D-Day anniversary

There were two topics that flooded the papers and the telly in Europe and America last week that I made no mention of and some listeners want to know why. They're not complaining, they're not accusing me of indifference or insensitivity to the great matters of the days, they're just curious in a friendly way.

One of these was a topical event and the other an historic one. The topical theme was the great economic summit in London. It was about as fully reported here and in Britain as such things can be when the press is, quite rightly, not allowed into the meetings and has to muse and speculate and, as we said in school, waffle.

I have been, in my time, to several of these so-called summits and unless a reporter hides under the carpet where the great men are arguing or manages to charm a leak out of someone who was present, the only substantive news he can get is the final communiqué and the final communiqué is, must be, always, a masterpiece of piety and cliché, signifying nothing.

It's bound to be so. To be useful at all, these meetings must allow the participants to speak their minds, to question, to argue, to challenge, to air their real differences about trade, defence, economic policy, nuclear arms, whatever. The press, surely, has no more right to be in on these frank debates than it has to be a fly on the wall at a confessional or a psychiatric session. So, the bland communiqués. And the reporters go away guessing and blowing up hints into theses. It's inevitable that the only vivid memories that come out of such things are personal incidents seen in the flesh.

If I were challenged at the point of a gun to say immediately what was most memorable about Mr Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the United States, on which he was accompanied by over 600 of us batting around in trains and airplanes from coast to coast, I should have to say it was a unforgettable scene at lunch in one of the big Hollywood studios.

At the head of that famous studio was a man with a Greek name. When the lunch was over and the toasts were in order, this man rose with the look of an evangelist about to proclaim a mission. He recounted his life's story. He told of himself as a poor boy in Greece, his parents bringing him on to these shores in a shawl – his mother, I guess – and how he worked humbly and hard. And he said, in effect, 'Look at me now! The head man of one of the great motion-picture studios of the world.' He piped a tear and turned with what I think we can for once legitimately call 'a meaningful look' at Mr Khrushchev and he said, 'Only in America, Mr K, only in America!'

There was a thunderclap of applause from the studio executives, the dazzling stars and the official representatives of President Eisenhower. Mr Khrushchev gave a sort of 'so what' shrug and then he got up. He had a story to tell. 'There was once', he said, 'a simple shepherd boy, born on the borderland of the Ukraine. The boy had an ambition to do more than tend sheep, he moved onwards and downwards into the coal mines and then upwards into a factory. Then he took a three-year night course at a workers' educational institute and look at him now!'

Mr Khrushchev, with a marvellous expansive gesture that ended by crooking a finger in the direction of his own chest indicated none other than the head man of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He turned slowly toward his Greek host, 'Only,' he said, 'in Russia! Only in Russia!'

And all I can, to my shame, remember of an earlier summit, an Anglo-American summit in Bermuda, was the charming little ceremony at which President Eisenhower planted a tree in the grounds of the governor's mansion. The governor in the uniform of a model major-general, the white plumes of his helmet fluttering like a swan in ecstasy, led his son to be presented to the president. The little boy had wonderful, ropey, light-golden hair – tow-headed, you could have called him.

So what was so memorable about this cosy scene? It would, I think, have faded from memory if the Bermuda newspaper the next day had not reported that the president was enchanted, as weren't we all, with the governor's two-headed son.

Well, the only really substantive thing to come out of the London summit – and some reporter got it from an American delegate present at the table – was a rather tart exchange between President Reagan and Prime Minister Trudeau. Mr Trudeau, we learned later, had sent several private letters to the president urging him to talk to the Russians about stopping the arms race from becoming a race in outer space. At least, start there, then maybe you could come down to earth.

Mr Trudeau had also written to Mr Chernenko with the same suggestion and got an answer back saying that the Russians were willing now, without delay, to negotiate a pact or treaty banning weapons in outer space. Now Mr Trudeau had, at the end of last year, also, had a long talk in Washington with the president and told him that he was not making it plain enough to the allies or the Russians that he really wanted to achieve settlements in Central America and the Middle East without the use of force or the threat of force. This is tough talk and if Mr Trudeau were going to run for re-election, I doubt he would have done it but he's retiring. He has no more political ambitions and he can speak his mind without the pussy-footing and professional tact of an allied prime minister still speaking for his country.

