Williamsburg summit

Many years ago, I did a talk on Williamsburg, Virginia and the remarkable story of its restoration. I suppose, by now, many thousands of tourists and listeners from around the world have been there. So, to make the point of my story, I shall give you the briefest sketch of the place, why anyone should want to restore it to its eighteenth-century appearance and why it was possible to do this, with the most scrupulous fidelity to the original.

In 1776, Williamsburg was the capital of Virginia, easily the most affluent and influential Southern state. The Southern leaders of the American revolution met and plotted there. When the War for Independence broke out, it was seen that Williamsburg was vulnerable to a British invasion from the rear, since an invasion fleet could sail up the James River to the city at its head, Richmond.

So the capital was shifted to Richmond and Richmond grew and prospered and changed throughout the following 150 years while Williamsburg was dramatically abandoned and retreated into its handsome shell. Nothing happened there. So that even by 1927, Williamsburg was a sleepy, mainly eighteenth-century, broken-down Southern town. It was a sort of American Fatehpur Sikri, the Indian city built by Akbar in the sixteenth century – an elaborate collection of grand buildings which were no sooner finished than the whole place was abandoned, since they'd forgotten to install a workable water system.

Williamsburg, 60 years ago, still had its governor's mansions, its parliament building, its old jail, its famous taverns, many small mansions and in 1927 the Rockefeller family, acting on the advice of a local parson, were persuaded to finance its restoration. Not too many nineteenth-century buildings had been put up. The owners were handsomely compensated for agreeing to their demolition, all except one, tenacious old lady who maintained that her family had lived there for a hundred years and she would not budge.

But history has passed by many another town and to restore it you'd have, in fact, to reconstruct it according to what experts – architects, designers and the like – decided was the sort of thing the original inhabitants probably lived with. Well, what made the Rockefellers and their experts warm to the job was a unique stroke of luck – the discovery of something called 'the Frenchman's map'.

The Frenchman was a prisoner of war in Williamsburg during the War of Independence. He was an architect and he amused himself while he was there drawing the main buildings and their rooms, not only that he roamed through them and noted down the several colours of the washes used on the walls – the beiges, greys, greens, yellows, Delft blues and so on. Also, the wallpapers and – and this is what makes Williamsburg unique as, if you like, a living museum – he measured and drew the spaces between the buildings, the dimensions and location of gardens, yards, outhouses and so on.

So it was possible to restore, with great accuracy, what had crumbled, to refurbish what had not crumbled with the look, the style of decoration, furniture, that had been there when Williamsburg was in its glory and to restore the original spaces. So it's a perfect model of an eighteenth-century American capital city, as it was in the very moment that history moved away from it.

I told all this and much more in my original talk and a week or two later I had a postcard from an English architect. He had his name and the initials R-I-B-A embossed on the card. An unflappable gent. He wrote, 'Have just heard your talk on that city in Virginia. Very interesting. If true'. Well, that's a stopper and should humble any reporter!

I've had several reminders of this sceptical attitude before and since. In the late 1940s, for instance, I covered for my paper, day by day, a famous American trial which was technically a trial for perjury but was taken by everybody as substantially a treason trial – the passing of secret State Department documents by a staff member to a Communist agent. Two trials, in fact. One lasted six weeks and, after a hung jury required another, a second trial running for nine weeks. I wrote a book about it, at the end of which I put down eleven possible solutions for the reader to ponder.

When the labour of it was all over and the book was out, people would come up to my wife at parties and say, 'I've just finished your husband's book. Fascinating! Tell me! What does he really think?'. It's enough to make a reporter ditch his job for life and take to something that everybody will believe in – advertising, the miraculous properties of detergents, for instance.

