Fear of appeasement

Maybe because this is the middle of a president's term and we all want to know – or the media think we ought to know – what he's done and what he hasn't, where we've been and where we're going, the newspapers and magazines are riddled or writhing with graphs and, if that word doesn't strike a bell to the ear as the sight of it does on paper, let me say that I'm talking about what the Oxford Dictionary defines as 'a diagram showing the relation between two variable quantities, each measured along one of a pair of axes usually at right angles'.

So, graphs counterpointing employment 99.1 millions with unemployment 12 millions, a happy graph showing a drastic nosedive in inflation, an unhappy graph showing a steep drop in the gross national product and because Vice-President Bush has been in Europe hoping to convince the allies of the administration's sincere desire to limit nuclear weapons, a whole wallpaper pattern of graphs about the relative distribution between the United States and the Soviet Union of medium-range missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, land-based, submarine-based, total warheads and the rest of it.

One of the sillier of these efforts to reduce human behaviour to a visible pattern is a study of the percentage of wives who, as the saying goes, cheat and the Ladies Home Journal found that 79 per cent of all wives have been steadily faithful. Playboy, on the other hand, said, 'Not so! Only 35 per cent remain chaste'. Considering that the surveys were conducted among the separate readership of these magazines, the results were fairly predictable as Time, the magazine, concluded, 'If the Readers Digest had surveyed its readers, it would probably find that nobody had extra-marital affairs'.

After toying briefly with another sexy magazine which simply aches to believe that faithful marriages are as rare or as obsolescent as the California condor, it was a relief to find myself reading an engrossing biography far into the night and coming on the story of a man whose wife, not a particularly educated woman, yet when her husband died said some fine and eloquent things about him.

'My married life was like one long, unclouded honeymoon. He did everything to make me happy. He gave me his wholehearted devotion. I had love, home and contentment' – an obituary that any husband might crave. Let me tell you about this man, beginning with the admirable, brisk words of his biographer.

'By temperament, aesthetic. He never smoked, drank or gambled. He ate sparingly, he eschewed profane and obscene language and disliked hearing it. He took no interest in any woman but his wife, Anne. In his daily routine, he observed a clock-like regularity. Early every morning, attired in a suit of sober hue and cut, wearing no jewellery save his wedding ring, he would tenderly embrace his wife and walk the three blocks from their flat on 19th Street and Archer Avenue (this was in Chicago) to his office on South Wabash.' End of quote.

For the next nine or ten hours, he attended diligently to the minutiae of his business and then he went home at six. After supper, he and his wife either went to a concert but most of the time stayed home. He took out the scores of favourite pieces of classical music and followed them on the gramophone. Bed by 11 at the latest.

Well, so, is this remarkable? Are there not millions of husbands who do much the same? Without a doubt! The interesting thing about this man was his business. let me go back to the biographer and pick up at the sentence, 'for the next nine or ten hours, he would attend to the minutiae of his business' – the brothel business, routing the girls from house to house in order to ensure the regular customers a continual change of faces, cutting corners on the brothel's food bills, drink and linens, calculating the previous night's profits. He ascribed no humanity to the hundreds of girls he handled. He regarded them simply as commodities to be bought, sold and replaced when worn out.

His name was Johnny Torrio and he was the administrator, business manager, treasurer and major-domo of Al Capone's far-ranging and criminally profitable prostitution ring. He went to jail once, for two and a half years, for tax evasion and died at the age of 75 of a heart attack.

Two things strike me about this absorbing story. One is the confirmation it brings to Bernard Shaw's maxim, 'No specific virtue or vice in a man implies the existence of any other specific virtue or vice'. This, I think, is something we all know in our heads but are loathe to believe in life because it disposes once for all of the theory of good guys and bad guys.

The other thing is the thought that it doesn't take too long for the most appalling human beings – I am, in spite of Shaw, a firm believer in bad guys, anyway – for them to become either folk heroes or comic characters. All the most notorious desperadoes of the West, the train robbers and the Wild Bill Hickok and the like are secure in song and story and in the movies as American frontier heroes. Same with the highwaymen of England. Napoleon is a revered national hero and, I hear, they are about to make a musical comedy with Al Capone as hero, or maybe lovable villain. This, I find hard to imagine but it could be that 50 years is about the limit of the taboo on society's unmentionables.

We were reminded this past week of one tremendous exception. The 50th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's rise to power has been commemorated, or recalled in horror, in many sombre pieces in our press and no doubt in yours and so long as the memory of the Holocaust is green and they're still hunting down its surviving perpetrators in South America I believe, I hope, nobody will be inspired to do a musical comedy about Hitler.

One consequence of these memoirs of Hitler, his rise, his atrocious reign and his fall, has been to renew American interest and disquiet in the phenomenon of appeasement. It's been helped, too, by the showing here of the British television drama about Winston Churchill and his mounting fears throughout the 1930s about German rearmament.

At some other, happier time in our history, we might have looked back to Hitler and to Churchill as merely fascinating bits of old history but, for years now, there has been a conflict in Washington, perhaps throughout the country, between men led certainly by President Reagan who firmly believe that there is a cautionary parallel between the threat of Hitler to the democracies in the 1930s and the threat of the Soviet Union to the democracies in the 1980s, and the people who say that the analogy is false.

Mr Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, has often drawn this analogy between the reluctance of Britain and France to credit Hitler's real motives until it was almost too late and the reluctance of many people, both in this country and in Europe, to credit motives of world conquest or at least the conquest of the west, to the Russians. In a news conference a couple of weeks ago, Mr Reagan mentioned the Ten Commandments of Nikolai Lenin which, among other frightening prescriptions, mention, 'Never reject terror on principle. There are no morals in politics, only expediency. Our tactic, absolute distrust. Promises are like pie crusts – made to be broken'.

Well, this passing reference sent a lot of reporters scurrying off to the books and not finding the Ten Commandments, though one man dug them up from a German propaganda pamphlet published during the Second World War which would be a source about as dubious as 'The Protocols of Zion'. Still, other reporters and surely researchers in the White House, have consulted the works of Lenin, V. I. Lenin, the man himself, and quoted chapter and verse for such sayings as, 'Do the utmost possible in one country for the development and stirring up of the revolution in all countries' and 'Our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle'.

One conservative columnist who is no scaredy-cat – indeed, he's the most brilliant of conservative commentators in this country – has recently said that Ronald Reagan is, indeed, the Winston Churchill of our time, a man crying, if not in the wilderness, crying out with equal gravity and sincerity against the belief or the longing, rather, of many millions of people to ridicule the analogy, to believe that the Russians have radically changed their policy and their aims and to say, in the teeth of the betrayal of the Helsinki agreements, to go no farther, that it's time to trust them.

Now I'm well aware that, to many people, this whole topic, this fear, is a bogeyman, but there are men in the west, equally intelligent, equally well-intentioned, who admit that historical analogies are dangerous, that one new element can vitiate the old comparison but who, yet, are nagged by the fear that perhaps the Munich mentality is a true and relevant state of mind. This fear is, of course, the main obstacle to radical, wholehearted negotiation on arms control.

A year ago, President Reagan minced no words in declaring that the Communist aim of world revolution was unchanged and that Communist morality justified any behaviour in promoting it. Since then, he's greatly modified his language and enlarged his offers of a truce.

We, the troubled, uncertain millions on the outside, can only hope that he and Mr Andropov have learned, or are learning, that whatever their separate ambitions, they have to live together or die together.

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.