The Cambodian guerilla coalition - 20 July 1990

In London, once Wimbledon was over and I had no cause to be glued to the tube, I yielded once or twice to the incessant finger-wagging warnings of my spouse that unless I got out and took a walk I would find myself permanently frozen to a chair.

I have nothing against walking in London that I don’t have against walking in New York or San Francisco or any other place that I find myself holed up in. I just don’t like walking on cement, on flagstones, that’s to say on what Shakespeare and Americans call sidewalks and Britons call the pavement. Walking on green grass in pursuit of a little white ball is something else.

I’m afraid my distaste for street walking is much like that of my old guru Henry Mencken, who was once asked why he never took any regular exercise. He said, “Any man who steps off a sidewalk takes his life in his hand.”

Well I don’t step off the London pavement onto the roadway without a little wary reconnaissance, mainly to see if the cars and buses are whizzing from the left or the right. In the past fortnight – you’ll see I’m learning to say fortnight again – I saved the lives of two Americans who were sallying off into the traffic on the assumption that it was coming at them from the left, when it was coming from their right.

“No wonder,” said one grateful man from Austin, Texas, “they have these big signs painted up against the kerbs, look right, look left.”

No such guidelines are printed in American cities, as Britons on a first visit here discover. So, instinct is the perilous guide, as Winston Churchill discovered to his cost, 60 years ago.

Here was a man who, in his late 50s as a soldier, traveller, escaped prisoner of war, a survivor of the brutal landscapes of two or three continents had experienced more hazards to life and limb certainly than any politician of his time. And yet the one really damaging accident of a lifetime occurred here in New York City when he stepped off the sidewalk on 5th Avenue, I believe, looked the wrong way and was knocked down by a motor car. He never completely recovered from it.

There’s one thing, though, about walking in London which I noticed years ago but which I was able to confirm picturesquely by looking down on a busy street from a hotel upper window. I spotted an American couple. They appeared clumsy, they stopped and started they tended to bump into people.

This is because in London, and I guess all over Britain, there’s no rule or custom of the sidewalk, the pavement. In America people tend to conform to the rule of the roadway, that’s to say since they drive on the right they walk on the right, so there are two rough streams of human traffic.

In London, I find, you thread your way through people walking, left, right and centre. So on the very few expeditions I took I slunk off into quiet side streets and admired the work of Mr Nash and walked through Belgravia, and for the first time in my life found myself thinking a kind thought about Marshal Göring, he it was – some people say it was more likely Albert Speer, but my ferocious research says Göring – advised Adolf Hitler to keep the bombers, the bombs, away from Belgravia and the surrounding crescents because Göring had persuaded the Fuhrer that that was the most majestic and beautiful part of London and would, once Britain had surrendered, make the most perfect site for the British capital of the Third Reich.

By a comical paradox the marshal pointed out to the Luftwaffe that what made Belgravia possibly the most conspicuous target in London, a mass of white stucco, made it also the easiest target to avoid.

Well all these pleasures and observations came to an end last Tuesday when we flew back to New York and winged over Long Island and trundled and taxied into Kennedy airport and came out of the cool arrival building into the oven of the outdoors and climbed into the furnace of a taxi that was not air conditioned.

The driver was an Indian – of India that is to say – he didn’t trust air conditioning, the motor overheats, you know. And we shot through blasts of sweaty air through Queens and on to Manhattan island and through the uptown slums.

I always say, the moment I get back, why do I live in this jungle? And then always some small thing happens and within no time you’re reconciled. The doorman of our apartment house threw up his hands in welcome, a middle-aged Puerto Rican, he said, “M. Cook, I have good news for you.”

This man, who is on the four to midnight shift, lives by day close to his radio set following the fortunes of his beloved team the Mets. The good news was really for him. His team, after a disastrous start to the season was on its way up and up.

I went round the corner to the French baker, smiles, and embraces, at the little Arab market absurdly called a supermarket, they asked about London. “London town you call it huh?” “That’s right” I said.

