Reagan backtracks on missiles

Something happened in the sky over Long Island the other evening that brought to mind, by an association that will become clear, my first eyeball-to-eyeball, or shoulder-to-shoulder, contact with the Russians.

It was at San Francisco in the spring of 1945 when the delegates of 50 nations were gathering to set up, to found, the United Nations. It was an exhilarating time. The day the conference opened in the Opera House, the Russian armies encircles Berlin. Three days later, Mussolini would be strung up, head downward, in Milan. The certain end of the war in Europe was only two weeks away and San Francisco, with its sparkling air, its tumbling hills and splendid views across the bay and its rollicking tradition of playing host to east and west, seemed the ideal place for an international celebration. And the great political event itself, the second attempt in this century, as the charter said, to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, was so enlivened with social ceremonies – dinners with Arabs turning lambs on spits, the French dispensing champagne and soufflé, the British among us keeping our end up with warm Martinis and sausage rolls – so much happy and exotic fare that the festival drew all sorts of unlikely and beautiful people, many of them there on fake press credentials.

The very first day I remember squeezing into a crowded lift which contained a Chinese general, a Saudi sheikh, Lord Halifax, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth and Groucho Marx.

One of the early chores of the correspondents was to watch the various delegations arriving at their hotels. The Russians had been booked into a famous hotel on Union Square. Two things happened that have stayed uncomfortably in my mind.

When their cars drove in from the airport and pulled outside the hotel entrance, there was, of course, a small, craning crowd and, holding them back and serving for all the delegations as the guardian police, were United States' marines – sharp and crisp in their blue uniforms. As the limousine of the chief Russian delegate, Mr Molotov, drew up, a marine moved smartly to open the car door. Immediately, two stolid men in square-shouldered suits, jumped out and pushed the marine back into the crowd. Mr Molotov was then enclosed by a flying wedge of security men and hurried inside without receiving a greeting from the amazed marine. That was the first shock.

The second came to most of us reporters that evening when we heard the astounding news from British and American press officers – one of them was a fellow called Adlai Stevenson – that before Mr Molotov and his chief aides had been let into their suites, the accompanying Russian security men had done a thorough search of the beds, the chandeliers, the window ledges, closets, bathrooms, nooks and crannies, for any sign of microphones. The word 'bugging' had not yet come into the language, into our language, but for most of us it was a stage in the decline and fall of our innocence. It was not, however, in those days, the sort of thing that you put in newspapers.

Well, last Monday night, a murky night with warm air drifting across Long Island Sound and fogging up the airports, a helicopter clattered out of the mist and hovered dangerously close to the rooftop of a small mansion near a cove. The mansion is called Killingworth and it's the weekend retreat of Mr Troyanovsky, the chief Russian delegate to the United Nations. He didn't happen to be at home as the thing spluttered and hovered over the house, but there were Russian security men inside, soon outside, and at once they called the United States mission to the UN and from there the calls radiated to the county police, the state department, to the FBI. Throughout the night, a lot of officials in a lot of places were nervously trying to track down this sinister helicopter.

Well, came the dawn and the harmless truth. A nearby hospital, finding one patient in a bad way that they couldn't cope with, had telephoned Bellvue Hospital in New York City to say they were putting the patient in a helicopter to get him into more expert care as soon as possible. The one sort of helicopter that would have priority at such a time would be a craft of the Air National Guard. Unfortunately the pilot lost his way in the fog and dropped from a thousand feet to 300 to get his bearings. He circled and hovered, and we can honestly believe he didn't know where, until he got clearance from the control tower at LaGuardia to be on his way.

The Russians, or for that matter any other householder, would have had a right to be scared but only two nights before this unlucky incident, shots had been fired – as I talk, we still don't know by whom – through the ground-floor windows of the mansion. So if the security men's first impulse was to call the police, their second was to call the United States mission and put the alarming word out to the FBI, the state department, the Soviet embassy in Washington and on and on.

