TWA plane hijack

It's only once in a very great while that I feel there's only one possible topic to talk about, that it would be irresponsible to talk about anything else.

And it is the episode, the outrage, the crisis, however you want to call it, that has completely monopolised the television news here. Indeed, there've been hours on end, through the day and night, when it seemed that the rest of the world was permanently on hold. Certainly, I can't remember a time when the newspapers performed a new function – it used to be their exclusive function – of telling you many things that were going on at home and abroad.

But since Saturday 15, not only the one-hour nightly television summaries of the news and the networks' half-hour summaries and the previous and the subsequent discussion programmes have been given over almost entirely to the crisis – and, for once, surely the word is the right word – of the hijacking of the TWA jet plane and the holding of the, mostly, American hostages.

We have a time problem here and one that often bugs or threatens my talk, except when I'm on about some timeless topic like the rich vagabond spending two years looking for an island paradise or how to make the perfect hamburger. It's no secret that some listeners are on hand on Friday evenings, others on Sunday mornings and that, as I have reason to know from the mail, as well as foreign journeys, that many countries, Mexico and New Zealand among them, will not know, shall we say, what to think until the following Tuesday.

There was a time during the agonising last phases of the Watergate scandal when Friday's talk was meaningless on Sunday and Sunday's talk was ancient history by Tuesday. So, I am bearing in mind – in fact, I'm hoping and praying – that the hostages and that indomitable, really heroic, pilot will all be safe and free by the time many people hear this talk.

Well, whatever happens or has happened to the hostages, or what is happening now in El Salvador or elsewhere, the hijacking episode has brought up, in the most merciless way, the whole question of international terrorism and what to do about it.

What to do about it is so obviously the essential, the pressing, question that I notice a quite new modesty among the different schools of commentators and onlookers. I mean, there's a unique absence of cockiness, of ideological infighting, of telling us all what must be done or what is idiotically not being done among the dogmatists of the right, the wiseacres of the left and the 'on the one hand, on the other hand' pundits in the middle.

For once, I hear friends and informed and uninformed of all parties saying, 'Well, thank God, I'm not the President of the United States'.

Where to begin? Looking back over what seems an age since the first hectic news breaks, the interruption of every sort of programme from classical dramas and symphony concerts to golf championships, the scene that sticks in my mind is a family scene – and we've moved in on scores of them – in which a woman, in the Midwest somewhere, had a son aboard the plane and he was still being held there. And she stroked her forearms in a quiet ecstasy of frustration and said there was nothing she wouldn't do and there was practically nothing the president shouldn't do to have the hostages set free.

She anticipated the next question which no interviewer seems to have had the wit to ask, that up to now, she'd been a gung-ho backer of the president in saying you should never give in to terrorists – don't weaken, don't negotiate, don't bargain. Give them the 700 men back, she said, give them 7,000. I don't care.

Now that may have been an extreme reaction, but its extremity is the only odd thing about it. There must have been scores of families who, at the first dread word that one of their own was aboard, muffled their automatic echo of the president's proud assertion, once he was in the White House, that America stands tall again.

And, here, I must mention a cruel consequence of being president today that's quite new – new, that is, since the networks began to amass immense television stockpiles of old presidential campaign appearances, news conferences and the like. In the old days, I should say any day before Jimmy Carter, a candidate on the campaign trail would have his writers bone up on the old speeches of the opponent and trot out a quotation here and there to show, usually, that the opponent was a hypocrite or worse. But not too many people read those campaign speeches or heard them.

Now, President Reagan, wherever he is, at a fund-raising dinner, an airport arrival, a Rose Garden ceremony, an interview, speaks, makes any dogmatic statement, at his peril. On the evening news now, he will be shown where he was today, but then, they will insert an old television clip from a speech, a rally, a passing thought, which runs directly counter to what he's saying now. So – and this happens several times a week – he's visibly held up for ridicule to millions of citizens and this week, on many news programmes, the president has been the helpless victim of this trick.

