The end of the LA riots - 22 May 1992

Tucked away in an inside page of the New York Times last Tuesday morning was a very short piece a few inches long on a matter that I assumed about a week ago would cause ructions in the White House, shock and dismay in the press and a storm of turbulence in the transatlantic airwaves. Amazingly, it amazes, the story, which I doubt one American in a hundred thousand ever noticed caused no protest, no comment that I've heard about either from the White House, the Pentagon, the public or the pundits of the media.

Let me just read the first three sentences of that obscure little piece as if you were eagle-eyed you could have spotted in the New York Times. It was a writer's dispatch datelined Oxford England May 18. A jury ruled today that nine British soldiers who died in the Persian Gulf War when their armoured vehicles were destroyed by United States war planes were killed unlawfully. Mark Stephens, a lawyer for the families of the victims, said "the verdict meant that the jury had found the American pilots had committed manslaughter". Mr Stephens said, "we will be asking for the papers to be handed to the Director of Public Prosecutions with a view to criminal proceedings being contemplated."

On Tuesday, the jury's verdict was mentioned on the evening news broadcast of a national network as a trailer sentence to a shot of Mr Major in the House of Commons saying in effect that the government had no intention of extraditing or prosecuting the two American pilots.

Wednesday morning, the New York Times had another very short piece inside unsigned explaining the British procedure for bringing charges but also pointing out that under British law, no foreign citizen could be prosecuted here for a murder or manslaughter committed abroad. Mr Major's contribution was expanded to include his comment "the sad fact is that terrible accidents of this sort do sometimes occur". The Pentagon came through quietly and promptly on Wednesday to say simply "the case is closed".

I had a close associate of mine here at the BBC in New York search through a database, which would certainly reproduce every American news story about the nine dead soldiers that was printed anywhere in this country, there was not one.

Well probably the fair conclusion from anyone going exhaustively into the whole story would be no less but no more than Mr Major's comment "in all wars ghastly mishaps of this sort do happen". My dismay shared by the only two Americans I know who'd even heard of the story is that on Wednesday at the latest, we had no word from President Bush, perhaps over the weekend some advisor in the White House with his senses about him will suggest to the president that Britain was the first prompt ally in the desert war that the death of those nine infantrymen is a disastrous embarrassment to all Americans and he's truly sorry.

But on Wednesday, it must be said the president did have an agonising distraction to contend with, as one reporter put it, "Thailand is in turmoil, the federal deficit is ballooning and hot embers of racial resentment still smoulder in the ruins of inner city Los Angeles, but today the high counsels of government were preoccupied with a truly vexing question, "Is Murphy Brown really a tramp?"

As Canada's Prime Minister Mulroney said – he was at the President's side supposed to be thrashing over a Trade Agreement – who's Murphy Brown? Well Murphy Brown is a character in a popular television comedy series, she represents in the comely person of Candice Bergen, who's Candice Bergen I hear echoing from Mexico and Switzerland to Estonia and perhaps Cornwall? Anyway, Candice Bergen formerly a successful, not quite at the top, movie star has hit the jackpot for herself and her network this year by her playing of a journalist a star reporter for a television news magazine show.

In the more recent episodes, Murphy Brown has grown laterally and literally big with child, is she married? She was and her ex-husband is the father. Murphy's racking ordeal shared vicariously by several million families across the country was, should she have the child and risk what Tennyson called the scorn of circumstance being revealed to the world as a single mother and technically, since she's divorced, having what we are no longer allowed by local governments to call an illegitimate baby, but a baby out of wedlock is that plain. Let me say it once before we go into the brouhaha or the big hassle that has developed that the producers of the Murphy Brown show know full well that today no scorn of circumstance applies to a smart pretty successful single career woman who decides to have a baby.

Any film fan can quote you hundreds of very famous and not so famous actresses who've been actually rather proud to have a child or two out of wedlock. I could offhand now cite two actresses alive and prospering on Broadway at this moment who between them have five little babies. And not many people listening to me now, I do mean in the so called Western world, not many are shocked by these facts and swelling figures. An older generation may sigh and deplore, but to the heaven or should I say the irreligious young not only does no sin or shame attached to an unwed mother in some upscale circles, it is a chic thing to do.

Now the social climate having been tested and pronounced upon, let us see what the uproar is all about? Well on Tuesday, again Tuesday was a big day for scandal one way or another. On Tuesday, Vice President Dan Quayle was in San Francisco making a speech before a club which down many years has attracted big shots, statesmen, business leaders, devines from around the world. Mr Quayle was giving his own commentary on the Los Angeles riots – more downright, more impassioned than anything we've heard from President Bush, though much the same in tone and moral posture.

In a soaring sentence, impressive as rhetoric if short as a helpful prescription, he said, "I believe the lawless social anarchy, which we saw is directly related to the breakdown of family structure personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society." I take it that means briefly that the outburst of social disorder was due to the breakdown of social order.

True and if you mean by family structure, the structure that most of his audience were inhabitants of, wife and husband living together comfortably off having had two or more children now grown and to the secret dismay of just such parents perhaps going to have a baby OOW – out of wedlock. Mr Quayle is not quite old enough to have the personal experience of children, terribly nice good children let alone grandchildren who never the less have been caught by drugs or have become pregnant and have faced the choice millions of young women in every what we call civilised country face to have an abortion or to have the baby, father on hand or not.

I read Mr Quayle's speech and found practically nothing to object to on moral grounds. However, it doesn't help the victims in Los Angeles and now in Long Beach and in Las Vegas to say that the riots are due to a poverty of values or as Mr Quayle added, "many of the urban poor remain that way because they lost their moral fibre in the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and '70s".

Well well, President Bush attributed the riots to old Lyndon Johnson and the failure of his war on poverty. Vice President Quayle says "better add the '60s riots under the Democrats and then Nixon caused a decay in the poverty stricken of moral fibre". I do not believe this tune is going to play, as they say, in any slum in any big city in the United States, I may be wrong but somebody in or around the White House apart from Mr Jack Kemp is going to have to give us a prescription for growing moral fibre especially in the infertile soil of poverty.

However, these sentiments of the Vice President were not the ones that fuelled the uproar. In the middle of his speech was this, "doesn't help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown a character who supposedly epitomises today's intelligent highly paid professional women mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice." It's true, Murphy Brown's big problem is not going to affect poor black or Hispanic teenagers who are pregnant, except possibly to make them wish they too looked so pretty and had the money to choose to bring up a baby in an elegant apartment to the applause of admiring fellow workers.

Within 24 hours of the dropping of this offhand remark, the telly, the press, the radio had jumped on it and bombarded the White House with the question, how does the president stand on what is rather awkwardly called single motherhood? Well, he believed children should have the benefit of being born into families with a mother and father who will give them love and care. Some of us didn't get the point of this – are children who didn't have this benefit to blame?

Later Mr Bush said he didn't know much about the show, pressed for more he said he was deeply concerned by the fact of an awful lot of broken families in this country. As for Murphy Brown, who has rejoiced in a tidal wave of national publicity undreamed off by, say Marilyn Monroe, the president said he wasn't going to get into the details of a very popular television show. The stress on very popular, I think is meant to imply that the show is justly popular among millions of voters. Right. Though, the compliment still leaves Murphy Brown out in the cold never to darken the doors of a decent family.

As I talk, no word has come from the White House about those nine dead men in the desert.

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.