Fighter planes for Egypt

I came back from San Francisco a week ago, just before twilight, and when we were a couple of miles or so from New York, the pilot came over the intercom and said we were bound to be delayed because Kennedy Airport, after the appalling blizzard, had managed to clear only one runway for both inbound and outbound traffic. We were too near the end of the journey to say, 'Let me out of here!' but when a pilot hears from the control tower that there may be a 40, 50 minute delay, as often as not they're breaking it gently that maybe it'll be two or three hours.

We banked and we circled around in a cloudless sky. Somehow after all natural weather disasters – hurricanes, typhoons, blizzards – the following days are blissful and you could look out the window and see planes circling at spaced altitudes. It looked as if the invasion were on. As it was, we were no more than an hour late and we took out our bags and weaved round mountains of snow, stacked in an orderly fashion like the walls of a maze and, to our astonishment, found the parking places already clear and the car there to receive us. 

Well, the next day I was supposed to go to Boston for some television work and I telephoned the station to see that – even in the reported Arctic conditions – to see if they were soldiering on. Instead of Mary, the usual switchboard girl, the voice was that of a man, polite, but firm. Was Miss Sullivan there? No, he said, she wasn't and not only was nobody else there, but nobody else was allowed to be there. He was an army security guard. For the moment, I thought the invasion really had happened because, as well all know, the first thing the rebels do is to seize the radio and television stations. 

Well, a week has gone by and I've still not made it to Boston. I telephoned the lady who arranges my reservations at the Boston hotel and facetiously suggested that I supposed she hadn't been home yet and was bedding down in the hotel. 'That's right!' she said. For six days after the blizzard ended, no planes went into Boston and no visitors were allowed in on the approach highways that had been partially cleared. The entire National Guard of Massachusetts was mobilised, the army moved in in helicopters and small planes flying into army bases and the governor of Massachusetts announced that anybody found out in an automobile on any navigable street would be fined $500 and subject to a jail term. 

Now this was not much of a threat to people in the far reaches of the city, the side streets of the suburbs because even if they managed to shovel the stuff away from their doors, once they'd trenched their way to the streets, their motorcars were usually invisible under a mound of snow. But in downtown Boston, where the snowploughs churned away, night and day, some main roads were halfway cleared and inevitably inquisitive people got out to trundle a few blocks and see how things were doing. They were shocked to find the police on the alert and they were slapped with the $500 fine. 

Now whereas New York had only another 17 inches to be dumped on top of the previous week's 13, Boston had 28 inches in 48 hours. Well, in 1947, New York had 27 inches but it didn't paralyse the city for long because there was little wind and the snowploughs and the sanitation trucks that cart the snow off to the rivers were able to see what they were doing early on. But last week, throughout Massachusetts and the neighbouring state of Rhode Island (38 inches) the snowstorm was accompanied by 90 mile an hour winds. As one snowplough driver said, 'Even out at the airport, you couldn't see two feet in front of you' and all efforts to clear the runways had to be abandoned till the storm was over. 

Well, it's nearly always impossible to convey the feel of a disaster to a distant audience. A mine cave-in in your neighbouring village needs no description but an earthquake in China is an incomprehensible statistic. So there's no point in going on about the hundreds of people trapped in cars, the frozen dead or the heroic efforts of the hospitals to keep going without power and with ambulances immobilised in snow banks. Nobody cares to tot up the old people in and out of hospitals whose charts will simply register 'heart attack' and there an end. 

It was simply the worst winter storm the north-east has had this century and the long-range weather boys – who begin to get very nervous and circumspect after such a blockbuster – they way underestimated the one in the third week of January. They say that they have no reassurances to offer for the next six weeks. The weathermen, it seems, are not much better off than the cab drivers who've been saying for 30 years about any freak of weather, 'It's the bomb'. 

