World Trade Centre basement explosion - 5 March 1993

Friday of last week was one of those days that you know you'll never forget. Like the San Francisco earthquake or the assassination of President Kennedy. The sort of day about which, for some psychological reason I've never heard explained, you ask people where they were when it happened.

Well I was coming home in a taxi from lunch, the driver had his radio on low, an unusual courtesy, but then he was a Russian and I've noticed that the best manners among the new crop of cab drivers come from East Europeans. Maybe they've been cowed for so long they haven't learned yet to talk back. At any rate, I couldn't quite get the drift of the mumbling radio, something about two known deaths, obviously a shooting. Any day you care to turn on the radio there is at least one fatal shooting in New York City, we have an appalling record. I asked the man what had happened and he was very vague and then I realised that his English was fairly primitive. He'd been here only a few months.

Which made me fall to reflecting about New York cabdrivers 1993. Thirty, 40 years ago, the typical New York cab driver was first of all middle aged or old, he was an Irishman, a German, Italian, Jew, few blacks. Today, apart from the blacks, such types are long gone. Today taxi driving is what they call an entry trade. It's where immigrants start. So since the great flood of immigrants on this coast in the past 20 years or so has been from Central and South America, the starting cab driver is young, young and born, I sometimes think, with his foot on an accelerator. The immigrants from Eastern Europe, from the so-called liberated countries, may of course also be young but there are many middle-aged men who decided to make the most of the breakdown of Communism and their sudden freedom to emigrate and among them there's a good quota of cab drivers. As I say, notably polite. So today the chances are, of you hail a cab, you're hailing a Puerto Rican, a Colombian, a Romanian, a Russian, an Israeli, a Nicaraguan and blacks of all ages.

By the time these reflections had fluttered and gone, I was home and turned on the telly and there it was. On every network station and half a dozen cable stations, the World Trade Center explosion. First thing I saw was a dazed, middle-aged man, face blackened with smoke dust, being helped into an ambulance. It was like, he said, one of those movies, Towering Inferno, and that, the sheer titanic scale of it, that's what made it impossible for an outsider, perhaps even also for the insiders, to take in.

To me, the most striking thing about the developing story, on a dozen channels for many hours, through the night and well into Saturday, was that it was a non-story. All the reporters could do was to point at what you were seeing, a young girl who'd fainted, an old man panting for breath, an old lady with blood trickling down her neck. The best the army of reporters could do by way of information, was to tell you on and on how many storeys the Trade Center building has, 110, how many people it can hold if it's fully occupied, close to 100,000 and eventually how many people were in there when the big bang came and the power went off, 43,000, and the anchor men and women, the ones who normally develop a story, could say only that the second tallest building in the world had suffered an explosion in its basement, which destroyed a garage and an underground station and left a crater, variously judged to be 1,000 square feet or a city block in diameter or two city blocks or perhaps only 60 feet and so on.

The story could not be enlarged on because, for two days and night on end, nobody knew for certain what had caused the explosion. So what does a poor commentator do, who's in touch with reporters on the street and true, with some people by telephone, trapped in the building? He, she has to guess, speculate, invent the likeliest story, the story they hoped was it, namely a bomb placed by a known terrorist group. Even the anchorites of the most reputable news programmes, couldn't keep their minds off what might have happened or their tongues off such words as alleged, reportedly, perhaps, do you think, isn't it possible that and would you say that.

There was one splendid interviewee, the Fire Commissioner of New York. He was, of course on the scene, nobody involved in the flesh was going to a studio. So, on the telephone, one of public television's most respected reporters, had at him in what by now was the standard, tentative, hopeful way. Would you say that … No, he said, I wouldn't, But suppose it was a bomb, was it not so big that it would have to have been planted by a group? Would it, he answered, I don't know the answers to any of your questions. All they do is invite speculation. I'm not going to speculate. That was on Saturday evening. On Monday came the first bit of mischief, of a sort rare here because we don't have daily tabloids. But we do have the evening New York Post, once a great newspaper, 10, 15 years ago bought out, not by an American and promptly turned into a tabloid. Last Monday it indulged the most mischievous headline so far. The whole front page read, Saddam's revenge?

To me the true story is a marvel and so far has been wholly unexplained by doctors, teachers, paediatricians, psychologists, whoever. There were 43,000 people trapped in that great, blacked-out monolith and there were I don't know how many kindergarten tots trapped in a lift for seven hours and there has not been one hint or rumour, let alone an authenticated account, of panic. I should have supposed that there would be several hundred people who had to be jumped on, slapped, cradled, soothed, something, but from the hundreds of survivors I've see and heard, there's come not a word that anything of the sort happened. Amazing and mysterious. The only good that blew out of that thundering explosion.

The news from Washington is all about the oldest story in the history of government. There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And how about this, to tax and to please is not given to men – Edmund Burke. Well this is the time of the year in a new administration, when the new Congress is busy looking over the new president's economic message, weighing it up and deciding what to yield to and what to fight. But usually the president's economic message is sent to Congress by a courier and delivered as a publication. This time, President Clinton turned it into a speech to a joint session of both Houses of Congress and instead of then retreating into the bivouac of the White House and watching for the smoke signals coming from Capitol Hill, he's been flying all over the country, pressing the flesh, talking to children, students, businessmen, small rallies wired for sound.

He's been campaigning harder than he campaign and this week he did something no veteran could remember a president ever doing. He went to the mountain, he went to Capitol Hill, into the lions' den on the mountain.

First he had a session with the House Republican leaders, then he had lunch, not just with the Senate Republican leader, Mr Dole, but with a clutch of leading Republican senators. They gave him a lunch of his favourite junk food, giant hamburger and French fries and then listened to him talk about how he means to raise money and cut spending. And then he did something I have to say, he does better than any of the 11 presidents I've watched. He listened to them. Nothing substantial came out of it. No Republican confession of wrongdoing for the Reagan years, no mention of the deficit, but a repetition of something that always riles the Democrats, a reminder that in the Reagan years, the treasury took in more money when taxes had been drastically slashed, than it did when they were high. A time when Mr Reagan could boast, and did, that in eight years his administration had created 18,000,000 jobs, more than all the countries of Western Europe combined.

As a practical matter, Mr Clinton is having to shave a lot of the promised reductions and he's beginning to look longingly at something that was barely joked about during the campaign – sin taxes, taxes on cigarettes, perhaps a bigger tax on alcohol. Now these are imposed, lightly or heavily, by each of the states. What Mr Clinton is thinking about, Mrs Clinton I'll bet even more since she's preparing the national health plan, is a national, a federal tax on cigarettes. The starting propaganda, perfectly true, is that 430,000 Americans die, every year, from lung cancer or emphysema or some other disease attributable to the demon cigarette. So what could be more apt, more fitting to the crime, than to tax, for the sake of the health plan, the thing that causes such fatal ill-health. Right.

This week, the politicos, including Mr Clinton, who are all for sin taxes, received a heavy dollop of bad news. A report is in for the north-eastern states. The revenue from taxes on tobacco and alcohol will fall by millions of dollars during the next fiscal year, that's July this year to July next year. By the way, you may have noticed what is surprising news to many Americans. Anything Mr Clinton gets through this Congress won't take effect until the fiscal year July 1994 to 1995. The Bush budget for 93/4 was passed by Congress and it's what we live by now and for another year. Anyway, alcohol revenue is down by about 3%, but worse news for Mrs Clinton is that whereas last year New York State got $590 million from cigarettes, this year it will get only 555, down over 30 million dollars. Why? More people are believing the facts about smoking, more people are sinning less.

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