President Truman and Dr Arthur Barsky - 12 February 1982

I was going to begin by remarking on something that I have heard friends go on about for years and years – about what a fine time is the early morning.

I rush in at once to explain that, to me, the early morning is somewhere between nine and 10am, so let me dissociate myself at the start from those Viking characters who say early morning is the best time of day, meaning sometime in the dark ages, when the dawn is coming up.

I had been told this incessantly by unquestionably fine types: fishermen, farmers, politicians who work neatly and inexhaustibly. Jimmy Carter was the type, so was Harry Truman, both of them you will notice, brought up on farms. Truman was murder on the normal type of White House correspondent, the normal being a reporter of some talent, one who comes awake late, does some diligent digging of his sources, writes his piece and then stays up till all hours, drinking and trading rumours and wisecracks with other traders.

Truman got up every morning of his life at five. When he was in the White House he was trotting out of the gates at a quarter to six, off for a brisk and appallingly good-natured walk around 10 or 12 blocks, of the streets in and around Pennsylvania Avenue, trailed by a couple of secret service men and about half-a-dozen reporters, usually young ones, who didn’t know any better.

I think now what an innocent time that was, only 30 years ago, when a president could stop passersby, admire a baby, talk to a streetsweeper, wave at people on the buses, and do this every day and be back at the White House, safe and sound. Today, the president can go nowhere without whole motorcades of secret servicemen, swishing through streets first, checking every shop and park for security, every rooftop being patrolled by men cradling tommy guns, and the motor cars going by at such a pace that it can only be one of two possible types of human being in transit – a crook making his getaway, or a President of the United States.

Truman was so hard on all of us for nearly eight years that the day Eisenhower was inaugurated and Truman went home to independent Missouri, a very small gaggle of reporters went to the railroad station to see him off. And as the train shunted out, and he stood there on the observation platform, his spectacles glittering and his teeth bared in that perpetual chuckle, one old reporter said, "I love him dearly, but thank God he has finally been put out to pasture".

So while I pay a passing – even a sneakingly envious – tribute to those fine, true, early-morning types, fishermen, farmers, golfers, dedicated fathers of small children, let me say that those people, those men anyway, who tell you that early morning is the best time of the day are usually very fine and cordial fellows through the morning but they are very dull dogs in the evening, eyelids clicking in a slow rhythm, like babies before they drop off into a 10-hour coma.

What I find so agreeable about the hour or two after most people come awake is that it’s a time of truce between human beings who, a little later on will be bargaining and arguing, and fighting, resenting, laughing, groaning. But, not long out of bed, even gangsters and dictators have to pull their eyelids and shuffle off for their breakfast, make humdrum remarks about the weather and how they slept.

I once visited a famous prison, out west, the morning, the early morning, after a riot. If I had been a member of an investigating commission I would have suspended all enquiry till noon at the earliest, otherwise I’d have been hopelessly prejudiced in the convicts favour, because the men sat around, sheepish, very peaceable, wanting more than anything their coffee and to be left alone awhile, before they started to stoke up their grievances.

My own routine – and it's absolutely dependable – is to put myself to sleep for half an hour or an hour at night into the early hours with the volume of somebody’s diaries or letters. Lately we have had a clutch of them.

The letters of Raymond Chandler, a morose, wry man, who wrote letters better than he wrote his private eye novels. Nunnally Johnson, funny and loveable Hollywood writer with an acute eye for what human beings seem to be, and what they really want to have you think about them. He has a priceless remark about the late, famous, or infamous, American gossip columnist, Walter Winshall, who descended on various kinds of society like an ambassador from the emperor, expecting people to click heels and listen to his interminable fund of deep secrets, about everybody from prime ministers to Hollywood blondes.

Johnson says, in one letter, "Walter Winshall has been through here. He is, as you know, a splendid fellow, with only one wee weakness, he thinks everybody is glad to see him".