At the liquor store my friend Art was there, a mountainous man with a permanently mocking smile. “So,” he said, “welcome home, you need dollars right?”

“Right,” I started writing a cheque. I don’t believe I’ve used my bank in midtown to get cash for oh, at least 30 years. “You’ve got pounds?” asked Art. “That I have,” I said, flashing several bills, pardon me notes, of three denominations.

“Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll give you one on one.”

“Not me,” I said, “£1 buys 1.80 dollars,". “I know it,” he said, “Just wanted to see if you were on the ball.”

This little expedition took about 15 minutes but already I felt at home, and knew it once I got inside my apartment and sat down to the faint breathing of air conditioning in the study, a nice steady 70 degrees, something I didn’t have indoors in London. And looked out at the heat haze trembling over the great blobs of foliage in the park and saw the seagulls skimming for relief into the reservoir.

Next morning, up astonishingly early for me since it was already noon in the time zone I’d just left, so to the papers. I’d left London in the teeth of the storm over Mr Ridley. I was told later that of course the New York Times had carried the story, not a headline maker, good careful piece from its London bureau chief. But it caused no waves, naturally the big news, the headlines, once the London summit was over, were about other things.

I really came to a couple of days later to pick up where I’d left off with the topics that are preoccupying Americans. Looking at the front page of the New York Times on Thursday morning I realised once again that for all our shared interest in Eastern Europe and Mr Gorbachev and the rest, once you’re in America the news, especially the foreign news, is seen from a different curve of the planet.

The east, the Far East and what we now call the Pacific Rim are matters of continuing concern, so there’s never a day when there isn’t something from Beijing, from Manila. The chances of a stable democracy are still very wobbly there.

From Tokyo, of course, but suddenly on Thursday the big news carried a three-column front page headline, in the New York Times, “US Shifts Cambodia Policy, Ends Recognition of Rebels, Agrees to Talk with Hanoi”.

Here are the first two sentences of the Times report, “In a major policy reversal secretary of state, James A Baker announced today that the Bush administration was withdrawing its diplomatic recognition of the Cambodian guerilla coalition which includes the Communist Khmer Rouge and opening negotiations with Vietnam.

"Mr Baker, speaking to reporters after a two-hour meeting with Soviet foreign minister Mr Shevardnadze, said the move was necessary because existing American policy appeared increasingly likely to promote a return to power of the Khmer Rouge under whose rule in the 1970s more than a million Cambodians were killed or died of starvation."

Well, perhaps it’s hard to convey the stunning effect of this new move. Again, human rights groups here and many congressmen have been pressing for this change – a policy, we should remember, that most recently is attributed to the Reagan administration but which in fact started with Jimmy Carter.

The original motive was to improve relations with China, back there in the late '70s and to defer to the nations of South East Asia that felt threatened by Vietnam. So Mr Carter and President Reagan who followed him, turned a deaf ear to the human rights uproar to approve China’s support of the admittedly murderous Khmer Rouge.

This move, and the importance of it to the United States, is another example of a burden that the United States carries, has carried, since the end of the Second War. The burden of being seen abroad as Britain was for most of the century – as the big power responsible for half the world.

Whereas since the war, the Second War, the other former great powers can tread water about rebellions, totalitarian regimes, human rights abuses, in remote countries they no longer have interests in. But the United States is not expected to be a spectator.

I’ll bet most Englishmen, Frenchmen, Scandinavians, Dutchmen have no idea if their country has a policy at all towards Ethiopia, Angola, Albania, Malaysia, Cambodia, Cuba even. The United States is the succeeding big shot who is expected to have a policy and because America and Americans go on so vocally about democracy as their special faith, their triumph, those policies are also expected to be humane.

So the opportunities for cynicism when a supported ally is less than simon-pure, are many. It’s the price I think that Americans have to pay for, 30 years ago, the never-forgotten Kennedy inaugural, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

It’s a lovely, ringing thought, but in the world of real politique, impossible to act on. Certainly all around the globe.

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.