In London, Mr Trudeau put the point again to the president pretty bluntly saying, in effect, 'what are you doing to convince the West and the Russians that you mean what you say when you claim to be a man of peace?'. The president's actual reply is by now well authenticated. He took off his glasses, he looked, if not glared, at Mr Trudeau and said, 'Dammit Pierre, what do you want me to do? We'll go sit with empty chairs to get these guys back to the table.'

It was pointed out in the New York Times the other day by an old American radical who is now what we call a neoconservative, that Mr Reagan did not initiate the policy of having intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Western Europe asked for them and President Carter agreed to send them. It was Mr Carter too who, expecting to be re-elected, proposed increasing the defence budget by five per cent. Mr Reagan, if he's re-elected, hopes to have increased it by seven per cent at the end of 1985, which will be at the end of five years in office.

The writer also pointed out that it was Mr Carter who sent military aid to El Salvador and it was Mr Carter who cut off help to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. It was Mr Reagan who pressed for a ceasefire in Lebanon. So the men decided that Mr Reagan's foreign policy is not much different from Mr Carter's. The startling difference is in his rhetoric. Mr Reagan does believe that the Soviet Union threatens to bully and blackmail the West into political subordination, that it wants not war, but, as Churchill said about the Nazis, the fruits of war.

But the fact, and it is a fact, that galls and tortures the president, is that he's seen far and wide as a provocative leader, not as a warning messenger on the Churchillian model. What rankled the president was the implication of Mr Trudeau's remark that, as the Duke of Wellington said about his own troops when he saw them drawn up before the Battle of Waterloo, 'They may not frighten the enemy but, by God, they frighten me!'

It will remain the chief psychological task of Mr Reagan's term, of his likely second term, to convince the world that the United States does not in its posture or its policy mean to be as frightening as the Russians. Long ago, a reporter, who covered Mr Reagan through the years when he was governor of California, noted his fondness for brave rhetoric and off-the-cuff gallantry, 'But,' he wrote, 'Mr Reagan developed a proclivity for doing what is necessary at the expense of his rhetoric.'

His problem, it seems to me, his biggest task in the coming year or years will be to convince this country, and the allies alike, that he believes he can find a way to live honourably with the Russians rather than to die with them and if he can do it, it will be the feat of the century.

The other, the historic, event was, of course, the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe. I suppose I saw on television as much of the ceremonies and the survivors and their memories as anybody and, naturally, I saw mostly the enormous coverage by the four American national networks. Some of it was impressive and much of it was moving, but I found it also sad and saddening in a way it was not meant to be.

I imagine that British television covered the British move in the operation known as Gold and that Canadian television covered the advance on St-Aubin known as Juno and, maybe, the British and the French retold the story of their joint operation, Sword. The American networks, vividly and without foolish boast, covered exclusively the American invasions of Omaha and Utah. The Allies were mentioned from time to time as such, but we saw nothing of Gold, or Juno, or Sword, and I would like to think – a wishful thought – that some country, some network somewhere gave a fair comprehensive picture of the five fronts with due tribute paid to the nationals who established them and fought and died there.

I don't know about you but I can only say that the overwhelming impression left on an American viewer, who did not lean back, shut his eyes and think or be otherwise instructed, was that the Normandy landings were a wholly American enterprise. Nobody, you understand, said as much and I think if the point had been brought up to the producers and the network heads they would have been surprised and sorry, but on television the thing seen is everything.

We all know, of course, that the Russians were barely short of boorish in acknowledging the feat or the value of the invasion. They simply reminded their listeners of the 12 million Russian dead.

Nowhere was it suggested that this sort of heroism can not, in the nuclear age, be called on again. What we had was a celebration of 'our boys' – a revival after 40 years of that chauvinism, that national pride, that may yet be the death of all of us.

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.