TWA hostages released

Well, they finally held a birthday celebration in San Francisco and when I read about it, a little paragraph tucked away in some paper, a name came darting into my mind from nowhere – the name was Walter B. Pitkin. I can't track him down and I hope I'm right in saying he was the author, years and years ago, of a book called 'Life Begins at Forty'. It was a thumping bestseller because, well, who doesn't want to be told that when you touch the crest of the hill and see the dark valley below, that you're actually still on your way up?

I hope it's not patronising to say that it's a kind of title that appeals to Americans more, I should guess, than to any other people. It taps the underground springs of optimism of a people who, in spite of all their woes, can't help believing that today is better than yesterday and intend tomorrow to be better still. Now this, any wise old European will tell you, is naive but some of the great American achievements have come from believing it.

Men were never meant to fly. Is that so? said the Wright brothers. You could search the earth from now till doomsday, Thomas Edison was told, and you'll never find a filament that will burn continuously in a vacuum. I forget how many he tried from how many countries – he certainly tested 6,000 vegetable fibres and, in desperation, tried everything from cork and hemp and lemon peel and even a hair from a friend's beard. He succeeded at last with a strand of a Japanese bamboo.

To a certain type of American, all you have to say is, 'Surgery has reached its peak, you'll never transplant a human heart'. Whereupon, teams in Texas, in Missouri and Massachusetts go at it. Of course, the people who eventually do perform what we'd thought of as miracles know that they take iron determination, unwavering skill and enormous patience. I suppose I'm thinking of the millions of the rest of us who yearn to believe that miracles can come cheap, that the popular wisdom is wrong.

For instance, another book published some dozen more years ago was a runaway seller on the basis of its title alone. It was called 'The Drinking Man's Diet', which challenges you at once to believe that you can go on drinking in the regular way, eat most of what you like and not put on weight.

Similarly, 'Life Begins at Forty', though it might sound to some old codgers like a whistle in a graveyard, to many more people was a clarion call defying the wisdom of our fathers. What's all this rubbish about going downhill after forty?

Well, as I say, they held a birthday party of sorts in San Francisco the other day – they, being various assembled delegates and veteran survivors of the United Nations' first organising conference in San Francisco which opened on 25 April 1945 and ended on 26 June with the formal signing of the charter by the 50 founding member nations.

Incidentally, the conference was very nearly scuttled when the Russians broke their promise to allow the Poles to elect their own government and insisted on seeking their own hand-picked Polish government. This hassle was not allowed to delay the signing of the charter, but Poland – the Poland the Russians wanted – came along later and signed in October.

Well, it's surely not cynical to believe that, for the United Nations, life positively does not begin at forty. Many of us who were there and are still ticking over, certainly are, were, not more naive or starry-eyed than statesmen or journalists of today, but I don't think any of us, in our most depressed or realistic moments, ever foresaw that the United Nations, far from becoming the actual superior world force it was meant to be, would be for so long defied, ignored and finally pushed aside in all matters of real politique, of the actual contests of power.

It's usual now in memoirs of people who went through the Second War and beyond to recall San Francisco '45 as a period of honeymoon euphoria. In fact, the men in power from all around the world, the best political brains available and the best journalists from many countries were there. The press corps, I recall, numbered around 600 in the beginning, though at the end, after nine weeks, there was a little party of what we called the survivors – the press that had stayed on and worked on. There were about 20 of us.

And I remember now, with startling clarity, one young man with press credentials who didn't write anything, but he hoped to and he'd gratefully accepted a job as a copy boy. He ran other men's copy to the cable companies, pending his emergence as a real writing journalist. He was a string bean of a Bostonian, so thin he was almost invisible in profile and he was keen. He was an eager beaver. He thought being a journalist was just about as glamorous a life as you could wish.

He was pointed out, dashing here and there, with copy in his hand, because he was the son of a very rich and shrewd American who had been in one of Roosevelt's Cabinets. The boy's name was John F. Kennedy. About, I should say, well, actually 15 years later, he was President of the United States and, down in Palm Beach, when his father's house became the winter White House, this memory was put to him – the time he burned to be a journalist, to be at least on the fringes of power. He smiles his wry smile, 'Ah,' he said, 'I decided long ago writing about events was not for me. I wanted to be where the action is.'

