Reagan silent over Falklands

You know how one day you come across a word that you've never read in your life and, for the next week, you see it over and over again? It's a mute point whether this is a trick of one's own mind or whether, as some serious people maintain, there are vibrations in the air, so to speak and we, suddenly, without explanation, tune into them.

Well, after listening to radio and television bulletins every hour on the hour, I find myself retreating at midnight into various bits of reading – diaries mostly – that can be guaranteed to take the mind off the Falklands. I was reading a chapter the other night in a book called 'The Fascist Menace' (it was published in 1939) and almost unerringly dived on this passage:

'In the spring of 1939, a memorandum reputedly sent by the German embassy in Argentina to Berlin recommended that Germany annexe the thinly populated Patagonia region of southern Argentina and this aroused a furious storm of anti-Nazi feeling in Argentina. That southern region not only contains Argentina's oil but would be of immense advantage in controlling the Straits of Magellan, the only passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, except the Panama Canal. England has, for years, held grimly to the bleak Falkland Islands off the southern coast of Argentina as a means of controlling the Strait and one of the decisive naval battles of the World War was fought near there when a British fleet defeated a German battle squadron and closed the Pacific passage to the Kaiser's navy. Argentina has been trying, unavailingly for years, to get the Falklands back from England and the thought that Argentine territory should be used in the European game of power politics is a red flag to Argentine patriotism.'

So, here was a nasty reminder that this feud has been going on for decades before 1965 when the United Nations urged both countries to put an end to it.

The next night, I embraced, in a manner of speaking, my steady bedside companion, the old, irascible, incomparable diarist, James Agate, an absolutely safe retreat because, throughout the Second War, he scarcely mentioned it, except as it affected his own comfort and during the worst nights of the Blitz, with London burning all around him, he was far more interested in rescuing a review of an old performance by Sarah Bernhardt than he was in rescuing the bodies from a bombed house down the street.

And so, of course, I come on this. May 27 1941, Tuesday. 'The first intimation I had about the fate of the Bismarck was looking out of my window at about 12.30 and seeing a sailor coming down the road, waving his arms and stopping everybody. "We've got the bastard!" he said. I listened to the one o'clock news and knew it was all right from the excitement of the announcer's voice.'

Well, I got up and took out Harold Nicolson's diaries to cross check on how this news had been taken in the House of Commons and this is what I read. There'd been apparently a question about a statement on Ulster, when 'I saw one of the secretaries in the official gallery make a violent sign with a small folded sheet to Brendan Bracken. He took the missive and passed it on to Winston, the latter rose at once and interrupted Griffiths. "I crave your indulgence, Mr Speaker," he said, "I have just received news that the Bismarck has been sunk." Wild cheers.' Unquote.

Well, the next evening, one of our networks played a long, I think the first, televised review of the fighting since the beginning of May, done by an Englishman for British television. More vivid than any scenes of smoke and fire and bombers scudding out from the carriers was a scene below decks on the British flagship showing the men huddled there and listening to the commander announce over the intercom the sinking of the Belgrano. Not a smile or a flicker of a cheer.

It was a natural but a surprising scene because we've been fed for 40 years or more war movies in which bomber pilots returning to base jumped out of their planes in an hysteria of delight and the enemy ship always sank while the victorious crew crowded their decks and fired off rounds of cheers for home and beauty.

There's been a change, a profound change, and maybe because we've never before seen television reports of a battle so soon, with the fires and the burned wounded. The change has passed over to the civilian populations too. It was the same when we saw the first casualties from the Sheffield. A feeling which, because we've been so long away from a ding-dong battle, we've not noticed moving slowly over the Western world like an almost invisibly breaking wave – the feeling that once you can see the grave, upstanding young men on each side, moving against each other, there is something indecent in a cheer.

The change came first, I think, to America's onlooking allies during the war in Vietnam. You were on America's side but uncomfortably so. While America was pounding away so far from home, Britons were saying, 'Has this got to be?' Now, it's the other way round.

