US impotent in Lebanon conflict

From time to time, I have to remind myself that when you write a letter to a friend you don't sit down feeling a prior obligation to show that you're up on current events. Also, from time to time, I get surprising reminders that even the most important people, what the book of Ecclesiastes calls 'men renown-ed for their power', don't expect always a letter to be a political lecture.

Some years ago I was sitting in the lounge at Kennedy airport, waiting to hear them call my flight to London, when a portly, kindly, old gentleman approached me. He apologised for the intrusion, he made nice noises about these talks, he mentioned his name, diffidently, almost inaudibly, as English people tend to. As it might have been, 'I'm Freddie Wood'. He said that through the years, there were two talks that had stayed with him that he liked most. As he gave me a slightly mischievous glance, waiting for me to guess which of about a thousand talks might have impressed him, it struck me with the force of a coronary that Freddie Wood, or whoever, might be the name by which he was known to his friends, but to Who's Who and the newspapers and the rest of us, he was nobody less than the Lord Chief Justice of England.

In the split second between my realising this and his recollection, I darted back through the mists of memory to guess what could possibly have impressed so grand a figure. Had I lately talked about the Supreme Court, I wondered? Had I ever paid tribute to the greatest of American jurists, Mr Justice Holmes? I had, but only in print and then in observance of the great man's centenary which had come up three years before these talks started.

Freddie Wood said quite simply, 'I liked specially your obituary talk on General Marshall but most of all the story about an illiterate black girl who stole a newborn baby from a New York hospital one winter night and took care of it in a dingy room while the FBI scoured the country'.

Well, that made me feel better about the complaints, which are infrequent but regular – complaints from people who say they're not interested in the history of the hamburgers so long as nine people in a hundred are unemployed and the people who say, 'Please don't ever talk about the American political system. It's bad enough trying to understand our own'.

I believe that if you had a letter from any American friend of yours this week you'd hear first about the blessed approach of cool, brilliant days, about getting the children back to school and hoping that the teachers would not go on strike for a spell, about the national railway strike – worse, the national football strike – and maybe some striking feature of 1982, such as that the bookshops and the bestseller lists are cluttered with two kinds of book: cookbooks describing every sort of recipe from every country, from goat cheese omelette to Bantu cuisine and books recommending a score of new diets which forbid you to eat just about everything that's in the new cookbooks. Are we, then, a bunch of Philistines who shut out all the woes of the world and think only of ourselves?

'Only' is the deceptive word here. The answer is 'of course not'. Like people everywhere, we're interested first in our personal lives but after that, we try to handle our anxiety and vent our opinions about troubles both domestic and foreign. And turning to those things, I would say that this has been a bloodthirsty week indeed if the thirst had not been amply slaked by the sad news from Monaco and the outrageous news from West Beirut. And about that horror, what is there to say that can be helpful?

Lebanon begins to look like the scene for one of the gorier Shakespeare historical plays with heirs apparent murdered, brothers taking over, kings and statesmen swearing eternal enmity and massacres reported off-stage. I will only remark on the peculiarly baffled position of the President of the United States. Not of this one particularly, of any man who happened just now to be the president. It seems to me that he is the victim of America's 30-year reign as top dog, or what we came to call 'the leader of the Western world'.

Certainly, I believe, 20 years ago, he could have intimidated Lebanon into an easy calm by the mere despatch of the marines to Beirut as Eisenhower did, but, as happens inevitably with great powers, as happened most notably with Great Britain in the decade after the Second War, they go on acting beyond their capacity as if they still had the power that once ruled, or calmed, the world.

It's not simply that America is now only one of two superpowers, but that many small nations have, in the past 20 years or so, overcome their fear that anyone would use a nuclear weapon and have felt free to launch conventional wars and do so without the accompanying fear that they would be stopped by the United Nations. I remarked the other week on the Secretary-General's frank and melancholy admission that the United Nations, in almost all international disputes, is either ignored or defied.

It struck me as noteworthy at the time, though it was not noted, that when Israel agreed to let an international, or as we know say 'multi-national', force into Lebanon, there appeared to be no suggestion that it should be a United Nations' force. It was even more of a sad surprise this week to learn that all the time there has been a United Nations' force in Lebanon of 8,000 men, sent there to stop the Israelis fighting the Palestinians and the Palestinians fighting the Israelis, but when the Israelis invaded, the UN forces simply stepped aside. They became, in a literal and pathetic sense, observers.

President Reagan's position is an acute embarrassment that emphasises, I think, the present impotence of a great nation which, unlike the Soviet Union, does not possess conventional forces sufficiently huge to intimidate any nation that invades or threatens to bestride an American's fear of interest. It was not so exactly 20 years ago when the Russians installed missile sites and equipment in Cuba, a memorable, a terrifying, crisis that is being recalled this week by many of the government men who had to handle it.

They were brought together recently by Time, the magazine, to say what went on during those dreadful 13 days in October 1962 and to decide, in retrospect, how and why the nuclear conflict that we all feared was avoided. It's worth naming the men whom President Kennedy assembled as a task force once American spy planes had photographed and confirmed beyond a doubt that the Russians had already installed nuclear missiles and their support systems in Cuba.

The news did not burst, was not allowed to burst, on the American people right away. It was too grave for that. I well remember being on a press plane with Kennedy as he was flying out to Chicago, I think, to lend a supporting voice to some Democratic politician running for office in the November election. We were still in the air on our way out there when the president's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, came down the aisle of the plane to announce that we were flying back to Washington because the president had a fever. Nothing alarming, but enough for his doctor to require him to take sensible precautions.

Of course, we took this word at its face value. None of us knew a thing about missiles or other Russian intentions in Cuba, but it came out much later that it was on that plane that the president had had a radioed telephone call from one of his security advisers, reporting with absolute certainty the photographic evidence collected by an American U-2 spy plane.

Back in Washington, the president called in Mr Gromyko, the perpetual Soviet foreign minister, to a secret meeting at which he confronted him with the news. Mr Gromyko flatly denied there were any missiles and later brushed off any new armaments in Cuba as defensive precautions. The subsequent history of cables and warnings and daily exchanges between the allies is one of subtle and serious jockeying and it doesn't concern us here. It's been told many times. Let me name the task force that has just been reassembled and reported the one new and significant finding of theirs.

They are Dean Rusk who was then secretary of state, Robert McNamara, secretary of defence, Roswell Gilpatric, his deputy, George Ball, under-secretary of state, Theodore Sorensen, a special counsel to the president and McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor.

They have agreed that if the United States had made clearer earlier an absolute stand against Soviet nuclear weapons in the Western hemisphere, the crisis could have been avoided. They agreed on many other things but the one novelty which reflects on America's comparative impotence in the Middle East runs counter to the received opinion of the last two decades, which is that what made the Russians dismantle their missiles was the knowledge of America's nuclear superiority.

Not so. It was the president's decision to mobilise along the whole Florida peninsula and out into the Caribbean, naval and air and ground forces not only able to overwhelm Cuba, or stop any fleet of supply, but, as the Russians were to learn, an attacking force more powerful and concentrated than any used in a single theatre in the Second World War. In other words, in 1962, the United States could intimidate even the Soviet Union with immense conventional forces assembled in a chosen place.

So, if President Reagan seems today to be reduced to warning and pleading and deploring, it's because, down the years, we have trusted to the nuclear arsenal as THE deterrent and reverted to the sturdy American dislike of a standing army while the Russians can keep a million men on the Chinese frontiers, spare a hundred thousand men in Afghanistan and still retain enough legions of ordinary men and ordinary guns to leave them undisturbed by the combined forces of the Western 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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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