Nancy Reagan's biography - 26 April 1991

I don't often make public confession but I have to make one now. The second week in April is the usual time for me to abandon the woes of the world I cover and descend into the gorgeous landscape of Georgia, to wander through meadows and down cathedral aisles of towering Georgia pines and stop to smell or simply admire the red bud and the white and pink dogwood and the azaleas, the countless varieties of native flowers that pack the banks and decorate the creeks of 365 blessed acres in Augusta, Georgia.

However, I always go down there on a Tuesday and stay till Sunday. This means that for once I must tape my talk in New York on the previous Monday for playing listening to the next weekend. So in most countries it will be heard six or seven days after it was taped. A perilously long time for a topical commentary especially on the never predictable world of war, peace and politics.

The blithe BBC producers in London used to say, do something timeless, like, something on American children or the history of ice-cream. I've done them, and during the first week in April a fierce division of opinion had developed here about President Bush's decision to end the desert war when he did. It was at that point that I left for Georgia and was afraid that the allied command might resume a full scale offensive, or there'd be some equally dramatic turn that would make my Monday talk stale and irrelevant and have me leaping back to Atlanta and New York and the studio from which I'm now talking.

But it turned out when transmission time came that the talk was right on, for the argument had grown more bitter and bad tempered and it was then seen, was mainly not as you might expect between dove like liberals and hawkish conservatives but between two opposing factions of conservatives and they're still at it. The regular Republican conservatives wring their hands over Saddam's renewed brutality against the Kurds and the Shi'ites, the misery of the refugees, the disintegration of Iraq and so on but say it's not business of the United States or and, the United Nations to intervene in a civil war and find themselves in some near or distant future backing or elevating one tribe, one religion, one region, one leader of Iraq over others, just like an old imperial power.

The conservatives on the right feel deeply and bitterly that President Bush betrayed the Iraqi people, particularly the Kurds and the Shi'ites by first egging them on to rise against and overthrow Hussein and then giving them no help when they did it. I put it more simply and bluntly in that talk of long ago, the weekend before last, by saying, "One body of opinion said the UN mission and the war rightly ended with throwing Hussein out of Kuwait and the other body said that the United States if not the coalition had, still has a duty to bomb Hussein and his forces into impotence and a second surrender."

Well, the argument lost some of its heat once Prime Minister Major's idea of refugee havens was acted on, by the way I have not read or heard from any American source that it was anybody's idea but Mr Bush's. And perhaps, perhaps the debate will cool off drastically, after the astonishing scene of Hussein embracing the Kurdish leader Mr Talabani, and announcing an agreement to let millions of Kurds return home, to give some autonomy to Kurdistan, to guarantee something called democracy.

And the word that the United States would issue an ultimatum demanding that all Iraqi military leave the place Zahko, where a refugee tent city has been built. That you might think would show once for all that the American military can, when it chooses, order Hussein about. I hope all this comes true but I must say I'm not alone in getting irritated by reporters and interviewers who will not lose any opportunity of reviving the old quarrel whenever the name of General Schwarzkopf comes up. He himself came up on Tuesday almost unrecognisable in his crisp dress uniform. The president showed him off briefly in the White House Rose Garden. And even though both he and the president were not there to answer questions, sure enough the one question that was left hanging in the air, was inevitably, had he been overruled in recommending to the president that the allied forces should have marched on to Baghdad and not declared a temporary ceasefire when they did.

In truth, in fact, there was no rift or quarrel here between the president and the general. The general admitted that in his interview with Mr David Frost, he had made an unfortunate choice of words, I think the misfortune was the one word recommend. Obviously after the tremendous dramatic success of the feint at the Gulf ports and the great flanking movement to the west any field commander is going to be asked by his president, prime minister, his civilian chief, what next? And again obviously the idea of going on to annihilate Hussein's forces would be brought up.

President Bush and General Powell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, decided that the mission had been accomplished and many dangers lurked in a march beyond the United Nations brief on to Baghdad. General Schwarzkopf agreed and next day he called the president's decision courageous and humane. That really is the whole story. But, increasingly it seems to me, I don't want to say the press, the media, they're not a club or a Masonic order, they're very numerous, they come in all mental shapes and sizes, from the brave and brilliant to the detestable. But let me say, increasingly serious journalists, serious television men and women are getting caught up in cheap curiosity, in fingering, scratching the sore when it's healing, the unceasing quizzing of General Schwarzkopf on an issue dead and gone is one example.

Another which at first may sound not worth a syllable of a mention, is the serious publicity given to a book which at an earlier time no decent publisher would have touched with a vacuum cleaner and which no serious newspaper would have reviewed except in a short and contemptuous note. I'm talking you must guess about the infamous book just out and being gobbled up in the millions in what we call the civilised countries of the West by one Kitty Kelley, the new star of what is correctly being called trash biography.

In this case a poisonous job on the ex-president's wife, Mrs Reagan. It is, it announces itself as, an unauthorised biography, well if a tenth of it were true the subject would have to be round the bend to have authorised it. Mrs Reagan was not consulted, nor Mr Reagan nor their closest friends, but boasts Miss Kelley, she based her book on a thousand and one interviews. Though I must say at once, a biography that has to consult a thousand people for the truth about a single human being is disqualified from serious consideration at once. From a thousand gossipers you can get anything you want to hear and much that you don't.

However, my point of shock, is not about the wretched prurient substance of the book but about the fact, impossible to credit on the morning it appeared the fact that the New York Times reviewed the book on the front page which is reserved for news of international or national importance and rarely the death of statesmen, kings, the very eminent in any field. The piece was what they call a jump story, it went over from page one, to fill almost all of an inside page, it was the sort of treatment given to the death of Winston Churchill.

I don't know who made this decision but had calls from good friends, all of them incredulous, not at the trashy book itself but at the Times' grand gesture of billboarding it on the front page and elaborating the great event inside. The effect of this was to make the Times act for the first time I can remember as the pander for the tabloids, worse, it unwittingly gave the nod to other serious papers so that next morning not only the scandal sheets has Miss Kelley's name slammed across the front page, but two or three of the good metropolitan newspapers, too.

So far, the Times has not explained itself, on the Duke of Wellington's principle I presume, after making a howling indiscretion, never explain, never apologise. But to me it's a sad new note in our time. First the descent of a reputable publisher into the stew of profitable hearsay, and of the Times into entreating meretricious hearsay as important news. Why some people have begged to know, why not go to court, what about libel, slander?

I think the Washington commentator George Will has the answer here, Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and now Mrs Reagan have become the victims of the Supreme Court of the United States. Which in its rulings of recent years has required a degree of intentional malice on the writers part that's almost impossible to prove. It's hard to conceive of a work of more concentrated malice than Miss Kelley's unauthorised biography but the chances are, in the last resort the court would not find it.

Even if you thought it likely, the course of such a libel action could take many months, years even, remember if the United States is a nation of laws, it's also a nation of more lawyers to the square mile than any other country on earth. And remember, too, the dread warning, given to new immigrants once by a famous American judge, the late Judge Learned Hand, he said,"I know no man who has a greater respect, I may even say reverence, to the law than I do but my advice to you is, try at all costs and throughout your life to avoid litigation."

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