No comment

There was a time – I suppose it's long gone – when schoolchildren in English-speaking schools were given short passages from famous orators to memorise, just so they'd get the swing of the language in their minds.

Usually they were bits from Shakespeare, like Mark Antony's expression of crocodile tears over Caesar's corpse. Sometimes they were from actual speeches, the most famous, I guess, being that of John Bright, the great, if forgotten, Victoria radical when he stood up to oppose Britain's involvement in the Crimean War. Bright raised in the house what he called 'a solitary voice amid,' as he put it, 'amid the din of arms and the clamours of a venal press'.

Well, I certainly wouldn't accuse the press, the media, in the past two weeks of being venal – that's to say of being bribed or flouting its principles – but if ever the din of arms was matched by the din of the press, the last fortnight has been unequalled in my experience. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that, throughout the country, at least a thousand television news reporters, anchor people, commentators, Middle East exiles, professors, have been bustled into the studio and milked dry of every drop of expertise, of rumour, of speculation, mostly by the anchormen and women, of rapid appeals not to go away, to stay tuned for the latest news, the up-to-the-minute interpretation of the hijacking crisis, and this has gone on not only through the days, but through the nights.

What turns this orgy of talk into an unbearable din is the dreadful, simple fact that they know nothing, that they cannot know anything much, anyway, about what's going on. I don't mean to demean the intelligence of many shrewd commentators or the energy, even the courage, of American reporters who've been hustled into Beirut, into Syria, as well as into Paris and London and, so help us, into every home of every relation of every hostage who has been released or not released.

Meanwhile, the government leaders of the West swear that they must get together and mount a concerted and ruthless campaign of retaliation against international terrorism. It's all praiseworthy, it's all understandable, but it is all so much as, who was it said, 'piffle before the wind'. Nobody can identify or retaliate against an abstraction called international terrorism and in the hijacking case, we don't know who did it, where they live. There is, as President Reagan said, quite rightly, at the only press conference he's held about the horror, and I imagine the only one he will hold till he can announce that it's all over, 'This time there is no nation that you can hold responsible, no target to go for'.

There's no question that the president and every conceivably useful adviser were tapped, every source in the world that might help but, for once, in the only time in this administration and maybe in several previous administrations, we heard from the president the old door-slamming phrase, 'No comment'. For once, at last, a president has dared to imply, if not to say out loud, that everybody in America does not have a right to know everything that's going on.

Now this used to be taken for granted until, I guess the fateful day, when for the first time, a president's press conference was thrown open to television. Eisenhower was the one who did it and that was 30 years ago. I remember it well. It was a revolutionary move. Until then, no citizen who did not have White House press credentials had ever seen or heard a presidential press conference and I recall going in there with some old reporters and we were all wondering what Ike would say when a question came up about some trouble that was brewing, some diplomatic problem that needed delicate and private handling, some presidential policy not quite yet ready for public exposure.

In short, problems whose solutions would be defeated if the press got wind of part of the story and unwittingly distorted it or misrepresented one of the party's attitudes. It all comes down to the opposing theories of diplomacy best expressed in this century by President Woodrow Wilson after the First World War and, about 30 years later, by the last, bold and brilliant, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld.

I think I ought to say that since every member nation has regularly put its own interests above the general interest and since the Russians, more than anybody, got alarmed at Hammarskjöld's independence, the role of secretary-general has been stripped down to that of a tactful flunky, no matter how fine, how incorruptible, how brilliant the secretary-general may be as a man.

Well, what Woodrow Wilson said in the pious glow of becoming the midwife at the birth of the League of Nations is that we should from then on have open agreements, openly arrived at. It sounds fine and forthright and just what any decent democracy deserves. We discovered down the decades what old, good diplomats had known from the beginning – that it's a hopeless, essentially sentimental prescription.

