Dalai Lama visits US

There used to be a special job on the New York newspapers which was hotly competed for by ambitious young reporters. It was the job of ships reporter and if you're lucky enough to get it, your daily routine started by turning to the shipping page of the New York Times and, in those days, one whole page of eight columns was often not enough to keep tabs on the enormous bustle of passenger ships coming in and going from the berths on the Hudson River.

The shipping companies provided the papers with manifests, or at least with lists, of incoming passengers who aspired to some sort of fame. The reporter then picked out the ship and the celebrity he wanted to interview, made a note of the tide tables, called the coastguard to find out when the press cutter would be off down the bay, and an hour or more before high tide, quite often at dawn, joined a little band of other ships reporters and newsreel cameramen and sailed off down the river to the narrows and boarded the liner when it stopped for immigration clearance. This could take quite a time and some reporters prayed for any irregularity that would delay the trip up the river because that could mean a drink, at least, even a meal and a long session with the incoming statesman, novelist, aviator, movie star or whatnot. 

Now, like any other job in journalism, this one could be practised as a chore. In gifted hands, in those, for instance, of a twinkling little Englishwoman called Dixie Tighe, it could turn into a work of deadpan satire and sometimes into a work of art. Well, nowadays the shipping news is relegated to about an eighth of a column. I notice, for instance, that if I wanted to sail across the Atlantic tomorrow, I have a choice of four ships, all freighters. I'm not sure that all of them take passengers. There's a Portuguese ship going to Lisbon, two others going to Antwerp and Le Havre and the fourth is a container ship. All four, like the five freighters the next day, sail either from Brooklyn or from the New Jersey shore. Nothing out of Manhattan. 

You can stand, at twilight, on top of the Empire State Building and look across to the docks in the west 40s and see the empty slots of the berths, like the teeth of some beached whale, where once in the first week of September you would have seen a continuous rank of liners and smoking funnels. I've been up there and seen a noble parade of the Normandie, the Europa, one of the Queens, the Statendam, the Olympic, the United States, the Leonardo da Vinci and a dozen more. All gone. 

There are now about five months of the winter when you cannot find a single transatlantic passenger ship. So they, and the ships' reporter, are gone with the jets. Reporters still, of course, whisk out to Kennedy Airport to catch some celebrity, more often some notoriety who's hoping to duck the press. But there's no interview room. You have to catch them on the hop between the customs exit and the waiting car. So, the trade, the art of the ships reporter, is dead and gone. 

Of course, the interviewers trade is very much alive, more so than ever, since new galaxies of stars have been discovered since television has turned rock musicians, athletes, politicians, even commentators, into special faces as familiar as old-time movie stars. There are today, indeed, so many recognisable famous faces that they have to clamour, with the help of managers, press agents and PR men, to get themselves interviewed. The newspaper interviewer, in fact, has become as imperious as the old schoolmaster who looked over a forest of hands waving for recognition. And you may be sure that no interview you read in a newspaper ever happened by accident or on the initiative of the reporter. The telephone call that set it up went from the star's manager to the reporter, not, as in the old days, the other way round. 

The same is true of gossip columns. The columnist rarely has to beg or bargain for copy. He's bombarded with calls from agents and his job is to decide not so much what to put in as what to leave out. 

So, there's no need today to pity a celebrity for the loss of his or her privacy. Any celebrity who doesn't want the publicity isn't going to get it. You never read an interview with Fred Astaire or Katherine Hepburn. They stay home and make no calls and keep themselves to themselves. 

One of the effects of this new, throbbing industry of publicity has been to abolish the hierarchy, or pecking order, of real eminence. In the scramble of celebrities screaming for more celebrity, a great man or woman who has no press agent, and no taste for one, can arrive in the country and stay here and nobody'd be the wiser. Shakespeare, I imagine, could have stayed a couple of weeks with friends in New York and never spotted his name amid the clutter of rock stars, models, movie actors, fashion designers and sexpots who inhabit first the conspicuous discos and then the columns. 