That phrase is by now a hackneyed idiom but it was new then and it set apart two types of people. The ones who want to observe events and write about them and the people who want to make them.

I wondered, when the fate of the hostages was being traded back and forth between Israel and Syria and Mr Berri in Washington, I wondered then how Kennedy or any aspiring president would feel about the action today. It's far more harrowing, more riddled with frustration than they could have imagined. It's hand-wringing inaction.

There was, incidentally, a moment there, a little glimmer of hope, that the United Nations would vault into the saddle that was made for it in San Francisco, to be the prime, the only, arbiter of all such conflicts and crises. A friend of mine called up and said, 'I see Brian Urquhart is out there, he might, after all, be the man'. This was a heartening moment. Brian Urquhart is probably the most dogged, the most unyielding, the most dedicated and sweating officer of the United Nations there's ever been, as a sort of permanent under- or deputy secretary-general. He's been there for, I guess, the whole 40 years or nearly 40.

It was proud news, but it was wrong. The man out there was his assistant and he quickly denied that he was in Lebanon to help in any way the resolution of the hostage problem. He was there on some undefined United Nations business of helping to secure borders. So the little glimmer shone and went out.

And, in the meantime, we sat and watched those grim press conferences arranged by the captors. You know, the ones in which the men said they were well, they were well housed, well taken care of – all the time, an official captor or keeper was sitting at their side, nodding his head sagely as if these thoughts were springing spontaneously from the hostages. Of course, they weren't and when they finally got back home, some of them said, 'What did you expect? There we were and they set this thing up as a wonderful proof for all the world to see that they were kind and compassionate'. On the contrary, we later heard.

And you had to feel sympathy for President Reagan going out to Andrews Air Force Base to welcome them with the knowledge of the murdered navy diver and the seven who are still held somewhere. And away from the relatives and the cheering crowds, the president has to go on saying things like, 'We demand' and 'We insist' and 'We're making perfectly clear' and 'We must not yield' and 'There was no deal'.

Well, of course, there was. The United States heroically kept its mouth shut and, meanwhile, sent – had to send – begging signals to Israel to exchange those 700-odd Lebanese for the 39 Americans. As a veteran of the San Francisco UN conference put it – the plump but indestructible James Reston of the New York Times – 'All the president can do is talk tough, act soft and go on television and tell them that next time, boy, they'd better beware.' That is cruel but it's true. What else can he do?

I read in a British paper that Americans, plural, are threatening all sorts of invasions and bombardments. I've never read anything to do with this crisis that was so mischievous and silly. There is one small cock-eyed, right-wing group that goes about, while nobody listens, demanding – it's always demanding – instant retaliation, but across the whole range of American opinion, which of course mixes bitterness with joy at the hostages' return, the general approval of the way it was handled is very obvious.

President Reagan's popularity, after the resolution, is close to 60 per cent. That's an amazing figure when you consider that the difficult and, of course, much longer handling of the Tehran hostages cost Jimmy Carter his re-election, but you can't help thinking how maddening and frustrating the action is these days for any head of government.

I have a friend deeply interested in politics all his life and always thoughtful about who he votes for for president. He's an old man of an invincibly optimistic temperament. He told me the other day that 'Life Begins at Forty' was nonsense. He'd just had a birthday. 'Life,' he said, 'begins at eighty, but don't tell anybody who isn't feeling well.' He did add, thinking about the appalling strains of the presidency, 'that you have to be unbalanced to want it. In 1988,' he said, 'I'm going to vote for any man who doesn't want to be president.'

By the way, there's an interesting bit of Americana in this whole nightmare that is seen on television. Everybody takes it for granted and nobody says where it started. It's the custom, which was followed in every town that had a hostage being held, of tying yellow ribbons around trees and telegraph poles and the like. It started during the American Civil War in Texas, which had acquired a song, 'The Yellow Rose of Texas'.

A new song sprang up, 'Around her neck she wore a yellow ribbon, she wore it for her lover who was far, far away.'

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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