Tyrants and Curses Live On - 23 July 1999

For a short time I thought the most sensible, the most respectful thing to do would be not to talk about it at all.

Last weekend, at this time, we knew only that a small private plane with John Kennedy, his wife and sister-in-law aboard had vanished over the sea and was probably lost.

All our national networks and the cable stations with a national reach immediately scrapped their schedules and devoted the next two days and nights to the story.

But there was no story beyond what I just recited in one sentence. So the best known commentators speculated for 10 hours at a stretch on which might have happened - bringing in scores of pilots, instructors, plane designers, accident experts to add their touch of the possibilities without, as one of them put it, "committing ourselves to the probable facts."

As one reporter wrote who wrote a piece covering the media coverage - there was scant fact and copious emotion. Of course from everywhere across the country from the greatest in the land to the humblest there was genuine shock and sympathy for a family that has known more personal tragedy than most townships.

As for the television coverage I have to note the ill-disguised zeal with which the stations raided, yet again, their immense library of Kennedy material from the eldest son Joe on through the eldest sister and the retarded one put away.

Four airplane deaths, one from skiing, another from drugs, two assassinations, the mystery of the young woman drowned at Chappaquidick and as for the little known Kennedy - John F Junior - starting with the little boy's salute to a coffin, we then had an interview with the secret service man who taught him that salute and on and on and on.

Soon the media were feeding the grief to a public that was supposed to be feeling and reflecting it.

A letter to the editor from a San Francisco reader makes a point here that I think we should not ignore - "It is very sad news for the family and for the people who knew him. It is also sad that millions of people who do not bother to get to know their neighbours are caught up in mourning for someone they did not know."

I was going to end with that thought but then I read a review of the European press and it seems to me that the American press behaved with comparative restraint. For I was shocked to read of serious French and German papers and some British devoting their coverage to crystal ball, behind-the-beaded-curtain, catch-penny psychiatry, about a death wish attributed to a young man the writers had barely heard of before last weekend.

And then, from presumably grown up journalists, the horror film thesis of "the curse on the Kennedys", a superstition to which William Safire firmly and finally responded here - "The book of Job teaches that God does not micro-manage the universe and free-willed human beings are responsible for actions and injustices."

All we on the outside, which certainly includes 99.9% of all the European reporters and commentators, all we can say is that John F Kennedy Junior was known chiefly for having started a magazine that is half serious politics and half fashion magazine - you could call it a magazine of celebrity politics - that he'd given no hint of running for public office, that he was 38 years old and for all but three of those years had lived an admirably private life, totally unknown to the general public.

But that having that name and being handsome and living in New York City he was from childhood daily exposed to the inevitable gawking city publicity which he never sought and which he handled with grace and modesty.

After that the best we can say is to echo one lonely commentator who admitted knowing nothing about him - "Now he belongs with our prayers to the grieving family." Let it be so.

An announcement came out of Nato the other evening, so quietly, so casually that I couldn't find it reported in any of the three daily newspapers that I take. An announcement that was at once heartening and, in a way, pathetic.

Simply that a Nato environmental team has gone off the Yugoslavia to examine and report on the extent of environmental damage done by our - Nato - bombing.

The team began, a report said, by paying particular attention to a fertiliser factory whose destruction had released possibly lethal amounts of radioactivity. They're also going to examine, from another bombing mission, the amount of toxins released by fuel oil which had poured into the Danube and spread pollution downstream into Bulgaria and Romania.

To sharpen, I suppose, our interest and concern there was an interview with a medical expert on diseases picked up from toxins in the atmosphere, and she remarked with chilling matter of factness that any investigators into these grim matters would be certain to find very many and various cancers.

What, I think, is heartening about this story is the simple existence of the team and Nato's decision to go and see the residual effects of its own acts of war.

I doubt anything like this, outside the normal mopping up operations of the International Red Cross, has ever been done before.

Imagine President Roosevelt, Mr Churchill, General Eisenhower and General Alexander recruiting a team in, say, the summer of 1945 to enquire into the environmental aftermath of our February fire bombing of Dresden. And I mean to begin, of course, with the incurable fact that our joint Anglo-American air raids killed, in 36 hours, 135,000 civilians.

What is pathetically touching about it to me is that this first admirable humane effort coming from the victors - I believe we were the victors - should be at the end of a war which a nation - 19 nations - entered from humanitarian motives after those 19 nations agreed they could no longer stand aside while an orgy of burning, looting, rape and civilian massacre was being done in Kosovo on Milosevic's orders.

I imagine that the story of the Nato team will be wonderful news to Mr and Mrs Milosevic and will be well-publicised in Belgrade and the surrounding terrain. From the Serbs' point of view the Nato's teams mission is a clear confession that Nato was the aggressor and is now doing public penance for its brutality and its alleged blunders like the idiotic bombing of the Chinese Embassy.

Not to mention a claim which Milosevic has made ostentatiously from the beginning and which at first sounds outrageous but which, on examination, proves woefully true - namely that "this was a war to stop ethnic cleansing but its main effect was to intensify it - to accelerate the killing and the emptying of the population at large." That, in shorter words, the Kosovo campaign was a disaster.

Well apart from the praiseworthy mission of the Nato environmental team there is beginning here in Washington a process that will quicken and take fire once the summer recess of Congress is over - a re-examination - a coroner's inquest if you life - on the whole Nato war and a debate on what Nato, especially what America, should do at the next strike of the next tyrant.

We've just heard, in a public interview, from a voice that most likely will be called on when the relevant committees of Congress open hearings in the fall on the lessons of Kosovo. The voice is that of Professor Richard Pipes, the distinguished historian of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, who served as a presidential advisor on the National Security Council.

Mr Pipes approved of Nato's entry into Kosovo. He believes it was a right and worthy response to the systematic brutalities of Milosevic.

He said however - "I am very dubious now whether we did more good than harm."

At the moment, as future policy, he suggests that the free counties of Europe should define a security zone they promise to protect before expecting or assuming that America would, under its historic Nato obligation, come in.

Through the summer and beyond to his voice will be added those of many in Washington who applauded the war but are appalled to learn that the United States carried more than 80% of its enormous cost and that the repairs to Yugoslavia will run as high as $100 or $120bn.

Others who - hearing from a responsible general that a peacekeeping force will need to stay in place for something between 40 and 50 years - they recall President Clinton's constitutional promise to have American forces out of Bosnia in two years. They now appear to be there for an undefined duration.

It would be wrong to hear in these voices a rising chorus of a revived isolationist party. There are very few of that old breed left in either party. There is no presidential contender in sight who does not believe that the United States has a permanent stake in the peace and good order of Europe.

But how much, at what cost, for how long?

The nasty truth that does tempt some potential isolationists to rise again is the reflection that in the two most recent wars our victory has left the enemy tyrant - Saddam Hussein and Milosevic - still in power.

If you listen persistently enough you will hear, from time to time, the wicked thought that the next strike of the next tyrant should be left to his neighbours to put down.

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