have not as I talk hardened into a firm or even recognisable policy, I think it was about two months ago when war seemed so imminent I had to preface my little woeful sketch history of Haiti, technically a republic since 1804 and since 1804, a bubbling volcano of coups and rebellions with little peaceful pause. I had to hedge and say "something may happen this weekend or may have happened already as you hear these words" and I really have to say the same thing again except that no invasion I can recall in the history of the United States has been so frequently threatened, denied, trumpeted, plans published.

This week, I read the dispatch of a correspondent who was priding himself on discovering the British island in the Caribbean from which the invasion was to be is being or has been mounted, so again as I speak it occurs to me that part of the president's indecision, if we may use a word increasingly used inside as well as outside, the White House maybe due to his awareness of a public poll, which shows that two Americans in three are against an invasion. Now maybe that poll is too downright, takes no account of why people are loathe to attempt invading yet another country.

I believe there's a conflict in public opinion, which it would take a very carefully thought-out poll to register between the growing impulse – when you are faced with so many eruptions of tribal and ethnic and Third World rebellion – the impulse to let the trouble regions handle their own troubles and the older deeper impulse in America to feel an obligation to help and rescue your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Those probing not to say sentimental words on the Statue of Liberty have had great political force throughout this century and he would be a much despised politician who dared to mock them. And yet, the second wave of immigration in the past 20, 30 years has been so much huger than the one from Europe at the turn of the century that people everywhere who would like to take in the poor, the tired, the persecuted of other nations find themselves saying we're not doing the greatest job of taking care of 255 millions already here and the time is surely coming when we just can't bring in any more. This dilemma is most acutely felt with Haiti, every night you see the boats, the hopelessly overloaded boats pushing off from the Haitian shore, the human overspill dropping off into the sea and then the United States coastguard hovering into sight heaving to, taking up a baby or two and ordering all the others back.

Throughout this muddle of emotions in the on-looking American, they intrude from time to time another unpleasant thought in Americans who remember or have read some history; it's the grim tedious story of the United States marines in Central America. Since the first decade of the 20th century, any sort of political uprising down there that could be realistically thought to pose a threat to the Panama Canal has not given any sitting president half the misgivings and bellyaches of Mr Clinton. The president simply sent in the marines to Nicaragua, to Haiti, to Panama itself. These invasions often into countries whose basic crop was financed and run by American companies, these intrusions were never any big political deal for the newspaper reader, most people I guess hardly knew they'd happened or continued; continued, that's the word that hurts. For instance, when I first landed in New York, 1932, and during the following year, I didn't know that American marines were occupying Haiti let alone that they'd been there 17 years.

After one of the usual coup in 1915, German and French agents went running into Haiti, those two countries were Haiti's main creditors, they insured the awful national debt. And President Woodrow Wilson as famous a man of peace as has ever inhabited the White House at once sent in the marines, they were there to restore, of course, law and order just as now the pretext, and it's a sincere one, the pretext for invading Haiti is to restore democracy, a system by the way they've never enjoyed. So the marines stayed there unreported, little thought about during the administrations of Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, until Roosevelt taking a flyer at the new policy towards Central and South America, of the good neighbour, Roosevelt took the marines out in 1934 after a 19-year occupation and the country went back to its normal instability and was, and is, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. No wonder desperate people will risk the sea trip in fleeing from a brutal military dictatorship and a country whose unemployment rate is over 50%.

I've already heard from listeners who say they have learned to be fascinated by the OJ Simpson case, the case of a superb athlete and god-like folk hero who has turned into a tragic figure, a man who guilty or innocent adored his wife but may have thrown away a pearl richer than all his tribe, a Los Angeles Othello.

Well, once the preliminary hearing was over and the judge decided there was ample evidence to order a trial, we are now in the waiting pause between the arraignment and the trial. The television networks have restored their soap operas given the World Cup full exultant treatment, Germany, North Korea, Haiti take their old important places. Heaven alone knows when Mr Simpson will come to trial. I'm sure the defence lawyers are busy going over the transcript of the hearing looking for some possible legal impropriety of the judge or license of the prosecution, then I'll expect there'll be a move for a change of venue. This has become almost routine in any town or county where the crime has been committed too much neighbourly prejudice etc, but it's almost routinely denied since television has made us all neighbours.

Now I'm about to tread delicate ground, but I believe I ought to quote you from a column by a famous American woman journalist because I believe her view of the long televised interview with the Prince of Wales, her view is I think common to many more Americans than you might think. Briefly then, Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe wrote a piece deploring this age of confession of private backsliding by public characters who are above all meant to symbolise dignity and restraint, she calls this trend "emotional nudism". By contrast, she looked at the lifetime behaviour of Jacqueline Kennedy, her unique characteristic, she wrote, in an age of compulsive confessors is that she kept her peace and cultivated a zone of privacy around a most public life, she neither confirmed nor denied nor explained. And for this, concludes Miss Goodman, she was considered an American Royal.

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