Voters back Bitburg visit

I have quoted it before and no doubt I shall quote it again. It's a sentence from a great statesman and a political thinker of genius whose name, unfortunately and unjustly, has become a synonym for a cynic. I'm talking about Niccolo Machiavelli.

Over 400 years ago, meditating on what we call today summit meetings, he wrote, 'It is an error for princes to come together in their persons to consummate what their envoys have failed to do'.

Well, in those days, the coming together of the kings and princes, both of nations and of the church who ran things, took a long and uncomfortable time, which may explain why they did it infrequently and why, therefore, a failure was thought of as more of a disaster and, quite often, was the almost automatic prelude to a war.

Well, nowadays, the presidents and prime ministers can get together overnight and the jet plane makes the temptation irresistible to keep taking things up at the top leaving, as it has left, ambassadors as mere caretakers of the overseas' offices. But the press and the broadcasters can jump on jets too. Hence, the invasion of Europe by the locusts of the media whose main job is to pretend to be under the carpet at the summit meetings, which they are not. They, too, must look at a communiqué and try to read deep and sometimes sinister things into it.

Well, I think it's generally accepted that the summit, as a vote for Western defence policy, was a fair success as what it was mainly about – an attempt to synchronise trade and economic policies – it was, thanks to Monsieur Mitterrand, a failure.

Now, it would be pleasant, it would be a relief, not to have to say any more about President Reagan's visit to Germany, not to mention Madrid and Strasbourg, but we can now see a striking difference between what a majority of Americans feared would come out of the notorious Bitburg visit and what actually did come out of it.

Two weeks ago or whenever the president's itinerary was first published, it was, I think, generally agreed by the press, the television, by national surveys that Mr Reagan's decision to visit the military cemetery at Bitburg was a disaster of public relations, of planning, of political and personal insensitivity.

Till then, by the way, I doubt that one American or for that matter one non-German in a thousand had ever heard of Bitburg, the .01 per cent might know it as the seat of a small, fine brewery. Of course, there would have been little outcry if the planning team of both Americans and Germans had noticed those 49 graves of SS officers buried there. The culprit was clearly identified as Mr Michael Deaver, who's been a close adviser of Mr Reagan from his days as governor of California on.

When the damage was done and the president, at the urging of Chancellor Kohl, decided anyway to soldier on through that horrendous graveyard, a network correspondent whose beat is the White House unearthed the cause of all the trouble. As is often the case with seemingly large and complicated diplomatic blunders, this one was not plotted or the result of careful, bad judgement. It was an unhappy little accident.

The day that Mr Deaver and other White House aides and the accompanying German delegation, the day they visited the Bitburg cemetery to look it over as an appropriate place to pay a... a forgiving tribute to the German dead, the gravestones were draped in snow. That was it. Contrary to the frenzied belief or wishful thinking of many of the protesters and contrary to the head-shaking editorials out of Moscow, the president not only hadn't the slightest intention of forgiving the SS or making peace with Nazis, dead or alive, he would have reeled at the suggestion. Simply, there was snow.

The place was chosen. It was announced that Bitburg was ideal for two reasons. It was a resting place of the German dead of both the First and the Second World War and it lay on the edge of an American air base through which the president would be able to move freely without Herculean security precautions. And then the snow melted and the nightmare rose up in the shape of 49 clearly marked gravestones.

At that point, the responsibility for a rescue operation passed to Mr Donald Regan, the president's new chief of staff and, at that point, somebody – we don't, honestly, know who – argued that for the president to back down, to change his plans, would be a sign of weakness. This argument, itself, it soon became clear, was itself a lamentable sign of weakness but, as we know, the subsequent backing and filling, the quick addition of a visit to a concentration camp, the word that Chancellor Kohl was adamant, Mr Reagan's alarming, improvised thought that the SS men were equally victims with the death camp corpses, then attempting to sound more convinced that it was morally right for him to go to Bitburg – all this piled blunder on blunder.