I also find myself coming to the end of the eighth volume of James Agate's Ego. Only one more volume to go, and then I’ll have to start again. And then yesterday, mooching around a bookshop I saw a holly berry of a red face glaring at me on a book jacket: WC Field's nose, eyes as blue as gas jets, a circle and two dabs of hoar frost by way of hair and eyebrows, nobody but the irascible, mischievous, incomparable Malcolm Muggeridge, whose diaries are just out.

Well, by the time I’d put the light out, I was angry at him, my normal 45 minutes had gone to two hours... and this morning I was more comatose, more shuffling than usual. But, this drenching in the political gossip of 20, 30, 40 years had one salutary effect. By the time I’d had breakfast and come to, and began to wonder what to tell you about, I felt not so much better about the state of America and the world, but better about what you and I think about it, no cause, I found, to feel that we are helpless pawns, that we know nothing, and that all the real knowledge of the way things are going belongs to the big boys, to politicians and economists and scientific experts and deep-thinking journalists.

Mr Muggeridge’s accursedly absorbing book is full of the cogitations and remarks and predications of important people. For several years, he was a busy newspaper correspondent and editor with access to all the people in the know. and what did they know? Well, in about 1948, 9, after the devaluation of the pound, Britain was certainly going to collapse into bankruptcy; a year or so later, an atomic war, sometime in the following five years, was another virtual certainty.

A famous British novelist, racked at all times by profound thoughts, knew in his bones that very soon the choice for Europe would be between being ruled by Russia or America, and on the whole, he felt life under the Russians would be preferable. This man is now crowding 80 and Europe, angry though it might be at the Russian-American standoff and the missile rattling is, if anything, more itself than it’s been since before the second war.

And in all these memoirs and predictions about the shape of things to come, I find no mention of Japan, even in the period of say the late '50s. This blindness to what was in front of our eyes still rankles with me because of one memory from the World’s Fair in Brussels in, I think, 1958.

Every nation represented there had the usual pavilion exhibiting its traditional symbols and the manufactured goods it was proudest of. I seem to remember lions rampant for Britain and spreads of fine textiles, and some reminder of an early train. The United States had a collage of sacred objects from Lincoln and Washington to the first Ford and the Grand Canyon and the great dams out west and so on, and on.

The Japanese pavilion, as I recall it, was quite small, you walked in and saw ahead of you an enormous circular lens, I would guess about six feet across. You stood in front of it, and looked through it – there was nowhere else to look – and saw a beautiful, huge evergreen which had been delicately taught how to grow, how this branch and curve and that tendril should be supported. You walked behind the lens and there it was, its proper size, a tiny exquisite bonsai. That was all, two symbols of Japan, stated with typical neatness and finality. With, we ought to have foreseen, ominous finality. And I remember photographers, both amateur and professional, went into writhing shapes to try and capture this magnified object on their lenses – need I say the lenses of their German cameras.

Today the Germans have their lenses ground in Japan. So what I am saying to myself, as much as to you, is take heart, and be a little sceptical when you read about what is sure to happen to Russia when Brezhnev is gone, to the American economy a year from now, even about the coming bankruptcy of professional soccer in Britain.

Nothing is certain, they used to say, but death and taxes, and Mr Reagan is trying to defy even this old bit of wisdom, and saying nothing is certain but death. For it goes on, with his chin up, declaring that nothing and nobody is going to make him try and solve things by imposing more taxes.

There is no future, no present, in prophecy. I begin to admire more and more the people who hew to their job and see their duty as giving their all to a few individuals they can help, like a man who has just died, a man quite unknown to fame, Dr Arthur Barsky, a pioneer plastic surgeon who 37 years ago turned from his profitable practice, to treat 24 deformed orphans of the Hiroshima bombing.

He thereafter specialised in reconstructive surgery on orphans from other devastated lands, and at the age of 70 he was so moved by accounts of the war injuries to children in Vietnam that he went out there and set up a 50-bed unit in Saigon, and didn’t give a damn whether he was working on the children of south Vietnam, or of the Vietcong. He gave himself wholly to this daily work till he was in his late 70s.

He died this week, at the age of 83. Dr Arthur Barsky is the name.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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