Ten years after Tet offensive – 24 February 1978

Whenever a famous writer dies who seemed to speak for his time, or a beauty who was celebrated for her chic, or a hotel is torn down which 20, 30 years ago was the fashionable place to go to do the tricks of the time, the turkey trot or the tea-dance or the frug or the hard rock, or whatever, the morning these things are announced, every columnist and commentator wriggles with embarrassment over his typewriter and finds himself writing the phrase he hates – it is 'the end of an era'. In the obituary columns, eras seem to die about every other day. It's a phrase almost as threadbare as 'time marches on' – a phrase, by the way, which becomes more and more ridiculous as time marches on.

Because I've had my two grandsons staying with me this week and if I tell you that they are two and five, and are about as meditative as grasshoppers, you'll wonder that I'm able to sit down and talk at all for 13 minutes and 40 seconds without the interruption of screams, giggles and things crashing in the kitchen. Excuse me! The five-year-old has just stood on the kitchen table which has a central column like a mushroom but no legs. The table has knocked down the two-year-old who is now showered with sugar and well on the way to becoming a snowman. Butter is also not the best sort of floor wax. 

All this will be fixed, has been fixed and, with their permission, we can proceed. I was saying about time marching on. I notice that by about 6 or 7 p.m. a blessed glaze spreads over the faces of these two. They rouse an occasional shout or chuckle for the Muppets but after that they subside into something indistinguishable from coma, which is not surprising considering that they've been on the hop since just before dawn, using their legs more than most boxers in training, and their arms for many more hours than all the conductors in the world. A baby doctor tells me that the average two-year-old is in about the same amount of continuous motion as you or I would be if we ran up and down the 103 storeys of the Empire State building for four hours at a time. No wonder then the glaze over the eyes at twilight. They look as if they'd been through a lifetime in eighteen hours. So they have. To them, time crawls on and every day is a month to a 20-year-old, but at my age I find that time gallops on, so much so that I'm barely aware of a new fashion, a big national craze, when it's all over and some young writer says, 'It's the end of an era'. 

The other night, they brought on to television a moppet of 19. A bright girl, just ending her second year in college. If you can believe it, she was brought on to reminisce about the temper, the tone of the early 1970s. She talked, I regret to say, like a sociologist. Her last years in school, she decided, had been 'meaningful' but after what she'd heard about the frenzy of the Vietnam War years, which she couldn't remember, she couldn't honestly say that her school days had been 'innovative'. However, it seems her parents had been creditably 'supportive'. At this point she moistened her lips. I'll bet if you'd asked her she'd have said she was 'moisturising' them. 

Anyway, when they asked her about her favourite movie actors, and some greybeard asked her if her generation was still mad for Robert Redford, her eyes bulged. The shock was so great, she lapsed for the first time into English: 'Redford?', she said. 'He was way before my time'. This made me suspect that if you'd asked her, she'd have thought that Gary Cooper was a Civil War general. 

Well, you gather that something has happened which marks the end of an era. It's not my judgement, but that of one of our most spry and mischievous writers. His name is John Leonard and he writes once a week about his home life. This was the week in which a large, bouncy, gabby, apparently indestructible lady politician, Bella Apzug, lost a by-election for Congress in New York. 

Well, I'll read you the opening of John Leonard's column last Wednesday and even the first two sentences will convey how far I am away from his age and his New York. I guess he's in his early forties and he's beginning to write like Job. His wife, he writes, is transferring names and numbers from an old broken-down telephone book to a new squeaky-clean telephone book. I am not. I am on top of the Orgone box sucking cyanide from a peach pit, reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It is clear to me this weekend that the 1960s are dead. Their licence has expired. Back to back, Bella Apzug and Muhammad Ali went down to defeat. Perhaps we should remove the Sixties from our telephone book. 