Well, in the Labor Day rush of stars of this and that, there was one enormous figure, world figure, who came quietly into Kennedy Airport last Monday. I doubt he would have got his picture in the papers if the word hadn't got out that several hundred strange-looking people, tapping drums and burning incense, had gathered at Kennedy to greet some guru or other. He was a lantern-jawed man with horn-rimmed glasses, a shaved head, a broad smile and the palms of his hands raised just above his chin. 

He is the temporal and spiritual leader of a nation of six millions, a nation overrun by the Chinese 20 years ago. He made a run for it then and a hundred thousand of his people went with him to take refuge, all that time, in India. He is the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the presider over a form of Buddhism established in the seventh century, since the seventeenth century, the temporal and spiritual controller of Tibet, the boy chosen 35 years ago as the one and only recipient of the spirit of the first Dalai Lama. 

Since theirs is a celibate order, the succession depends upon direct reincarnation. The present, the 14th Dalai Lama, was nine when it was decided that he was the one into whose body the spirit of the dying Dalai Lama had passed. He's now 44. 

He's going to make a tour of the United States to speak in various universities and colleges and to rallies in cities as far apart as Newark and Los Angeles, to plead for the restoration of Tibet's independence. So far there's been no suggestion that he will be accorded the obvious honour which President Carter will pay to the pope on his visit here in the fall. Washington is not, at the moment, on his itinerary, which is understandable. The United States government has quietly requested that he should consider his visit as that of a Buddhist religious leader and not as that of an exiled head of state. But, in view of the Dalai Lama's declared mission to advance the cause of an independent Tibet, this may be rather awkward to manage. 

I imagine that, four or five years ago, his political cause would have had at least a sympathetic hearing from the White House but he's arrived at an embarrassing moment. Vice President Mondale is just back from China and from extolling the warmth of the relations between the two countries. Down in Havana, Fidel Castro has just heaped scorn and abuse on the United States and, quote, 'its new ally, China'. The United States has just signed a trade agreement with China. Mr Carter must be relieved to reflect that he never signed a Helsinki agreement about elementary human rights with Peking, otherwise he might have to preach a sermon or two on religious freedom and the scandal of the occupation of Tibet by a foreign power and the ousting of its temporal and spiritual leader who, to Tibetans, is as precious as the Queen to England and as holy as the pope. 

There is, in this country, a society, the Friends of Tibet, that was formed by Americans and Tibetans in 1963 and for 16 years it has been calling in a still, small voice on the United States to support the Tibetans in their effort to get back their independence. Its chairman has now suggested that when Mr Carter goes to China in the New Year, he should take up with the Chinese this ticklish matter. In the meantime, the Dalai Lama was asked at a news conference here in New York if he expected to go back some day to Tibet. He said, 'Certainly, because things always change.' Just now, however, he doesn't see big changes ahead. He had noticed that the Chinese have recently liberalised their attitude to some other religions. Liberalisation in a Communist country, both in secular and religious matters, means letting people say some things that are on their minds, but not everything. 

'But,' said the Dalai Lama, 'the extent of liberalisation that has come to China has not come to Tibet.' So, for the time being, he will hope and pray for the independence of Tibet and, on this visit, he would like, he says, to help Westerners know more about two things: compassion and selflessness. 

Well, as I hinted, he was not given any of the formal honours that greet a head of state, he was not even accorded the ordinary courtesies, by the city or the state, that usually await a prime minister or a Channel swimmer. But it was something that one church, representing about a quarter of all Americans, did him a signal honour. Last Wednesday, Cardinal Cooke put on a service for all faiths in Fifth Avenue's St Patrick's Cathedral. 

We still, over here, stay with the English calendar and pretend that with Labor Day, the beginning of September, the summer is over, though we'll be swimming on Long Island for another couple of months. You might expect that the hot days would give out in the whimper of autumn. However, summer here ends not with a whimper but a bang. 

It is the hurricane season and we've had a beaut in the monster David, which killed a thousand people in the Caribbean and has done ferocious damage along the coast of Florida and then the Carolinas and, as I speak, is tearing up on a north-east course for New Jersey and Long Island. It has been demoted from a hurricane to a tropical storm since its winds are now a mere 70 miles an hour. 

In our house on the bluff on Long Island, we are bracing ourselves against its arrival and I guess we'll survive. If this guess is wrong, all I can say is, 'It was nice knowing you!'

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

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