Oklahoma City bombing - 28 April 1995

Very rarely do I know what I'm going to talk about before the day I have to sit down and broadcast, but for quite some time I've been looking forward to the 25th of April, knowing that I'd be here in San Francisco for a special once in a lifetime occasion.

Fifty years ago, at noon on Wednesday the 25th of April, I was sitting in the front row of a box in the Opera House, catty corner from downstage right, looking out over a scene that otherwise might have been a very glittery, expensive and highly improbable theatre audience in Paris, say in the middle of the 19th century. You know the sort of thing, it's a movie about say, Chopin and he's about to appear on stage for the recital. The camera pans the audience and we see an elbow-rubbing congregation of every literary, musical, diplomatic and social celebrity in Europe. Dickens is talking it up with Balzac, Bismarck is lending an ear to Georges Sand. Now the fact that none of these people were ever in the same room, or even in the same decade, together, has nothing to do with the case. As a very famous and wealthy and bonehead movie director once said to me, accuracy isn't the point, it's the atmosphere that matters.

Well at noon on that balmy Wednesday April 25, 50 years ago, the accuracy and the atmosphere and the glitter all came together. It was the opening plenary session of the United Nations or rather of the delegates of 51 nations assembled there to create the United Nations. We – I was one of a dozen or more press or radio people in that box – we looked down and across the whole span of the orchestra and saw to our disbelief, scores of faces that had just come alive from the covers of American and European magazines. The names may not mean much to you today, but they were the famous soldiers and statesmen of the time. The generalissimo of the Chinese army, Lord Halifax, British Ambassador to the US, Anthony Eden, a hero to Britons and Americans alike for resigning as British Foreign Secretary after the betrayal of Munich. Colonel Romulo, military hero of the Philippines, Field Marshal Smuts, once the brilliant young enemy of Britain in the Boer War and now the much-honoured prime minister, commander of the South African forces against the Nazis, Oscar Veloso of Brazil, the dour Andrei Gromyko and Molotov of the Soviet Union. The old Paul Boncoeur of France, who was to get up later and say, "Trois fois victime," I speak for a nation that was three times the victim of German perfidy. Row on row of South and Central American diplomats, who jumped in on our side very late, sometimes only a week or two before, but early enough to qualify as brave allies against the European and Asian enemy. Arab sheikhs, Indian princes, Evatt of Australia, Fraser of New Zealand, all waiting for a gavel and a declaration from the acting secretary general, the founding conference of the United Nations, I now declare open.

Nine weeks later, the charter of the United Nations was signed and I'd meant today to sift – surf, I guess is the new word – surf through the channels of my memory and tell you what it was like to be here, to be in on the wrangles and the crises and the high hopes. But to be truthful, the most vivid memories are very mixed. Some memories are bizarre, some touching, some very funny and I can only say as quickly as possible that after the huge obscenity of Oklahoma City, I don't think this is the time. But also just now I'm afraid the United Nations has its back against the wall, It seems a poor time to celebrate. However there are to be random low key ceremonies in this city until the 26th of June, the day the charter was signed and perhaps by then, at a calmer time, it will be proper to look back over the United Nations' 50 years and it may not then be tasteless to recall the hilarity as well as the solemnity of San Francisco in the spring of 1945.

Well about such things as Oklahoma City, there's very little you can decently say at first about a huge accident, an earthquake, a bomb plot except to say limply, with everybody else, isn't it awful. But this time, this disaster, very soon began to develop novel and frightening features that had to be gone into, and within days, it was clear, affected the daily life and possibly the very security of the republic, and so confronted the president and the government with the challenge of doing something, as well as simply indulging in hand-wringing lamentations.

What was so new? It was the discovery that what has become the instinctive assumption of all of us with these terrorist acts, that they were done by Middle Easterners, was wrong. There were many people – what we now call ethnic groups – in the United States, who could be forgiven for feeling, after the arrest of John Doe 1, feeling a bath of relief. Because for a night and a day, Arab Americans, Muslims especially, in their parts of town around the country, stayed indoors.

They were fearful. There were obscene telephone calls, death threats to perfectly ordinary families, here and there, windows stoned and broken. Until Sunday evening, all that most of us could do was to deplore, to be shocked and to leave things to the people who could do something, as many of the people of Oklahoma City magnificently did. But then, on Sunday, the Columbia Broadcasting System, which is one of the three original television networks, put on a 20 minute interview with the leader of something called the Michigan Militia.

I believe, I hope this feature was seen by enough Americans to alarm and alert them to a new rebel institution in American society. The small armed band of so-called patriots who have concentrated a general distrust in government into a battle plan, though they cannot be touched by the law they loathe until they make a first overt criminal act. A lawyer who has written 10 books on the nature and organisation of terrorism said on Sunday, he thinks the country has been asleep, to have discovered only now the existence and the threat to a civil society of such outfits as the Michigan Militia. It now appears there are such well-trained, uniformed, thoroughly armed militia in 26 states, which is more than half the Union. They're in close touch, which is not difficult today when the internet will put you in close touch with anybody on earth, with a modem and a mouse.

From interviews with these groups, one thing about Oklahoma that's come out is that the deed was very likely done to avenge the government's raid on that religious sect in Waco, Texas, exactly two years to the day of the bombing of the government building in Oklahoma City. That raid, and the subsequent death by burning at their leader's hand, of 80 people was, it's now generally admitted, grossly carried out. The Federals almost hysterically over-reacted to the baiting of the cult leader. But it's a long step away from sanity to saying – as these leaders do say – that Waco was only the first move on the part of an American government which now means to use Russian troops in Mexico to invade with tank battalions, take over the United States, shovel billions of Americans into underground pits and machine gun them.

The most awful thing about these militia leaders – and I've listened to about four or five of them – is that while they're undoubtedly mad, paranoid, they sound cool and sensible. They really believe they are the sort of militia that the founding fathers depended on when they wrote into the Constitution: a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. These monsters were very clever to set themselves up as militias, though I'm afraid not one American in a thousand remembers that that is the essential condition to owning a gun, to be part of a militia. Most people think there's a sacred individual right to carry a gun, though the Constitution gives no right whatsoever to an individual to bear a gun to kill so much as a rabbit.

Once it became pretty certain that the Oklahoma bombing had been done by some native anti-government maniac, it was possible then to talk concretely about what might be done. The wire-tapping of the phones of American citizens is normally forbidden and after President Nixon infiltrated anti-Vietnam groups, a law was passed forbidding the secret infiltration of protest groups. Now of course these paranoid militia men are a world away from simple protesters. Yet civil liberties lawyers and advocates have been quick to say that they must have the protection of the First Amendment: freedom of speech. In the coming months I suppose, the crucial problem will be to find how far freedom of speech can be allowed to go before it turns into freedom of speech to plan a criminal conspiracy. The most famous revolutions in Western history have been brewed in a period of social disintegration which maybe we're already in. Anyway, it seems to me there is a coming painful conflict between our beliefs and our gruesome experience, which is going to have to be resolved. It's the conflict between our guarantees of liberty and the bloody proof of the abuse of it.

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