I see no way that this is going to change. It feeds the self-righteousness of even the dumbest viewer. It gives mean satisfaction to the political opponents waiting in the wings for 1988. It produces an unworthy, wry smile on the faces of the men who were in the White House in 1980 and wringing their hands and brains over the plight of the American hostages in Iran.

Not all of them. Mr Carter's former national security adviser – I guess they have clips of him too – said he could never forget the tension and the frustration of those many months in the White House. He knew what Mr Reagan was going through and he wasn't going to second-guess him.

Then, Dr Henry Kissinger, Nixon's old secretary of state, was on for a long interview and he said that any policy seen from the outside is simpler far than one seen from the inside and that he grieved for the president caught in the toils of the hijacking complexity. Dr Kissinger did go on to make what one commentator called a deplorable point. It was, however, exactly what the president the next evening made the point of his policy. 'No negotiations with the terrorists, no concessions', said Dr Kissinger. Said the president, 'We will never make concessions to terrorists. To do so would only invite more terrorism.'

From the start it seems that that was the president's firm decision. Over the weekend, the smart word from all the Washington pundits was that, plainly, the three main parties – the United States, Israel and Nabih Berri, who then appeared to be the Shi'ite Moslem with the whip hand – that these three were engaged in a wriggling exercise to save face. In other words, the expectation then was that Israel could be persuaded, without any public persuasion from the White House, to release the 700 Shi'ites it held, that it must be seen to be doing this on its own accord, that Mr Reagan must be seen as not having given in and that Mr Berri must be seen as not accepting a deal. Sounded like an impossible way out. In fact, at that point, Mr Berri was saying that he washed his hands of the whole thing, that the solution lay entirely with the White House.

Now that was a situation complicated enough, especially since we then expected that there would be a lot of bold speeches and vows never to surrender or yield, and then, to save the American hostages, Mr Reagan would twist Israel's arm, Israel would say it was only doing what it had long ago arranged to do, would release the Shi'ites and somehow the hostages would be released simultaneously or just afterwards.

Well, the president, on Tuesday night, took on what I think was the toughest ordeal of his presidency – a press conference at this delicate and horrible juncture – and received a pitiless barrage of questions and accusations and snide reminders of his old posture of standing tall. To the surprise, I think, of the press corps, he spoke no weasel words, he prepared no Band-Aids to mask a deal.

Still, right away, he was asked, 'What happened to the policy of swift and effective retribution you announced four and a half years ago to deal with international terrorism?' The president's immediate answer and his line from then on was, 'In the Iran hostage crisis, it was a government that was the enemy, but that here we don't know,' as he said, 'who is perpetrating these deeds, who their accomplices are, where they are located. Just to strike a blow in a general direction would be a terrorist act in itself.'

Well, he may have spoken even truer than he knew, then. Mr Berri, the moderate leader of the Amal Shi'ites may or may not be in control. In the shanty town where the hostages are, or were supposed to be, hidden, radical Amal Shi'ites were fighting Palestinian guerrillas and, not far away, Moslems and Christians were exchanging artillery.

Meanwhile, Sunni Moslems were trying to destroy the Shi'ite television station and, at the same time, clashing with their usual allies, Druze militiamen. Another radical Shi'ite group, the Imam Ali Brigade, threatened to blow up the house of Mr Berri, the Shi'ite. And there was a time early on when the hijackers said they belonged to the Hussein Suicide Commando.

Who can police or speak for so many warring policemen? The word 'suicide' points to a new, grim element in terrorism. Once, terrorists did their dirty business and fled for their lives. Now, they are quite willing to blow themselves up with the victims.

Another element goes back to that frantic mother in the Midwest. An emotional switch in the minds of doughty citizens whose own kith and kin are caught – the switch from defiance to surrender. There is one other unspeakable thought, that every American who travels by air to troubled countries should be willing to die for his country. Preposterous!

However, the end of air traffic would mean the end of tourism, trade, bank loans, of their economies. It's a desperate thought that no president, I believe, dare possibly act on.

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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Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.