The TWA Flight 800 crash - 26 July 1996

I've been surprised during the past week or ten days by the number of people, good friends, who've heard about these talks but living in this country never heard one, I've been surprised by how many of them say, you talked, I suppose, about the TWA crash? Or even, well you must have had lots to talk about this week?

It's a question that surprises and then depresses, and my immediate reaction is a rude one: what is there to say?

So long as I can remember, I have never jumped to comment on a big accident, an earthquake, even a bombing. I've gone on the belief that when an airplane falls out of the sky and two or three hundred people die, all a commentator can say is, isn't it awful? Wait for the investigation and then privately grieve or pray for the stricken families and friends.

But I will talk about TWA Flight 800 because of the way it's been covered by an invading army of correspondents from, I don't know how many countries. I should say, the way it was covered up to the time of the rescue of the black box, the flight recorder, on Thursday morning.

Teams of reporters came in a week ago. Not aviation scientists, not forensic experts, just day to day reporters who, having done their first piece detailing the number of known casualties, the depth of the water into which the plane plunged, then faced a question which assaults all good reporters once they've listed the known facts: now what? And the true answer is there is nothing except speculation.

And so far as I read and listen, the onlooking journalists did not add a useful sentence to the daily reports of the FBI men in charge and the medical examiner of Suffolk county, the most eastern of the two counties of Long Island, off whose south Atlantic shore the plane went down.

To be for a moment cold blooded about a humanly appalling disaster, I have to say that the FBI man in charge of the ocean divers, the forensic lab, the geodetic experts and a slew of related scientists, is a man of Job-like patience, Mr James Kallstrom. He knew that all the crowd of reporters in front of him wanted to know was, is it a bomb or a missile?

He also knew that most of us haven't the faintest shred of knowledge of the scientific methods, the delicacy of the forensic expertise it takes to be able to say for sure whether it was an accident or not. He must have been driven ballistic often this past week, by a remark which, once disclosed, simply aggravated our curiosity. One forensic man said it: "The science of discovering positive traces of a dangerous weapon is by now so developed that we can track down one black speck of sand on an ocean beach." Of course anybody of the FBI chief's age – Mr Kallstrom, he's in his fifties – has grown up with the convention that reporters are to be tolerated and respected and answered every day no matter how dumb or merely prurient their questions are.

It first struck me during the Desert Storm war, that the officers doing the daily press briefings in Riyadh were incredibly patient with boneheads and with reporters who, like so many in so many countries today, are looking only for one thing in a story: a note of scandal or crookery or sexual hanky-panky.

The FBI and its experts have aboard the team that discovered the needle in the haystack of the World Trade Centre's prodigious rubble three years ago. There they performed brilliantly and swiftly. Swiftly, there's the rub. Once a team of experts after a terrorist explosion produces the quick solution everybody craves, next time people are impatient for another quick fix, preferably after 24 hours.

A professional aviation accident investigator said ruefully: "In a way we have only ourselves to blame. Look at the incredible job they did in rescuing and identifying all those bodies dumped in the twenty foot slime of the Florida Everglades".

And beyond the never satisfied crowds of reporters was another crowd, dispersed and getting angry beyond impatience: the victims' families - some in hotel lobbies, some not leaving the small town close to the beach, some wandering on the beach itself and looking out stonily to the placid swells of the ocean. Every day somebody came forlornly to the beach at East Moriches and left a flower.

I suppose in the ideal world we don't live in, the reporters would come, report the known hard facts and then go home, and come back and summarise as clearly and concisely as possible the final forensic report or the evidence on the flight recorder tapes. As it was, the original invaders stayed on day after day, ballooning every hint and rumour of dirty work into a terrorist piece, recanting partly the next day, then blowing up another hint the day after that. And one or two of the networks – there are, say, ten of them nationwide for news – enjoyed every evening, interviewing the families.

The best of the television reporting was first the live pictures of the divers padding slowly over tangled wreckage trying to identify and take a human limb. And best of all, on television, were the pictures of the technological tools and the chemical problems in a forensic lab, trying to distinguish and identify fragments of humans, bits of cloth, wood, metal, rubbish. And the worst of the television coverage was the mouth watering zeal with which some stations, as I say, systematically every evening interviewed the victims' families, always to the point where one of them breaks down. A flood of tears every evening. A free nightly soap opera. Enough.

At the other end of the scale of human curiosity, we had this week a parade of another kind of expert meditating, guessing, speculating, everybody with any sort of position on Wall Street from investment advisers to humble runners – how about the recent dread plunge in the market, especially in "high-tech offerings" as they say?

There's no need to dwell on this dire subject. My oldest friend, who was for sixty years an investment banker, finally confessed the other day, almost by way of a last rite, that: "Nobody knows ever what makes the market rise and fall".

He must have got rid of this bit of absolution for my sake because I've known him for nearly fifty years, been the closest friends, and in all that time, even though he did admit that the 1929 Wall Street Crash triggered a true Depression, ever since he has described every slump as a long, overdue correction, even the 1970s recession as a "healthy shakeout." He now says he has no idea when or how or why the stock market rises, falls, collapses, gallops. "It's a casino," he said, with a relieved sigh like a dying man who's dictating his last words.

I know there are still people wondering about the present state of the so-called race or bout: Clinton versus Dole. Well the first thing I noticed when I got back from England was that the marked slump in President Clinton's stock, which had apparently been brought on by the last of three scandals: the White House's clumsy or rascally acquisition of confidential FBI files on numerous Republicans. Mr Clinton had dropped six points of his twenty point lead and the Dole team of course said: Aha! It's the beginning of the slide. "Down," as a Wall Street Dole-backer said, "down for Clinton into Big Bear country."

Well it was not so. Mr Clinton has recovered, his stock is up again and flourishing. Evidently Mr Dole's tactic a month ago of saying the election would be decided on personal character, never mind politics, evidently it hasn't worked. But Mr Dole can't change his character. He can't decide that he too is a swinger of the 1960s when Clinton was at Oxford, not inhaling his marijuana cigarette. Mr Dole was seventy-three the other day and, unlike old Ronald Reagan who was a year or two younger when he ran and won, Mr Dole is constitutionally incapable of pretending to the likes and dislikes of the 1990s as Reagan did so successfully with the 1980s.

But to show that he's not a stick-in-the-mud, Mr Dole admits to liking the music of Glenn Miller. Glenn who? The America he loves to refer back to is the America of Gary Cooper. And I quote briefly, a writer you're acquainted with, who wrote this the day after Gary Cooper died:

"He resisted and defeated the corruption of the big city. He was always heading back to duty along the railroad tracks with that precise mince of the cowboy's tread and the rancher's squint that sniffs mischief in a creosote bush, sees through noonday suns and is never fooled. What the world mourns is the most durable of American myths: the taut but merciful plainsman who dispenses justice with a single sentence, a blurred reflex of the right hand at the hip. An honourable man slicing clean through the broiling world of morals and machines".

The trouble is most of the voters don't know who Gary Cooper is either. Said one old politician: "There's no sign the voters want to go back to those days even if they knew what they were." When Mr Dole this week visited a rock and roll hall of fame, he was asked which was his favourite rock band. He said, "Er...we didn't visit that part".

Perhaps Mr Dole has the period wrong. Maybe he's not running for president. Maybe he's running for sheriff.

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