James Baker in Mexico - 11 August 1989

On two consecutive nights this week, I saw the American secretary of state on the nightly news in what you might call a sound bite interview.

One night he was talking about the negotiations going on about Lebanon, Iran, the hostages, and the next night he was talking about the slums of Mexico City and I thought, with Duke Ellington, "there have been some changes made".

When Britain was top dog, the foreign secretary might go one month to Paris, perhaps two, three months later to Vienna. If there had been jet planes in those days, he would almost certainly have commuted in any given month between Vienna and Cairo and Paris and some of the capital cities of the empire, but in those days too, since travel was slow and there was no hotline, ambassadors were the active stand-ins for their governments and it was they who confronted the other foreign secretaries with the proposals or – in tense times – the demands of His Majesty's government.

Today, ambassadors are social hosts with no direct power who need, as one modern American ambassador put it to me, "no more qualifications than a perpetual smile and a lead stomach".

But whereas Anthony Eden or Ernest Bevin could except, in times of crisis, do most of their work from Whitehall, the secretary of state of today's top dog has to go in person – since the jets make it possible – to every trouble spot and every ally that shares a problem, and he's all over the world in a couple of weeks. Now at first glance, this seems a wonderful thing, modern technology, modern communications make it possible for the number one statesmen to meet face to face at a day's notice.

But in a gradual way, it can be murder on the human body. I remember, many years ago, doing a piece from a new government agency, one of those non-political, non-partisan bodies like the food and drug administration, which for a reporter provides such a relief from committees of the house and the Senate that profess – and may even live up to – noble aims, but which are bound to have in mind the effect of their ruminations on the voters.

This, to me, fascinating body was called ????? NOT FOUND the Gaudette centre for aviation medicine – something quite new in the world. Its job was to study what air travel did to the human organism, and its first, or at least most interesting, studies were of the first regular jet crews in the Korean War.

Well, the piece I wrote on the aviation medicine centre in Maryland was about a warning it gave after looking over the logs of hundreds of jet pilots. It warned that flying very quickly between the earth's time zones did queer things to the body's circadian rhythms – I think they first called them "bio rhythms".

In simple words, we all have a pattern of being awake and being asleep because the huge majority of the earth's inhabitants live in one place, one time zone, but if you leave your hometown – say New York – at noon and fly across five time zones, as you must, arrive in London at 11pm, it may be bedtime to the Londoners but to your body it's only 6pm. And as I'm always only too vividly aware, when I get to London you – I – don't go to sleep at 6pm so you have to deal with this in various ways.

For several years I had the blessing of an old friend, London friend, so thoughtful that on the day of my arrival, he used to quit work and take a long nap in the afternoon, so that when I checked into my hotel and called him at 11pm his time, 6pm my time, he was ready for me, and I ran around to his house and we sat up and gossiped and shared the patina ????? WHAT???? and played nostalgic records of oh, I don't know, No No Nanette, and the liquid cornet of Bix Beiderbecke and parted – with great gratitude on my part – at 4am his time, 11pm the previous night my time.

This is a problem which obviously all transatlantic travellers, jet crews especially, have to face, but what also the Gaudette Aviation ????? CHECK doctors noted was that, apart from the wrench to your sleeping pattern and some of your other habits, there was something else that happened to the mind.

Judgement, they found, on quite straightforward logical problems – business problems – was impaired. They ended their study with a recommendation that people – businessmen, politicians, statesmen, whoever – flying across several time zones to a meeting at which crucial decisions had to be made should wait 24 hours before committing themselves to anything.

This, at the time, I assumed would be taken up and observed, especially by jetting statesmen, but it was evidently not so.

Mr Henry Kissinger, when he was secretary of state, must have racked up a record in the headlong violation of the time zones. He was in Washington one night, Tel Aviv the next, Madrid back to Washington, then on to Argentina, back to Washington. The next thing we knew he was in Tokyo. So much for the Gaudette ???? peoples warnings. However, Mr Kissinger did come to have a triple heart bypass operation and I'm glad to say he seems to be in as good shape as ever.

One of his successors, Mr Alexander Haig – remember Alexander the Great? – a year or two later checked into a hospital in Boston I believe and when the reporters asked him what was up, he said he was going in for a bypass. "Double, triple?". "No," he said, "Henry Kissinger had a triple, I'm having a quadruple."

Well, so far, Secretary James Baker seems to be holding up without benefit of surgery, but it's a gruelling routine that he faces for the next four years and I wonder if the Gaudette Centre ???????? was all wrong.

You may want to know what Secretary Baker was doing in Mexico this week and that journey. One reason for it threw me back to a weekend in the spring of 1951 when I was down in southern Texas, in the Big Bend Country, as its called, because it describes the great downward curve of the land that marks the course of the Rio Grande River where it separates Mexico from Texas.

I'd gone there on a holiday to visit an old friend, an immigrant Scot who was then the district attorney of the county that's embraced by the Big Bend. We set out one day to drive the 100-odd miles due south into the Big Bend and the mountains there, where we were going after the white-tailed deer which is a denizen of those parts but, as the DA said, we might along the way pick up some wetbacks.

Wetbacks was the name given to the straggle of Mexican fugitives who by night usually swam and waded across the Rio Grande and got lost somewhere along the curving 600-mile border and went into Texas. It staggers my memory now to think that hunting for wetbacks was then, 38 years ago, as trivial and rare an occupation as hunting for white-tailed deer.

Today, one million Mexicans every year will swim, climb, pass into the United States illegally. The great curving border between Mexico and the United States is about 4,000 miles long. The American government has a border patrol and a fleet of helicopters to watch out for what are called "illegals". At last count, there was something like 50, 60 maybe 100 helicopters. Obviously 30,000 helicopters would be hardly enough to stop the night and day infiltration.

Well, Secretary Baker was not in Mexico City just to talk about improving the border patrol, he was there to help the new President Salinas do something about Mexico's prestigious debt to the United States. The new man has promised to try and reduce that debt by as much as $2billion a year, the capital of course runs to so many billions that it will never be repaid.

The great thing now with the South and Central American countries, as with the Third World countries, is to get their economies so solidly on their feet that they will be able to keep up on the interest.

Now seven, eight years ago, the United States was very happy with the economic prospects of Mexico. It had a great oil strike and Mexico was cheerfully lent $100billion against the vast gushings in prospect. Alas, the oil gave out – at least, the wells could not compete with the Middle East – there was a slump in prices and Mexico's economy slumped too, to the point today where 4,000 impoverished peasants every day pour into Mexico City for a better life they will not find in what must soon become the most populous city on earth.

Eight million people live in slums, shacks, caves hacked into the suburban hills with no running water, no services. The unemployment rate in the city is 40%, inflation is a soaring rocket and, in the past year, the standard of living has declined 50%.

To go once to see this sort of life, whether it's in Mexico City or Lima or Calcutta is shattering enough for most visitors, but after Mexico, Secretary Baker will no doubt be off sometime soon to similar scenes and problems in Argentina and Brazil and sinking Peru, not to mention El Salvador and, if ever Nicaragua has an election, there too. All missions designed to ask "What do you need?" and to pump up American help.

And then he'll be back in Tel Aviv and Bonn, and perhaps Warsaw and, of course, always busy with Tokyo and the bitter problem of Japan's protected trade empire.

In the old days we, the public, just assumed that Austen Chamberlain or Mr Eden or Mr Bevin were taking care of these things. If we were interested, we read about them, we didn't have to see the horror and the poverty and the fighting every night on the tube.

Aren't you glad, whoever you are – Spanish. Dutch, French, British – you aren't top dog any more.

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