So the Russians had every cause to be touchy and down the years we've learned that in bigger matters than these they are understandably so. The really big matter I have in mind is something that American presidents, if they don't already know, have to be or ought to be instructed in, which is a chronic sense that goes back beyond Communism into Tsarist Russia – an unflagging sense of being hemmed in. Now most of us in the West look at a map and the vast spread of Russia and find this hard to believe but probably more Russians have died from foreign invasions than the peoples of any other land and, apart from Napoleon and Hitler, Russian schoolchildren learn of many, many more incursions that we know nothing about.

America has no armies, no divisions, no squads guarding the border between the United States and Canada but the Russians keep more than a million men along the frontier with China and the size of their armies poised on their European borders is a byword.

Now it's the size of these forces, the great increase in their military budget in the last decade, while the United States has been regularly reducing the military slice of the national budget, this is what caused President Reagan to say in his speech on Wednesday that his aim in defence policy has been to remedy the neglect of the past decade.

The discovery – the belief, let us say – of this administration that the Russians are far ahead not only in conventional but in nuclear force is at the root of its policy. Some of the people drafted into top positions by Mr Reagan into his administration belonged, during the Carter administration, to a protest group, many of them Democrats, calling itself 'the committee for a clear and present danger'. That phrase is a famous constitutional one to justify the suspension of certain rights. It was most famously applied in 1919 when a case was brought before the Supreme Court to say that the Espionage Act of the First War violated the guarantee of the first amendment to the constitution, which is the guarantee of free speech and assembly.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for a unanimous court in ruling that a man who had distributed inflammatory pamphlets had really encouraged resistance to the military draft and that he could not claim the protection of the first amendment at a time of clear and present danger.

Well, the members of this protest committee protesting against what they took to be the lassitude of Mr Reagan's three previous predecessors in the face of Russian rearmament, the members of this committee, of course, don't go so far as to say that the danger is so clear and present that we should suspend free speech. By giving the committee that title, they wanted to dramatise what they took to be a situation of neglect and sleepiness in this country and in the West, similar to the inertia or indifference of Western Europe in the face of German rearmament during the 1930s.

The case for the administration is most strongly and steadily put by the Secretary of Defense, Mr Weinberger. He constantly tells us that we are in mortal danger again of the folly of appeasement and, obviously, he can make the case more persuasive by reminding us of the eloquent and unheeded warnings of Winston Churchill. Churchill was right and who shall say that Weinberger is wrong?

Well, for one, George Kennan. George Kennan is a veteran American statesman, former ambassador to the Soviet Union, a long time and learned student of Russian language and history and 30 years ago the author of the doctrine which said it was the main purpose of the Western world to contain the Russians within their borders.

Kennan has been thinking long and hard lately. He's been in Europe. He is deeply moved by the rising huge movement across Europe against not simply the deployment of nuclear weapons, but their existence there at all and he's recently put out a long reflection in the New Yorker magazine in which he goes on at length about the historic Russian obsession with encirclement and believes this to have been aggravated by recent American military relationships with Iran, with Pakistan, with China. He denies that the Russians have achieved any clear nuclear superiority. He has no confidence in plans to limit the numbers of nuclear weapons or the areas of their deployment. He sees no solution other than the complete elimination of these and all other weapons of mass destruction from national arsenals.

The Secretary of Defense and Ambassador Kennan represent the two poles of American opinion. The protest movement against nuclear weapons is dramatically spreading across the campuses of this country and the White House which, a month or two ago, was disposed to look on the protest marches of Europe as the popular equivalent of the peace ballots of the 1930s at best or the mischief of radicals and hippies at worst, the White House has learned – under the pressing persuasion of Secretary of State Haig, no less – that these European marches are a far weightier challenge to the early flag-waving Seventies of this administration.

So between them, the European marches, Ambassador Kennan and Secretary Haig have startled the president and sobered him and made him think again. This is the sombre background that persuaded the president last Wednesday to make his sudden proposal to the Russians to have both sides cancel the deployment of land-based, intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

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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