China-US relations

On Boxing Day 1947, I was to take over the American correspondence of the-then Manchester Guardian. Naturally, like any other journalist who's about to become 'the' correspondent of a famous paper, I primed myself with all the political ammunition I could pick up with the intention of starting off with a bang.

I woke up on that Boxing Day and New York City was weirdly silent for the first time in my experience, absolutely devoid of what Cole Porter, I believe, called 'the roaring traffic's boom'. Indeed, there was no traffic at all. I went to the window to look out over Fifth Avenue and Central Park, threw it open on a brilliant day and gradually the silence of the tomb was broken at intervals by small cracking sounds. It was the sound of tree branches breaking under enormous swords of ice and then, there were small, merry sounds coming from the park where children, muffled to their eyeballs, were sledding down the slopes.

Down Fifth Avenue – and from my nest you can see 40 blocks or so, which is two miles – there was nobody at large on this strange, vast planet of snow. There were, at intervals, double-decker buses marooned, with the snow swirled up against their first-deck windows. There were, also, many sleeping polar bears which would later turn out to be buried cars. It was the most scary and the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen in New York. In 24 hours, twenty-six and a half inches of snow had fallen on the city. Inevitably, the first piece I wrote for my new paper as the resident correspondent was about the biggest blizzard the city had known since the famous storm of 1888.

Now, it's time to mention at least the third great blizzard of the century, the worst since 1947. From last Friday through Saturday, the accumulations that piled up on the city were between 18 and 22 inches and it was much the same across a 600-mile swathe of the north-east coast, from Massachusetts down through Virginia where 30 people were drowned in a freighter off the coast. So far about 65 are known to have frozen to death or been asphyxiated in cars that were first stalled and then suffocated with snow.

Apart from that, the whole experience is one you have to experience in the flesh. It is indescribable and so, I will not describe it.

I had the luck to have left New York three days before and arrived in San Francisco still telling western friends what was nothing but the truth – that we'd had the mildest winter in the east in 50 years until last Friday. The San Franciscans, like the other Californians who live along the coast, had their own grouse about the weather. They've had their 800-mile coast line battered by a succession of ferocious storms coming in from the Pacific which since early December has not been living up to its name. So, they've had, last winter and this, about three times their normal rainfall which comes, invariably, mainly in January and February.

Well, other people's weather, short of an earthquake or a volcano, is almost as tedious as other people's party politics. All I have to say about the strange new weather systems that have slammed at the Pacific coast and dumped horrendous snowfalls on places as far south as Georgia, is that a new superstition has sprouted from them.

The more venerable members of the class may recall that, for a year or two, after 1945, every freakish twist in the weather, anywhere, everywhere, was put down to the two atom bombs that ended the Second War. Now, the secret word is that it's all due to periodic erupting of the Mount St Helen's volcano or of the Mexican volcano of last year. Studious types wrinkle their foreheads and say, 'Well, 20 million or 200 million square miles of ash in the upper atmosphere, you know!'.

Who pronounces this diagnosis? The same people who knew, at once, that it was the bomb. Cab drivers, that's who! And it's only faintly surprising to me to discover that cab drivers in San Francisco offer the same dark wisdom about such things as the cab drivers in New York. Or for that matter, in London. They constitute, perhaps, an international secret society, a sort of subsidiary Masonic Order. This is something that newspaper reporters have known for a long time and, indeed, there have been times when desperate reporters, compelled to measure the bias of public opinion against a pressing deadline, have commuted from one taxi to another in order to discover the way things are going in America, in Europe, anywhere.

I'm proud to be able, very late in the day, to pay tribute to this splendid body of men and in New York, anyway, to a splendid body of women, too.

My recollection of early days on the Guardian has also reminded me of the timely advice of another wise man, not, however, a cab driver. He was the long-gone and much lamented editor named A. P. Wadsworth and when I came to take over, he asked me where I proposed, in the main, to write from. Now this was an extraordinary question. Every editor on earth knows that once you appoint an American correspondent, he gravitates or rushes at once to Washington. Generations of foreign newsmen have been doing this automatically to the enlightenment, but also to the confusion, of their readers at home.

The custom is based on the simple fact that Washington is what American radio commentators always call 'the nation's capital'. So it is and so it is obviously the place from which to report the political news and trends and uproars. But Washington is also one of those very few capitals – Canberra and Brasilia and Bonn are others – which are nothing but political capitals. Unlike London and Paris and Stockholm and Rio and so on, they are compounds or pitched camps of politicians and all the drones and civil servants who live with them or off them. If there is a cultural capital of America, it is, of course, New York. It's the capital of music and book publishing and fashion and banking and food and ideas.

When I told Wadsworth, rather guiltily, that of course I was ready to pack for Washington within the hour, but this would mean selling an apartment, taking my children out of school and so on and so forth, he said, 'Good! Stay in New York! After all, we want you to tell us about America, not just about Washington'.

So for many years I based myself in New York and made regular safaris to Washington for two or three days every two weeks. As a matter of fact, if you wanted to appoint a correspondent who would be more in touch with more of America than anybody, the place to be based would be Kansas City, not just because it's bang in the middle of the continent, but because it's in the centre of the nation's bread basket, it's in touch with the south, it's a waystation through which passes all the traffic of the Mississippi Valley, it has one hand reaching up to the business of the north-east and another hand ready to deal with the traffic from the west. If we'd all been based in Kansas City in 1948, we would not have been amazed at the astounding victory of Harry Truman over Thomas E. Dewey, the candidate of the powerful financial east.

Well, as you see, I've, for a week or two, switched my base. I suppose we'll soon be calling it my basing mode to the West Coast where, all day Sunday, the air was banging and cracking not with slivers of ice, snapping trees, but with the local Chinese letting off firecrackers to celebrate the arrival of the Year of the Boar, that's B-O-A-R. It was a lively reminder that California, throughout its history as an American state, which is to say for the past 135 years, has had a strong link with the countries of the Pacific and, especially, with China. At one time, in the very early days of the American republic, the China trade between Salem, Massachusetts and China was so brisk, so all-embracing and so profitable that the Chinese imagined Salem to be America and their maps showed it as an island lying off the coast of a large and generally unexplored continent.

This connection with New England inspired many devote Christian families to send their sons as missionaries to China when it was discovered that the Chinese were not of the true faith and there's a whole raft of their sons, the sons of the missionaries, who came to have much influence in American life and to show a pronounced interest in the Orient. Two names that come to mind at once are the writer, John Hersey, who wrote the unforgettable first long account of the ordeal of the people of Hiroshima, and Henry Luce, who founded the publishing empire of Time, the magazine and who, throughout his life, looked to China as the most important future ally of the United States.

So, out here on the Pacific coast, you'll notice that there is a far livelier anxiety than there is in the east about the future intentions and policies of Peking when it comes to guessing its relations with Moscow. The reporting is much fuller, it's better informed, it's less likely to take for granted – whatever assurances come from Washington – that China and Russia are still deeply suspicious of each other and that, in the long run as well as the short, China is pretty certain, if it has to choose up sides, to side with the United States.

It was in a western publication that I read the other day something I wrote ten years ago at the time that Mr Nixon went to China and made what was generally hailed as the great breakthrough in America-Chinese relations.

It was the very uncomfortable thought, as ridiculous at the time as the thought in August 1939 that Stalin and Hitler would ever sign a pact, the thought that the firebell for the west would be rung the day the Chinese decided they had more than less to gain from regarding the Soviet Union as an ally and not an enemy.

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.