Secret of Eternal Youth - 24 May 2002

"And believing this to be an island and because it has a very beautiful view of many woodlands and is level and uniform, and because moreover they discovered it in the time of the Feast of Flowers, they named it La Florida."

"They" should be "he" and he was a Spanish explorer, Juan Ponce de León, a friend of Columbus - in fact his companion on the second voyage to the New World.

He was a professional soldier of a prominent family, had explored and conquered what is now the island of Puerto Rico.

He became governor. He also became very rich through the gold he'd discovered, the land he'd annexed and the slaves who worked it for him.

However, late in his life the Puerto Rico Indians told him a tantalising story. Go north of us, they said, go north and west and you'll find an island even richer than ours in gold but also possessing something unique - a fountain, a magic fountain whose waters can restore you to your youth.

Now at that time Ponce de León was described by the Spanish royal historian as "robust but 50 years old", which by today's reckoning would be like saying he was still vigorous but crowding 80.

A fountain of youth! What a marvellous prospect.

Well he sailed away and he sighted the Florida peninsula at the end of March 1513 and followed its long coastline.

Like the explorers from any other European country, including the English, Ponce de León had no scruples about what to do with any stretch of land or an island not on the map. He annexed it.

He did not find the fountain. But having declared Florida Spanish he sailed back to Puerto Rico.

As he approached 60 he must have pined again for that fountain and he got a commission and a blessing from the King of Spain and he set up a crew fully equipped to colonise Florida, to come on the fountain of youth and live happily and young forever.

He came on, instead, a battling tribe of Florida Indians.

He was severely wounded and sailed back to Havana, just making port in time to die.

No longer robust, youth unrestored - a very disappointed old man.

But his name has resonated down the centuries and is known to the average American for just that one legend - he was the man who went looking for the fountain of youth.

And according to today's Florida chambers of commerce he found it - in Florida!

And there today, all through the winter months, you can see along the white beaches on both coasts old men and women in shorts in their 70s and 80s, padding along in the blazing sun, adding a daily gloss to what they fancifully believe to be a golden tan, but which to the onlooker is a dark purple, coffee-coloured glaze, barely hiding the wrinkled face and the wriggling varicose veins.

But, they swear, their youth is restored.

Hence in Miami the three recognised ages of man - youth, middle-aged and "gee you look great!"

I suppose that after a certain age the secret yearning to look younger than you are is universal.

But I do believe that in no other country has this urge, this yen, to restore one's youth been so much of and for so long a national cult, if not a religion.

For centuries women have tried to erase the signs of ageing for perfumes and powders and more effectively with various ointments, especially ointments from countries you'd never heard of. There's something more exciting about the essences and unguents from greener pastures.

And then, I guess it was because of the great advances in facial surgery that were, you might say, compelled by the Second World War, it occurred first to movie actresses and their promoters that the time had come to use the techniques acquired by army surgeons to restore at least the appearance of youth.

Cosmetic surgery came into its own.

I wanted to tell you about the latest thing - a new magic, without surgery, that has been touted all across this country.

And I shall tell you - I will tell you - but next time, for I see head shakings and I hear protesting sighs: surely he must talk about the frightful uproar in Washington and, we hear, around America from the suspicion, the awful rumour, that the president had forewarning of 11 September catastrophe and ignored it.

Well let me say at once there has been a frightful uproar, which is a disgrace to the citizens and the political party that provoked it, and say even more quickly that of course the president had nothing more to go on than you had, whoever you are, on and before that tragic morning.

There is, however, a spreading web of rumour and fantasy. But the facts are quite simple.

This is what is known as a mid-term year - a November election second only to that of a presidential year in importance - when one third of the Senate and the whole of the House of Representatives will be up for election or re-election.

For over eight months the Democrats, the opposition, have found no big issue with which to confront, to shame, or to fight the president.

Only about five months to election day and Mr Bush still has 70% of the nation backing him.

Since the winter the Democrats have tried to mount various protest campaigns - airport security isn't what it might be, the coastguard isn't competent to check every merchant ship delivering on these shores, why has nobody solved the anthrax problem? - the FBI and the CIA ought to be combined and share their intelligence.

The response from the administration mostly has been "We quite agree with you".

So no Democrat dare question the vast sums of money being poured out in the cause of tighter and ever tighter national security, by which is really meant the guaranteed safety of its citizens.

But at no time since the fatal 11th has any public servant had the courage to say publicly "There is and can be no guarantee of safety of any individual."

I suddenly recall a late evening in a Texas hotel with three, four aides sitting shooting the breeze, as we say, with the president of the United States.

Somehow the talk turned to the number - seven, eight, nine - of the presidential assassinations and attempts.

And one aide said, "But I think today the way we've trained and held the secret service always within physical reach of the president it would be a practical impossibility."

At which the president said, "If a man is determined to kill the president of the United States he'll do it."

Thereupon President Kennedy yawned and said, "Turn out the lights, I'm going to bed."

Next day he was shot on the streets of Dallas.

Well: the glum electoral prospect of the Democrats.

I don't know how it happened but a very partisan Democrat congresswoman from the South announced that the president had foreknowledge of the Twin Towers attack and covered it up.

Whereupon the Senate's long-time Democrat leader, Congressman Richard Gephardt, comes on the tube, very grim, very earnest, and says, "We want to know what did the president know and when did he know it?"

Tough, blunt line of Churchillian simplicity.

It wasn't Congressman Gephardt's invention, it's as well known to two generations of Americans as "England expects every man to do his duty" is known to English schoolboys.

It was coined by a senator on the committee that first investigated Mr Nixon's part in Watergate. And the answer to that question is what tumbled him.

And then Senator Feinstein of California was equally grim and implicitly accusing.

The junior senator from New York, one Hillary Rodham Clinton, was more forthright still, as forthright indeed as the tabloid whose wicked front page, two-word, headline she quoted: "Bush Knew".

Could this, Senator Clinton wondered artlessly, could this possibly be true? We ought to be told, ought we not?

When the president came on television and, manfully bottling his natural outrage, said in one sentence that if he'd had a clue, known a thing about the attack, he would have given his best to protect the people. Of course.

Congressman Gephardt came back and said he never, never for a minute thought of imputing any blame to the president.

Senator Feinstein said, "Let's stop playing the blame game" - which she had helped to start. Senator Clinton has not been heard from.

All we know from the subsequent research of the FBI, the CIA and now two Senate committees is that an FBI agent in the Arizona desert had a warning in August from somewhere that a known terrorist had said some big attack was coming to the United States.

Lately - note the word lately - it has been almost proved that the man could have been one of the September actual hijackers.

That warning from Phoenix, Arizona, last August is all we have to go on and I wish the administration or somebody would point out that that was not, in the intelligence community, the news of the day.

Both the FBI and the CIA and the counter-intelligence department of the government - hundreds of agents - received then and are receiving today and everyday thousands of warnings, rumours, classified hints and nudges and threats.

But, the scandalous damage was done. People rose up and bawled, "Why weren't we told and why don't you warn us?"

At which point the vice-president and the secretary of defence said, "OK: a new attack is almost certain and terrorists may soon have nuclear weapons, and that's what you have to live with."

In the meantime, erm, just, er, go about your lives normally - stay on the alert of course - but, shop, work, umm, go to the movies, as Sir Rudolph Giuliani used to say.

It all reminds me of the time 20-some years ago when on the divided motor highway running alongside La Guardia Airport they put up, at intervals, for the benefit of motorists, signs saying in block capitals: WARNING, LOW FLYING AIRCRAFT.

What were we supposed to do? Duck?

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.