Diplomacy and Public Relations - 15 June 2001

The day before President Bush left on his first trip to Europe he assembled his colleagues, a cabinet officer or two and the White House press corps, and he made a short speech summarising in the simplest language the policies he was going to discuss with the European leaders.

I had no sense that he was putting on a brave face.

A brave face on what? On the shock of the loud and unanimous and often venomous response by Europe to his proposed policies. They were no different from the policies he'd proposed in his inaugural address.

What, President Bush and his senior aides wondered, had hit the ceiling and shaken the more or less optimistic mood in which they'd anticipated the European tour?

Notice I keep saying "proposed". A president is not a dictator in the sense that a prime minister is a dictator of policy. A president can only tell you what he'd like to do. He proposes, Congress disposes.

This is an elementary fact of the federal system that once every four years even European leaders and all European newspapers forget. And if Mr Bush has forgotten it the Senate, run by the Democrats, will rudely bring him back to the centre.

I talked the other day with a lifelong Republican who had favoured most of the president's political blueprint, let's call it. My friend was almost as indignant as is, we are given to understand, every European prime minister, grocer, schoolchild, human being.

But my friend was mad at the White House for what he called "a catastrophic performance in public relations."

When Mr Bush came to the White House he at once gratuitously recited all the main issues on which he differed from his predecessor. He tossed them out all at once like hand grenades, an artillery barrage from the extreme right wing.

And even sympathetic Europeans were overcome by what seemed a wilful act of defiance of all the issues they held sacred.

For example, the president said the United States would not jump automatically into any ethnic or tribal fracas in Europe but choose places and events where American interests were served by helping.

So the European papers go off full cock: "See," they said, "the United States is slinking back into the old isolationism."

Mr Bush proposed to take up where President Reagan left off with research on a missile defence. First, naturally, for the United States. Immediately prime ministers screamed in the same breath: "So, they're going to let Europe go hang and build a huge missile shield - which won't work anyway."

Not to ratify Kyoto, cried millions who'd never heard of Kyoto until the departing Mr Clinton, who had presided over its funeral, mischievously brought it up. Well it was appalling and shameful, cried the other 87 signatory nations who hadn't ratified it either.

It seems to me today inconceivable that there was no one in the White House who from prior knowledge could anticipate European sensibilities, especially at a time when Europe is going to have to learn - gradually, not all at once - that the America it has dealt with since America's entry into the First World War, the America run by white men of European ancestry and bias, is gone.

In simple terms, as my Republican friend put it: What the White House needs more than anything is a diplomat. Somebody who'll carefully look over, not only what the president says but the way he first says it.

Personally I'd like to see the story of President Truman and the atom bomb written up and printed and hung in the Oval Office as a warning to all presidents to consider in any declaration of policy how it might sound to his allies.

Bear with me and I will briefly recount an occasion when Europe exploded with fear of the ultimate war because of a sentence of nine words spoken offhand by a president of the United States.

It was the last day of November 1950 and President Truman was holding a press conference in the Oval Office of the White House - as they did in those days before television swelled the White House corps from 20 to 200.

The press corps was larger than usual that day because there'd come in overnight very grim news from Korea. And let me remind those not alive and sentient 50 years ago that the Korean War was a United Nations war - the first - against North Korea's communist invasion of the South.

The bad news was what some Americans had feared and the British parliament had dreaded, namely the intervention of China with a quarter of a million men and the forcible retreat of General MacArthur's main United Nations force.

So at the press conference there were lots of anxious questions about Korea. At one point the president said: "We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation."

And a young man, as I recall, intending no mischief, put the follow-up question.

"You said sir, 'every weapon we have' - does that mean that there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?"

We didn't know it at the time but it was a fateful, appalling, moment.

President Truman said, without any flourish or particular emphasis: "There has always been active consideration of its use."

He went on to say: "I don't want to see it used, it's a terrible weapon and it shouldn't be used on innocent men, women and children."

But one international agency reporter was not interested in the humane enlargement of the president's first thought.

"There has always been active consideration of its use" was enough for him.

And the moment the press conference was over he filed a brief, brutal story to London and within the hour, in mid evening, those posters they hold out like aprons were flashing such phrases as: "Truman may use bomb", "Truman's bombshell on the atom bomb".

Parliament was holding an evening debate and the fateful sentence, garbled as it had been by exploding late editions, brought the debate to a halt while 100 Labour MPs signed a protesting petition to Mr Attlee, the prime minister.

He appeared to be as alarmed as the rest of the House. And to their roaring applause announced that he would fly to Washington to meet President Truman.

Three days later he did so. And in the popular accounts of the dread episode Clement Attlee has been firmly planted in the pantheon of British heroes.

In fact Mr Attlee spent three days without mentioning the bomb in intense discussion with the president, mainly about Korea, to seek some assurance that the United Nations forces would not move north to launch a war against China, which every European feared could lead to a general war, at worst, at best, to such an absorption of American manpower that the Soviet Union would be left with a free hand in Europe.

Well he got his assurance. And when the conference was all over Mr Attlee made his move. Truman's secretary of state wrote about this meeting that "Clement Attlee is the most underrated politician and the cunningess lawyer I ever met."

So I say when the conference was over and Mr Attlee was looking at his watch and thinking it was time to pack for home he took the president aside.

"By the way, you don't mean to use the bomb do you?"

Said the president: "Not without giving you notice."

"Thought so."

Well that parliamentary fright of early December 1950 had the effect of a spreading plague on either side of the Atlantic and Christmas 1950 was not a merry time.

One thing I've heard from a man present throughout President Bush's tour, and was first evident at the meeting of the 17 leaders in Brussels, the look of most of them, once they'd spent an hour or two with the president, was a dazed look.

Where was the White House bully, where was Dr Stangelove, who was this quiet spoken amiable man who, confronted by opposing forces, even by the contemptuous French, remained so unalterably good-natured?

It was to their vast surprise the president of the United States.

I believe the best thing about summit meetings is just such an appearance in the flesh of characters who, seen from a distance, are puppet expressions of a policy or a party. And I would trust the long-term effect of that dazed look more than anything that goes down in a communiqué.

I believe also that when the foreign ministers look over the 12 nuclear arms treaties signed since 1963, all but two of them about producing a stalemate between the arsenals of Russia and the United States, I believe the Europeans will question whether any of those treaties is a protection against the character of the next war if it is to be.

Finally, at the tour's end I should like to see posted - posted up in the foreign offices of Europe to match the Truman story over the president's desk - a couple of sentences from the London paper the Economist:

"The danger in Europe is that it might meet what it sees as American arrogance with an arrogance of its own, deluding itself that it can have superpower status without political maturity and defence spending to match. To compete with America rather than to complement Nato.

"Yet these two partners have much in common. They are together not only the main engine of the world's economy but the main custodian of its liberal values. They have strong interests in common.

"America needs European help in Asia. Europe needs American help almost everywhere."

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