Ottawa economic summit

The first boss I had – or chief, as we used to say – when I started out as a British correspondent in the United States was a Welshman who struck Americans as the very model of a British major general, retired. He was the chief Washington correspondent of The Times of London, as we say here. His name was Sir Willmott Lewis. He stood as erect as a grenadier and he had the rotund voice of an archbishop and knew Washington politics for about 30 years as well as anybody.

What delighted his American colleagues was the contrast between his austere exterior and the warmth of his drollery. His dry wit became a byword and was easily quoted because he always spoke in beautiful sentences that seemed to have been composed with great care overnight.

The last time I saw him – he died over 30 years ago – he was barely able to walk; not because he was mortally ill, in fact his death from a heart attack a few weeks later was a shock to everybody, but because he happened, at the time, to be suffering from what most people assumed was an attack of sciatica. When he hobbled, still very upright, into his office, I expressed my distress at seeing him in this state. I asked him what was the matter. He looked straight ahead at his typewriter and said, 'Not Caligula nor the courts of Genghis Khan ever devised a torture so exquisite as the bi-monthly massaging of the prostate gland.'

Some other time, I'd like to recount more of his precious one-liners but I thought of him just now because of a remark he made to me, his junior or assistant, when quite suddenly in the spring of 1940, he handed over to me his press credentials, his seat in the House of Representatives, his White House pass, his press ticket to the forthcoming presidential nomination conventions. He was in his prime, he had eight years still to live and work and I was puzzled to hear him say that he had no intention of attending the conventions.

Why? I wondered. 'My dear boy,' he said, 'what happens today, happened yesterday and will happen again tomorrow.' Well, being young and inquisitive and convinced, as young reporters are, that everything is happening for the first time, I was astonished.

Well, time bears him out and two or three items in the news this week have collided, so to speak, to strike a spark of memory. Something happened in Kansas City last week and it was reported in my newspaper in a column adjacent to a despatch from London about the preparations for the Prince of Wales's wedding.

It recalled to me the vivid reports of what happened to the Prince of Wales when he visited New York. He was the first heir to the British throne to set foot on American soil. He became King Edward VII. The year was 1860, the prince arrived at the peak of a brilliant fall, he walked around the town with various city fathers and society hosts unaccompanied, so far as I can discover, by any detectives or what we now call security men. The New York Times said of this 19-year-old, 'he has received an ovation the like of which has seldom been offered to any monarch in ancient or modern times. It was not a reception, it was the grand welcome of a mighty people'.

On 12 October, the city gave him a great ball at what was then the most impressive of New York's public halls, the Academy of Music on 14th Street. Three thousand people were invited in spite of the insistence of a New York dandy that there were only – and precisely – 400 people in New York who constituted society. Three thousand were invited and five thousand showed up. Two social climbers who desperately wanted to be there failed to get tickets and committed suicide. This was not known about till afterwards so nothing marred the splendour and cheerful spirits of the thousands as they settled into a long file and began to be presented to the prince by the dean of New York society, one Mr Hamilton Fish. His grandson is in his nineties and still alive.

Fifty, or maybe sixty, couples had passed and bowed when there was a loud, creaking sound followed by cracks and human shrieks. The floor of the ballroom collapsed and several guests slid away into oblivion. The amazing thing about this scary accident was the aplomb or phlegm of everybody present. The procession of course beat a retreat. A small army of workmen was summoned, the guest retired to the dining room and by the time they'd had supper, the floor was repaired. The dancing was interrupted briefly when it was found out that a carpenter, a live carpenter, had been buried under the boards. He was rescued, the boards were nailed back in place and the ball went into full swing, or rather into a modified fling with the hundred or two guests who decided to risk it.

The general calm of these proceedings can only be explained, I think, by the fact that creaking balconies and wilting floorboards were fairly common at the time, not to mention the collapse now and then of buildings just put up. In fact, for many years, New York was rife with scandals that involved building contractors using inferior materials. The near tragedy at the Prince of Wales's ball led to new and stiff city ordinances affecting the building code.