What all this has done has been to call on millions of dollars from city treasuries that don't have them, to ruin winter crops and to cause everybody to use every watt of available electricity and every gallon of petrol just when the government is imploring people to save energy. And it's come at a time when the coal strike was reducing the stockpile of coal for industry to a 30-day supply. The president was loathe to invoke the act of Congress which arrests strikes for 80 days that can be said to threaten national safety, but sooner or later, he was bound to act. 

For most Americans then who do not live in the desert or the Deep South or Southern Florida, the business of America was what it was 400 years ago in the winters – the business of survival. Only comfortable people, like me, tapping away on a typewriter in a warm room and looking out on Central Park as a Pickwickian Christmas card, only a few millions of us, I suppose, were free to look at the newspapers and ooh and aah over politics. A congressman here, accused of taking a thousand-dollar bribe, the New York police coming out for a pay rise with the city controller wringing his hands and screaming, 'But the money isn't there!'. 

Most of all though, the sudden decision of President Carter to sell jet fighter planes to Egypt which to a lot of people is a practical puzzle, very far removed from the evangelical tone of President Sadat's first descent on Jerusalem. To the Israelis, it seemed to confirm their suspicion, more their accusation, that the United States was moving to the Arab side of the conflict. To the Egyptians, it was a long, overdue recognition that, as a fighting force, they are woefully inferior to Israel. To the other Arab countries, it was taken as everything from a belated concession to a clever ruse. 

I don't think it's any of these things, though there's something to say for Washington's yielding at last to the steady Egyptian argument that while they may have the manpower, they don't have any comparable weapons. In this country, anyway, the papers, especially those papers whose disillusion with Mr Carter grows like a palm tree, they were recalling his campaign remark that it's hard for the United States to be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war. 

By the way, Mr Carter's been taking an awful beating from popular recall of his campaign rhetoric. For instance, when he agreed on the telephone call of a Democratic congressman to dismiss a United States attorney who was investigating 'the' congressman, it was recalled that during the campaign Mr Carter had said the time had come to take the appointment of federal judges and law offices out of politics. Since he's been president, he's appointed 65 federal attorneys – 64 of them have been Democrats. Reporters confronted the president's leader in the House with this statistic. 'It's the way the system works.' he said. 

Well, similarly, there is a system, by no means necessarily cynical or cunning, when it comes to balancing the armament needs of countries that America would very much like to keep as allies or, at worst, as friendly neutrals. The system requires appeals for peace and the availability of weapons. Mr Carter's dilemma goes back to his visit, last year, to Saudi Arabia. They'd been pressing and pressing for F-15s, the most advanced jet fighters at America's disposal. Eventually he gave in and agreed to 60. Now, of course, Israel and Egypt came at him and the burst of Christmas goodwill between their leaders has not moderated their demands. 

When Mr Sadat came recently to Washington and it appeared the peace talks were turning sour, Mr Carter sweetened him with a promise of 50 less advanced fighters. And then, less the Israelis thought Mr Carter had capitulated completely to Egypt, he offered them a consolation prize of 15 advanced fighters and 75 bombers. Now these gifts are not equal in intention, let alone in substance. The Saudi Arabians are being begged to back Mr Sadat. The Egyptians are being persuaded to keep on with the peace talks. The Israelis with a promise of advanced weapons which, by the way, cannot be delivered for two or three years, are being reassured that America cares for their future security. 

Of course the gifts are not being packaged tonight. The Congress has, by law, seven weeks to debate them. At the moment it doesn't seem that Congress will rebel. There will be some bitter eloquence about the mockery of arms for peace, Republicans will make the most of reciting the piety of Mr Carter’s campaign promises, but he's paying the price of it, of the sweeping picture of America as the Good Samaritan in a wicked world. 

In the White House, he keeps on discovering that his job is not that of a Billy Graham or even of a born-again Baptist. It's the difficult, humdrum, tricky job of trying to juggle a host of ideologies and a sheaf of threats. It's the job of trying to be an honest broker.

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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