Well, Muhammad Ali is of my time. I can, as the young, or perhaps the middle-aged now say, I can relate to him. By the way, I'm pleased to notice on my flying trips to England that most of this mushy language has not yet been imported. It's a nice change to hear people in England say, 'I understand him' or 'I sympathise with him'. It's an actual joy to hear a friend say, 'My doctor's put me on some pills'. No American is ever taking pills. They are 'undergoing' or 'on' – wait for it – 'chemotherapy'. 

Well, talking about Muhammad Ali, I think I covered his first fight and I was saddened to watch his last. But I think it's wrong to think of his defeat at the hands of Mr Spinks as the end of an era. His era ended about 16 months ago and nobody has explained this better than our most gifted sportswriter, an incomparable gent named Red Smith who is way up in his sixties but still writes like an angel, a mischievous angel, but I marvel that for 40 years or so he has stayed funny, graceful, fluid as a river in spring, precise and foxy shrewd, as well. He too, I ought to say, appears in the New York Times and his prose is like Fred Astaire dancing around the tombstones of a graveyard. Let him have the last word on the last fight of Ali, the Greatest. Here then, is Red Smith. 

'One thing needs to be said about Muhammad Ali's pas de deux with Leon Spinks before its labelled "an historic upset" and tucked away in lavender like some treasured keepsake. The transfer of the title was memorable as a happening because it was the last hurrah for an actor who has commanded the stage for almost 18 years. As an example of the sweet science, it was an embarrassing encounter between a fearless novice who has not yet learned to fight and a relic who has forgotten how. Ali has been losing fights for two years. It was only a question of how much time and how many bad decisions would pass before Ali caught up with the judges who'd believe what they saw. Two such judges worked in Las Vegas the other night. Two, not three. The third kept eyes and mind hermetically sealed. Obviously he didn't believe that Muhammad Ali, officially designated a living legend by Cassius Clay, could lose to a raw rookie seven fights this side of the amateurs.' Mr Smith ends his piece with this professional obituary: 'He was a splendid athlete among the modern heavyweights, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano would surely have beaten him. Joe Frazier and Ken Norton did whip him. Frazier knocked him down, Norton broke his jaw. And now he can't lick Leon Spinks. His end', says Red Smith, 'was in no sense an upset, it was as inevitable as nightfall.' 

Something else was seen this week to be inevitable, something of far more serious concern to the republic than the end of Muhammad Ali. I say 'was seen' this week to be inevitable because what I have in mind didn't happen this week, but ten years ago. Down the past few years, most of us, the oldsters and the middle-aged, have been looking back through the Nixon years and the Johnson years, the woeful frustrations of Vietnam, and the upheaval of the colleges, and the black year of 1968, and the long shabbiness of Watergate. And we wondered when the country, the national will, ceased to be all of a piece. A young man asked me this week if there were riots and protests during the Second World War. I told him there was none. Beyond that there was Korea and when China moved in the whole country grew restless and impatient to have it over and done with. But the question is when did America, the government, the presidency, cease to depend on the loyalty of most of the people, what we now call a national consensus? 

In a wise editorial this week, the New York Times marked the spot. It is ten years since the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive which can now be seen as the decisive battle of the war. After that, many American certainties were shaken. America could lose a war. Communism was not a bulging giant who could be contained. The blame fell mostly on the presidents and, after Nixon, on the overriding power of the presidency itself to conduct foreign affairs. The Congress wanted to be in on everything, the people wanted to know about everything, and they both discovered that the world of foreign policy is not a moral gymnasium. However lax the Arabs may be about civil rights or women's rights, America needs their oil. However terrifying the secret police of the Russians, we need to seek an agreement on arms. However much we abhor apartheid, we need chrome from South Africa. However brutal the dictatorships of Korea and the Philippines, they are outposts of American security. 

So, the era of consensus ended ten years ago, the general urge to reform the world in the American image. And Americans have discovered that when you become a great power, foreign policy is not a bright, daylit moral crusade. It is a twilight zone of complexity and contradiction. After the Tet offensive, this recognition was inevitable. As inevitable as nightfall. 

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.

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