The Korean war and political holidays - 27 August 1993

This letter should come under the heading of answers to correspondence, something I believe I've done only once before. Though an ingenious listener has suggested that, since you must have a whopping great bag of daily mail – right – much of it from people who expect an answer – alas most of it – wouldn't it make sense to answer them in public, i.e. over the air?

Well, it would except most of the letters that mean to correct me, either adopt the tone of "Sir, you cur" or a fussing about some problem as tiny as a pinpoint or so local, so personal it couldn't possibly interest anyone but the closest members of their family. But I must say that, from to time, letters do arrive that sharpen the perspective of something I've talked about or set me straight in the most useful and what's more, and what's rarer, the most courteous way.

Such a letter dropped at my door a day or two ago, on a topic I've talked about more than once and which in I've never managed to get exactly right. Do you remember a week or two ago, I retold what happened over a weekend in June 1950 the accident of the Soviet's man being absent from the United Nations Security Council meeting, which was able, therefore, to vote unanimously in favour of military action on the side of South Korea against the invading North Koreans. It was the first time there'd ever been a unanimous vote in the council because of the veto – a weapon which the founding conference of the United Nations had given to the five permanent members of the council, the big powers, which then were the United States, the United Kingdom, Soviet Union, France and wait for it Chiang Kai-shek's China. Only five years after the founding of the United Nations, June 1950 is when this historic vote was taken very swiftly because no delegate of the Soviet Union was on hand to cast the dreaded veto.

Well, the letter I've just had comes from the horse's mouth, from the last surviving horse that was there in the race in June 1950 to vote "yes" to military action. Sitting up there in the press gallery, I, I suppose I was watching this man, he was on the British delegation and sat through the emergency meetings that led to the waging of the first United Nations War and I was suggesting the other week the last good war.

Well my correspondent Gordon Campbell and later to ennobled to Campbell of Croy has straightened me out in the most good tempered way cleared up a shred of fog that remained in my mind and left us with an unanswered puzzle, which I didn't even know was a puzzle. I'm sorry to say that I'm going to have to forfeit my dramatic account.

The Soviets were boycotting the Security Council because the United Nations would not admit the new Communist China. That was correct, but I said there were no accredited Soviet delegates in New York, so they didn't vote because we had only propeller planes in those days and it would have taken a Soviet delegate say 24 hours to fly from Moscow to New York. So Harry Truman told his Secretary of State the bristly moustachioed Acheson, told him to get to New York in a hurry, call the council into emergency session, put up a resolution and get a vote on it, presto pronto, before that huge spreading four-engine Russian prop plane came winging like a vulture into Idlewild as it then was.

So we went into Korea and fought for the right or for the lack of a jet plane and a bustling Russian to say "no". A tingling account unfortunately wrong, nothing to do with jet propulsion, his lordship tells me that while it's true, the Soviet's chief delegate Malik was away from New York, his deputy was there thoroughly qualified to act for the Soviet Union, why did he not? Why did he presumably sulk in the Soviet house on Park Avenue and not trot over to the East River and foil the lot of us, that's one puzzle. However, somewhere along the line, along the cable and telephone lines between Moscow and New York, somebody – and surely could only be the big chief himself, Khrushchev – must have told him to stay put, in other words, to maintain their policy of boycotting the council meetings continuing the "let China in policy". Whether Khrushchev guessed what would happen so soon and, if so, whether he came privately to regret his decision is something I doubt we shall ever know.

What must also have puzzled the White House and the British delegation here at the time was why Moscow had allowed its satellite Asian allies to invade South Korea just at that time. Again, we don't know.

Well now, I have a second letter from a friend and Englishman who heard my last letter about presidential holidays and the favourite sports of the presidents. You may recall that the main points were two. One, the boldness of Mr Clinton in announcing a 10-day vacation having in mind the rough time President Bush had had with the media and therefore by osmosis with the public when he was seen so often playing golf, tennis, touch football, fishing, speeding, he suffered from the same absurdly unfair charge as Eisenhower that he was neglecting the presidency in the interests of improving his putting or whatever.

My Englishman who knows this country well says he couldn't remember a time when the British public ever complained about a Prime Minister's holidays or seem to care. The implication he dropped here was that Britons were somewhat more mature in allowing demure that prime ministers have a right to take a holiday just like people. Well in my memory he's certainly right, but I wonder if things are changing.

My friend and colleague in the fourth estate Mr William Safire suggested this much in a piece the other day from Paris no less, which began characteristically enough, "Why are the world media so avidly covering the podgy paunches of leaders on vacation?" Well that's it; I thought it was an American fixation when things are going well for the president to show him as human as the rest of us indicating as they used to do with Roosevelt, the impressive size of the fish that got away. And when things weren't going well, showing him at his carefree sport in order to encourage the nasty notion that he's careless of the nation's woes. Anticipating Mr Safire's points, if European countries are now following the American mania to cover ever step of the leaders trend, hitting a ball, casting a rod, even as Bill Clinton suffers every morning of his life being shown puffing along a country road in the hazardous business of jogging, then I think the answer is television. The availability of television combined with the availability of press media credentials.

In December 1960 and again the same time 1961, I went down to Palm Beach Florida to cover president elect first time and then President Kennedy for my paper. I was the only foreign correspondent on and, all the others were accredited White House correspondents, that's to say they covered the White House exclusively for their papers. There was one television reporter present and she was down there on holiday, so in all the White House press corps I should say would be a dozen, 15 of us at the most.

Today, the White House has accredited to its something over 200 correspondents. How come, why? Because every town in America has a city TV station, every cable channel has reporters, so why not have our very own White House correspondent. So let's settle on 200 men and women, boys and girls sifting around every morning with trying to find a story to tell or, to be more accurate, a picture to show their viewers – that's the rump. If there are more newspaper and magazine reporters than there have been who are obliged to write a piece every day, there are hundreds more television reporters who are looking primarily for a picture, preferably a dramatic or funny picture, a fire, a riot, a murder scene, a trial in cities where television's allowed. The point is that the press has papers to fill and the television crews have pictures to show every day of their lives.

Anyway, the Congress is off too, so there can't be any grousing about this massive coverage in Washington. Yet, Mr Safire is very disturbed about what he's discovered, what he's discovered to be not an American but a worldwide obsession, so he reports seeing Li Peng in bathing trunks, the French prime minister's dog hurting a bodyguard – some bodyguard, some dog. Helmet Kohl consuming great mounds of dumplings on the Wolfgangsee and Mr Safire's phrase not mine, "John Major lollygagging in Portugal." Is that what he was doing? Lollygagging is old American for lounging through some useless or trivial pursuit. I do hope Mr Major was not seen dancing in public, if so, you can be sure some mischief maker would dig up the first printed use of the word, though in mid-century America, mid-19th century it was a common bit of vernacular. A newspaper called The Northern Vindicator, this was just after the Civil War, deplored quote 'the lascivious lollygagging lumps of licentiousness who disgraced the common decencies of life by their lovesick fawnings at our public dances'. After that Helmut Kohl's dumplings and Bill Clinton's stripping to the waist seemed innocent activities indeed.

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