Apply it to your own private life. Suppose... suppose a couple were having trouble with their marriage. They don't go around advertising it, though, maybe, the wife confides in her mother and/or her closest friend. The man makes cynical remarks to a crony or two, but suppose the couple, while thinking of divorce, has a genuine desire to make the marriage work again. I think anybody who's ever been married knows how much the chance of coming through the bad time depends on private discussion, on trying not to nurse grievances, of working through the ups and downs in private.

Imagine their prospects of success if they put bulletins every night saying, 'Today he did this, today, she said that...'. I think this is plain to anyone who has ever read much diplomatic history and been close to men whose job is to negotiate international troubles that might lead to trade embargoes, to suspending diplomatic relations, at worst, to war.

Often I, as an outsider, occasionally given the opportunity to be on the inside, on the understanding, though, that I kept my mouth shut and didn't talk or write about it, I have seen how, if the contending parties can get together in private and talk and argue in confidence and not reveal to anyone but their governments the different moving stages of agreement, disagreement, bad faith, good feeling, this is the only method with a chance of success. In the end, of course, there may be no way out. Neville Chamberlain was under the pathetic delusion that Hitler was a reasonable man who liked him.

But when there is a way out, when the private negotiations succeed, it doesn't make news. There's the rub for the newshound.

So, Dag Hammarskjöld, when Woodrow Wilson's noble prescription was put to him – open agreements openly arrived at – said, whatever is the Swedish word for 'rubbish'. Diplomacy, he said, can only work when you have open agreements secretly arrived at.

In our time, in the time of anyone who's read newspapers and watched television during the past 40 years, the main driving impulse of the media has been to get to the bottom of everything at once, to air the secrets, to write and talk on the bold and mischievous principle that the public, everybody, has the right to know everything while it's going on.

Mr Reagan's blessed use of the phrase, 'No comment' and saying, time and again, 'I'll take no more questions about that' sent me back to the journalistic code which was never violated in the days when I covered the White House. I've just looked back to the transcript of a presidential press conference in 1937 published in one of the eight volumes entitled, 'The Public Papers and Addresses of President Franklin Roosevelt' – published, of course, after his death.

Throughout Roosevelt's 13 years in the presidency, throughout the 998 press conferences he gave – for years, he held two a week – there was a firm, well-understood relationship between the press and the president about what could be printed and what could not. Four categories of news. One, very rarely allowed, statements you could quote from the president's own lips. Two, news for attribution to the White House but not the president. Third what was called background, to help you understand but strictly off the record, not to be printed. Fourth, news you had no right to be in on just yet. No comment.

In this conference I'm looking at, the president started by saying, 'There isn't much news but I want to tell you a story off the record, wholly off the record because it does affect the press of this country.' He then quoted two stories picked up by a news syndicate and sent confidentially to their regional editors. One said, 'Towards the end of last month, Mr Roosevelt was found in a coma at his desk. Immediate treatment resulted in the president's being sent off to Southern waters, ostensibly on a fishing trip.' The editor of the syndicate called the White House and said he wouldn't print the story if the White House would issue an official denial. The White House refused.

Another confidential note to the same syndicate quoted an American businessman as saying at a private dinner that 'we have a paranoiac in the White House'. That was printed.

Of course, both stories were perniciously untrue and Mr Roosevelt said to the press conference, 'As you know, I'm in favour of legitimate news reporting, whether friendly or hostile, but this is not news reporting, this is not a news service and I thought you ought to know about it'. Question: 'Mr President, how much of this is off the record?' The president: 'It's all off the record. All strictly in the family. Now...' And then he turned to news he had to give on the record. Nothing of this ever appeared.

So, give, for a moment, a sympathetic thought to the president, to any head of government today who dares say that nothing is off the record, who only has to venture the passing thought that coffee upsets his stomach, to have every newshound in the world crackling the evening air with the news that coffee shares have slumped and the Colombian ambassador has lodged an official protest with the White House.

Nothing, any more, is 'strictly in the family' of responsible reporters.

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.