A very perceptive American woman journalist, Meg Greenfield, has put it best. 'What is at work here,' she writes, 'is not allied indifference or a failure of patriotism or nerve at home, but rather a modern sensibility that has just plain crept up on us in the nuclear age. A sensibility that is wary and rejects body counts, never mind whose bodies they are, as an index of fulfilled national purpose. Britain's present dilemma has greatly helped me to understand our own.'

Well, even in wartime, letters between friends, however sensitive they may be, are not exclusively about the war and when this thing is over – though I'm not sure what I mean by over – we shall have to delve into a long backlog, a mounting inventory of life in America, some of which will affect only Americans and some of which will affect all of us. I don't propose this week to go into the political reflections of the war, such things as what the Organisation of American States, which met on Thursday in Washington, might or might not do by way of military aid to Argentina, the promise or threat of which made American navy and military men watch more anxiously the British advance across the islands and echo Macbeth, 'If it were done when 'tis done, it were well it were done quickly'.

I'm not sure you'll have noticed how little President Reagan appears in all this because it's always difficult to notice what isn't there. I remember 25 years ago, it must be, driving an old American friend of mine through the West Country, through Dorset, Devon, Somerset and Cornwall, that is, not through Broken Bow or Wounded Knee or Tombstone and he kept saying, 'It's like a huge, private park.' 'Why?' I nagged him. He didn't know. By the time we were on the return journey and within striking distance of the London suburbs, I said, 'You'd better spot the reason quickly or it will vanish!' He couldn't get it. 'No billboards!' I said. 'That's right!' he shouted.

Well, the president's avoidance of pronouncements or meetings with any of the antagonists or protagonists is leaving everything to the UN ambassadors and the rival communiqués and turning over the wholly thankless job of articulating American policy to Mr Haig. This has been done with great care and done deliberately. The day will come when he must emerge again as the great healer of the deeply wounded relations with most of South and Central America. That's going to be an appalling undertaking and you'd better brace yourselves – who's going to be blamed for it?

The president's almost total preoccupation this month has been with next year's budget and people born to a parliamentary system, who live here, must sigh for the simple procedure whereby the government of the day works out its budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer walks into the House, announces so much for the navy, a cut here, a tax there, 6p on whisky, no increase on beer.

In this country, the president proposes in early January, the Congress disposes, maybe by the summer but, after months of committee hearings, a bill drafted by a Senate committee, a fight on the Senate floor, then House hearings, another bill, a fight on the House floor, a so-called 'accommodation' bill between both Houses and in the fullness of time – which is very full indeed – a budget.

What has occupied part of our viewing time every evening for several weeks has been the trial of John Hinckley, the young man who shot President Reagan. There's never been any question that he did it. He was grabbed in the act by the secret service and the police. We have the film of it. The jury has also seen film of him in a crowd around President Carter. He dogged him too.

And the jury has heard tapes of telephone calls and listened to recitals of long, agonised, passionate letters he wrote to Jodie Foster, now a Yale student but, several years ago, the girl who played the 14-year-old prostitute in the grizzly movie 'Taxi' about a taxi driver obsessed by the girl who, by way of becoming a hero in her eyes, resolves to shoot a presidential candidate. It's a rough outline of the plot of John Hinckley. He saw 'Taxi' 15 times. The whole burden of the defence is to say he was, and is, insane.

It brings up a topic that we've haggled and stormed over for 30 years or more. Does violence on the screen provoke violence in the watching young? Or is it rather, as practically the whole psychiatric profession used to maintain, is it rather a fantasy release of violence which reduces the likelihood of violence being released in life?

Well, a government study, completed by the National Institute of Mental Health, after 10 years' independent research, has just been published. It's an immense and scrupulous work and it concludes, 'There is overwhelming evidence of a causal relationship between violence on television and later aggressive behaviour and other effects of substantial exposure include mistrust, fear, paranoia and a distorted sense of reality.'

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.

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