Well, it seems we're in for a similar rash of new laws. A disastrous hotel fire in Las Vegas, another one in Atlantic City, another in Massachusetts and last week the collapse of two free-standing balconies or walkways into the lobby of a hotel in Kansas City which left over a hundred people dead. Well, of course, a great deal has been made of this accident and several states are now holding in their legislatures investigations into building and fire codes and what one testifying architect has called 'the aim of some modern architects to achieve at all costs a look of lightness in suspended units'.

While these inquiries are pending, the insurance companies, finding themselves overwhelmed by enormous claims, have laid down a new definition in their contracts of catastrophe. Until now, a catastrophe that invited compensation was defined as any accident that caused over $1 million worth of damage. The insurance companies have now decided that a catastrophe is not a legal catastrophe unless it causes over $5 million worth of damage.

President Reagan has had what I should guess was a worrisome week in spite of his usual determination to keep up an affable and confident front. He went to Ottawa to what was billed as a economic summit of the seven Western leaders, just as Mr Begin intensified his air strikes against Beirut. I say Mr Begin deliberately because the administration, the secretary of defence in particular, is beginning to make a distinction between the State of Israel which the past seven presidents have sworn to defend and Mr Begin as its representative.

It would not be too much to say that the administration, from the White House down, is straining its patience to the limit in public, while in private deploring Mr Begin's martial policy. He knows, and the administration knows, that the Arabs get arms from many countries whereas Israel depends solely on the United States. Granted the American pledge to defend the sovereignty of the State of Israel which President Truman made 34 years ago, the United States finds itself in a bind unable to withhold arms without being accused of welching on that pledge.

The agonised wish of the White House that, as one man put it, 'We wish Begin wouldn't do it', was not eased by the statement the other evening of the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. 'When it comes', he said, 'to defining self-defence, each country must decide for itself.'

These alarms and excursions were being reported to Mr Reagan every time he got up from the summit table in Ottawa. His roving ambassador, Mr Habib, had been sent, everybody understood, to seek a ceasefire but on Wednesday evening, when Mr Begin was reminded of the point of this mission, he rejected the word. 'Not ceasefire,' he said, 'but peace. Peace in the Middle East.' A line that caused further groans in Ottawa and the White House.

The Ottawa meeting had, as such things always do these days, hundreds of correspondents representing the press, radio and television. One veteran Washington correspondent, who's been covering summits since Dumbarton Oaks during the Second War, wrote, 'There were two conferences in Ottawa. The summit conference of the big seven which was held down on the Ottawa River flat at the Château Montebello and the cellar conference of the fifteen hundred media types which was held in a basement on the summit of Parliament Hill.'

The big seven were carefully isolated in a huge and luxurious log cabin. They were protected from the press as much as from more dangerous types by squads of security men, by guards on the river and by helicopters which flew them from one safety point to another. The New York Times's canny and vastly experienced old Scotsman, James Reston, summed up the summit by saying, 'All this cost the Canadian government about $10 million. First, to serve the media mob with the news that the seven wanted to be left alone and second, to hire the cops to keep the reporters from asking the questions the seven didn't want to answer.'

So what those fifteen hundred newshounds discovered was practically nothing. We'll have to wait for the memoirs to have any accurate idea of the drift or movement of the talks and the chemical effect of one personality on another. All we can be sure of is that President Reagan was vastly relieved to discover that a real, live socialist, Mr Mitterrand, could be resolute with regard to the Soviet threat – that's what he said – and Mrs Thatcher was mainly responsible for having the seven abandon formal speeches and was ingenious in phrasing acceptable compromise language in the communiqué.

Otherwise, the main fact is as plain as a sore thumb. Six of the seven came to find out how the United States was going to reduce its damaging high interest rates. When they left, they were still wondering how.

So was President Reagan.

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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