The Jews, in this city of all cities, mounted large and, through some of their wisest leaders, eloquent protests. The Democrats moaned and bemoaned. Very many men of the president's own party, Republicans, begged the president to think again. There was scarcely an editorial writer in the country who didn't make the point that, for once, the president who had led a charmed life in shaking off every embarrassing gaffe, for once a blot had stuck to the Teflon President.

So, he went and he spent six minutes at the cemetery and kept his back turned on the graves, spent a long time in the concentration camp and made a moving speech. The West German police who, in matters of presidential security, take their advice, if not their orders, from the United States secret service, they held back the onlooking protesters, most of them, of course, Jews.

When it was over, the White House thought that the president had, after all, come out of it, if not unscathed, at least healing quickly.

Now, appears an element that we hadn't anticipated. When the embarrassment was all over, when the president had gone on to Spain and Strasbourg, when he was on his way back, our television networks did not move at once on to other matters. Documentary programmes, long planned, followed the progress of the Second War from Normandy to the German surrender and many of us saw, for the first time, the indescribably chilling documentary – not, I believe, shown at the time of its making, April 1945 – the documentary put together by Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock about Belsen and Dachau and Auschwitz and many other charnel houses, an appalling record of human inhumanity, done without preaching, without music, the most silent, the grizzliest documentary of our century.

And then on many discussion programmes and again on the nightly news, the president's trip was thrashed over and over. And night after night, a most distinguished Jewish leader vowed never to forget or forgive and did not yield an inch from the lamentation with which he had, before the fact, confronted the president himself.

I discovered I was not alone in feeling, with a full heart, for this splendid man, but my head began to signal a kind of discomfort. Would many people not become first weary and then irritated if he and his brothers went on and on and on?

And this appears to have happened. This uncomfortable feeling, which is surely nothing to be proud of, was strengthened, reinforced when the television reminded us that this was the seventieth anniversary of the hideous Turkish massacre of the Armenians. We saw an American-Armenian family commemorating this obscenity at which the grandfather, who was there, instructed his toddling grandchildren about the Turks' method of cutting off people's hands. It was, unwittingly, an object lesson in how to instil hate in the young and made you say, 'After 70 years, surely enough is enough?'.

Over the weekend, I think the wisest words came from the former chancellor of Germany, Helmut Schmidt, who was here, sat in on a very popular Washington network discussion programme and said, 'Why commemorate at all? Why the 40th? We didn't celebrate the 25th or 30th or 39th. It would have been better to hold no commemoration at all.'

Well, now, one of the most reliable national surveys, polls, has been completed, that of the New York Times in association with the Columbia Broadcasting System. It came out on Wednesday. Let me say first that in another poll before the German visit, over 70 per cent of Americans thought the president should not go to Bitburg. Today, now it's over, the public is exactly divided: 41 per cent says he should have gone, 41 per cent say not, leaving 18 per cent who didn't know how they felt; they were puzzled or indifferent or, surprisingly, didn't know why anybody should be against the visit.

Old soldiers, veterans, split evenly too. More men, 46 to 41 were in favour of the visit. The idea of reconciliation was strong with them. More women, 40 to 36 were against it. Of the general population in favour of the visit, about 80 per cent of them came together for different reasons. Some felt the need to cement American foreign policy with West Germany, others that the president made a promise and should keep it, others that forgiveness should be the motive, others forgetting. The rest that it was fitting to honour all soldiers.

But 95 per cent of all Jews were against the visit and though, among people in favour of the visit, there was widespread sympathy for the Jews and their ordeal, a surprising 38 per cent of the total poll, including two-thirds who supported the visit and one-third who didn't, 38 per cent said that Jewish leaders in the United States protested too much over the visit.

So, there is an unpleasant, but plain consequence to come out of it which has to be noticed. Out of it all, it appears that the German visit has been, for the president, not a catastrophic liability which we all predicted, but a political asset.

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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