Well, this scepticism about the press is, we hear from many melancholy surveys, now very widespread and it has extended from doubts about what has been reported to what is about to be reported. So by the time the handful of allied leaders, supplemented this time by the French and the Japanese, arrived last week in Williamsburg, stalked or dogged by between seven and eight hundred people from the press, even the press itself was telling us that nothing would come of it, that the communiqué sure to be out at the end would incorporate the usual, bland, if not hypocritical clichés about cordiality, useful exchanges, work done toward a common purpose and so on, and so on.

Mr Schmidt, the former chancellor of West Germany, dismissed the whole thing as not so much a summit as a media event. Well, all political conferences, especially international ones, are media events these days. To complain about it as in some way diminishing their effectiveness is really to complain about the invention of the jet airplane and the cathode tube.

The invention of the newspaper in the seventeenth century caused, if anything, much more alarm among statesmen and politicians than the arrival today of hordes of television technicians and commentators. The man who first took office as licenser of the press in London in 1680 said, more crisply and exactly, what many of the delegates to the Williamsburg summit were muttering in private. Listen!

'A newspaper makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors and gives them not only an itch, but a kind of colourable right and licence to be meddling with the government.'

But a hundred years later, while the politicians were still grumbling and foaming about the press, there were powerful citizens who knew not only that the meddling of the multitude was here to say, but was a thing necessary to good government. Samuel Johnson said, 'The mass of people would be barbarous without newspapers' and on this side of the Atlantic, Thomas Jefferson who had been as bruised a victim as anybody of newspapers' slander and defamation, wrote in a letter to a friend, 'Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.'

Of course, the knowledge among a clutch of statesmen at a summit meeting that every word they use in public, every gesture and inflection of voice, will be heard and watched and loaded with sly or deep meaning, puts them all very much on the defensive and one thing they all were relieved to agree on was the president's decision to have a working meeting with the heads of government without the presence of anybody but interpreters. Same with the private meetings of foreign ministers and of the finance ministers.

What happened in these three meetings, which were the crucial meetings of the conference, is something all the rest of us will not know about until the memoirs come out and then we shall be not so much enlightened as confused, as we've seen from the recent, almost simultaneous publication of the memoirs of Mr Carter's Secretary of State and of his National Security Adviser.

Mr Vance and Mr Brzezinski didn't like each other and their accounts of the same events, especially of the discussions and arguments leading up to the disastrous attempt to rescue the Tehran hostages, vary in exact proportion to the desire of the authors to maintain their self-respect; in Mr Brzezinski's case, his self-admiration.

Still, and however, one firm thing and one slender reed came out of Williamsburg and it's the consensus here, even among the more brooding and suspicious members of the media, that they were good things. First was the fact that the statement on arms policy was endorsed by France, which is not in NATO, and by Japan. The most important sentence in this agreement showed for the first time a common stand against the Soviet Union's attempt to separate the United States from its European allies. 'Attempts,' it said, 'to divide the West by proposing inclusion of the deterrent forces of third countries such as those of France and the United Kingdom will fail.'

The second thing was a phrase written in to pacify or cheer the French who believe that American high interest rates are at the root of all Europe's economic evil. The ministers of finance are now invited to consult with the International Monetary Fund to consider the possibility of improving the international monetary system by holding, in due course, a high-level international monetary conference. 'In due course' is a very wispy olive branch but there are Europeans who will hold Washington to it. It is, anyway, the first faint recognition by Washington that the international monetary system has to change.

I can not end without saying a word about a man, the boxer, Jack Dempsey, who died last Tuesday at the age of 87, the strange case of a man who didn't become a legend until he lost for the last time when he was battered beyond recognition by Gene Tunney. A ferocious beast in the ring, Dempsey was an extraordinarily gentle and amiable man outside it. When he staggered to his corner in the final bout, he mumbled to his trainer, 'I want to shake his hand' and when he got home, his wife said, 'What happened?' 'Honey,' he said, 'I forgot to duck.'

It was the line Ronald Reagan picked up and used to his own wife when she arrived at the hospital in the hour after John Hinckley gunned him down.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.