US intervention in Rwanda - 15 November 1996

Who was the great man who said: "You don't notice what isn't there"? The liveliest example that comes to mind is of a friend of mine, my oldest American friend. Over thirty years ago, I took him on a motor trip through the West Country of England, and we'd hardly got into Dorset before he marvelled at the, well he said the "cleanness" of the English countryside.

He went on like this for several days until the morning we were due to drive back from, I think, the Cotswolds to London. "I know," he said. "It looks like a huge private estate." "And why is that?" I asked him. He didn't know, he was puzzled. I said: "It's not what's there, it's what isn't. No telegraph poles, no billboards." "My God," he said. "That's it!" I believed then, and believe now, that the most civilised act of parliament passed since the Second World War was the Town and Country Planning Act, at least that part of it that buried the telegraph poles and banned advertising billboards more than, was it, two miles from a city centre.

The perfect coda to this story happened this summer when another English friend drove with me through the end of Long Island. He was a much younger man than my old crony. I guess he was a tot when they started to enforce the Town and Country Planning Act. Anyway we were toodling along the vineyards of the north fork of the island on a sparkling early fall day and he said, what a pity that the landscape wherever you go in America is defaced by these wires strung across poles sticking up everywhere. Of course he's right, but nobody, Briton or American, has ever said it to me before.

Well I'm not changing the subject, but the unnoticed disappearance of a famous American institution suggests a political variation on it. "When," I casually asked a friend who is close to Washington politics, "when did Clinton hold his last press conference?" He was puzzled for a moment. "Can't remember now," He said. "I suppose just before he launched his final campaign. Maybe just before Labor Day." The answer is January, last January. He'd gone nine months without one. We never noticed.

It's true of most presidents, they come roaring in and they can't wait to give their first press conference, to get up there all dolled up – with the Max Factor No.9 isn't it? – and be centre stage on national television. After a while, they make a rather awful discovery, that what applies to television comedians applies to presidents: overexposure.

It's always true anyway, that the television audience for a presidential press conference declines in inverse proportion to their frequency. More conferences, fewer viewers. And then there's always the possibility, increasing with time into a probability, that you'll make a slip or an actual howler in fact. Ronald Reagan made so many, it became an essential follow-up to his press conferences to have an aide announce later that he hadn't really meant what he said. The last, I think eight presidents, have in time given them up or held them very rarely.

Now somebody in the class is going to say how about Roosevelt? Right. Franklin Roosevelt was a law unto himself. His first press conference came a day or two after he was inaugurated in March 1933 and his last was in the first week in April 1945, a week before he died. Twelve years, nine hundred and ninety-eight press conferences. He revelled in them.

But the great difference between his conferences and the ones that came after was a set of inflexible rules which could never be imposed today. He could and did say no comment to anything tricky he didn't want to discuss. He talked openly, frankly, fascinatingly about his relations with Congress, problems of an upcoming bill, the sort of opposition he was up against. Also much confidential stuff. None of this ever appeared in newspapers anywhere. He simply would say at the end of an anecdote or a confessional: "That, by the way, is for background only" or "off the record." Or he'd announce a policy and say: "You can attribute that to White House sources only".

About three, four times a year, he'd say: "And you can attribute that to me, but no quotes." And about once a year, he'd intone a strong sentence and say: "And you can quote me." Forty pencils rained down on forty notebooks. That was so rare, it was an oracle come down from Olympus and of course made national headlines.

The astonishing thing was that even the most squalid tabloid and the most anti-Roosevelt newspaper chain abided by these rules. Harry Truman picked them up, modified them, allowed much more direct quotation, and then came television and Eisenhower and all the rules went by the board.

Eisenhower maintained he'd introduced a more democratic procedure. Why shouldn't the people see and hear everything on the president's mind? Of course they didn't, we didn't, he couldn't or daren't or didn't choose to reveal the real problems he was facing. He just had to waffle and evade and indulge in double talk. And ever since then, the need to avoid saying anything that might come back at you, the uncertainty about facts too, these things accumulate in the mind and the experience of every president, and they're all glad eventually to forget the institution.

What struck me when I realised Clinton hadn't held a press conference since January was, "Ah, so that's when he really started his campaign." He wasn't going to feed the television network libraries with tapes they could replay of his press conference mistakes and stumbles.

He was right. It was bad enough during the campaign that barely a day went by when we didn't see a tape of him saying – which he did one time last year – that he had introduced one tax too many, and another tape, which the Republican campaign used night and day, of a younger Clinton replying to that question way back, if he'd ever smoked marijuana. With a chuckle, he'd said: "Yes, but I didn't inhale," which we all thought was a pretty funny crack at the time. But in the Dole campaign it was played right up against alarming statistics of drug addiction in the young and offered us brazen, visible proof of a president who thought that drug addiction among the young was a joke.

So with a lot of this in mind, I was excited on Tuesday to be told there would be a press conference on Wednesday. It was not so. It was to be a statement from the president's press secretary. But, I was told, important. So on Wednesday we had Mr Michael McCurry appear and make an announcement. He'd hardly got halfway through the first sentence before I realised how mad the president would have been to release this statement any time during the last weeks of the campaign. Here it is:

"The president has given his approval to the deployment of several thousand United States troops as part of a Canadian led mission to avoid a human catastrophe and bring food and water to hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees in Zaire where the supplies of aid have been cut by recent fighting."

And then the reservation, which might have puzzled you: "The president has decided that the United States is willing in principle to participate in a limited fashion in this mission as long as certain conditions are met".

That sentence must have been sweated over during a night session with the Canadians. During the campaign President Clinton stayed most of the time far away from controversial foreign policy themes, indeed from foreign policy itself. The Republicans were crouching to leap and catch him, offering to intervene somewhere in the suffering world. They mumbled at best, grumbling complaints about American troops having gone into Haiti and Somalia, and have been sharply divided about the mission to Bosnia.

Mr Clinton knows better than anybody that the Republican controlled Congress leans toward less, not more intervention abroad. Dark rumours were spread by the Republicans: you can trust Clinton not to keep his word about bringing the troops home from Bosnia after the promised period, which is to end on the 20th of December.

The Republicans, Mr Dole as much as anyone, went along with the Bosnia mission because President Clinton attached a time limit. This has become a habit. Ever since Vietnam, the Congress, every congress has developed a deep distaste for what in the long, isolationist period between the wars they called "foreign wars." This distaste has increased since the collapse of Soviet communism and the alleged disappearance of public enemy number one.

From Reagan to Bush to Clinton, a president who feels that American military intervention in a given country is a duty or in the interests of national security, he's had to soften the fact of intervention by setting a time limit, which on the face of it is militarily ridiculous. It's one thing to hope and another to insist that the boys must be home by Christmas. And sure enough running parallel with the headlines about troops to Zaire was another one that will no doubt start the first rumpus of the new congress: US likely to keep troops in Bosnia, says Nato Secretary General. Of course it was always inevitable.

I think the most lurid reflection of the isolationist mood of the country is one statistic that came out just before the election. And I should preface this shocking figure by saying that if there's one policy that most politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, will sneak round corners to avoid, it's any proposal to increase the American budget for foreign aid. But here is that figure. A national study conducted by Harvard University asked what percentage of the whole government budget goes to foreign aid. Four Americans in ten said 25 per cent. That's almost the whole defence budget. Twenty-five per cent. The actual figure for foreign aid is two per cent.

I fear that sooner than later, in the New Year there is going to loom a showdown between – as the Bible says – them that say yes and them that say no to the immemorial question: Am I my brother's keeper?

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