Press overkill on hostages return

One night this week, I found myself, as the French say, I found myself reading the letters of Queen Victoria. They are so called, even though I should guess more than half of them are letters to Queen Victoria from various of her ministers.

Now what was I doing here in New York in 1981 alone after midnight, pouring over yellowing pages and such stuff as Queen Victoria to the Earl of Clarendon from Balmoral? And next day, Viscount Canning to Queen Victoria from Calcutta. Was I burying my head in the sand to blot out the cheering and the fireworks outside?

On the contrary, at the end of a week that has been exhilarating and depressing, rousing and strangely disturbing, I was looking back to a situation in Britain that is not totally unlike the situation the United States will now face in its relations with Iran. Bear with me for a minute or two while I read you a letter from Viscount Canning to the Queen, written in September 1857.

It was the year of the Indian Mutiny, what Parliament and most British people looked on as the dangerous precedent of a military uprising and what Disraeli, a lonely and unpopular voice, called a national revolt of natives and native governors against a system whereby the mother country made India a duty-free market for British goods, but by barring Indian manufactures from Britain with high tariffs, bankrupted millions of natives who wove textiles and practised handicrafts and so condemned them to scratch for a living by throwing them back on the overworked soil.

However that may be, once the revolt was on, there was savage brutality on both sides and there came a day when the British garrison at Lucknow was besieged. Viscount Canning was the Governor of India and he wrote to the Queen from Calcutta to tell her that 'the garrison contains about 350 European men, 450 women and children, 120 sick, besides 300 natives hitherto faithful. The city may be abandoned and recovered again but these lives must be saved now or never, and to escape the sorrow and humiliation of such barbarities as have already been endured elsewhere, is worth any sacrifice.'

Well, in the days when you could send in 20,000 soldiers of the line without fear of retaliation from the Russians or anybody else, Lucknow was relieved after four and a half months but, in the middle of the siege and the middle of his letter, Canning was looking ahead and warning the Queen: 'One of the great difficulties,' he writes, 'will be the violent rancour of a very large proportion of the English community against every native Indian of every class. There is a rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad. Not one man in ten seems to think that the hanging and shooting of 40 or 50,000 mutineers can be otherwise than practicable and right. To those who hearts have been torn by the barbarities inflicted upon those dear to them, any degree of bitterness against the natives may be excused but the cry is raised loudest by those who have been sitting quietly in their homes and have suffered little from the convulsions around them. Nor does it occur to those who talk and write most upon the matter that for the sovereign of England to hold and govern Indian without employing and trusting natives is simply impossible.'

Well, the United States does not have the problem of pacifying the rebels and taking them once more into the family of government. It will, however, have to face an early future in which its relations with Iran are friendly enough to guarantee the neutrality or the freedom to international shipping of the Persian Gulf ports and that is what General Haig and the State Department will have to work on now that the cheering and the weeping are over and the yellow ribbons are coming down.

They didn't come down everywhere. After what the president and some of the hostages' wives and parents hoped would be the final outburst of welcome and warm-heartedness at the White House, the mayor of New York – not to be outdone by the days of celebration and thanksgiving we saw on television in Algeria, in Wiesbaden, at West Point and then in Washington – repeated a request he'd sent to Mr Reagan while he was still president-elect, proposing a grand ticker-tape parade in New York City, the sort of artificial snowstorm of welcome that has been given in the past to such generals as Eisenhower and MacArthur and to the astronaut John Glenn. Mr Reagan, way back there on the 7 January, agreed. It was at a time when none of us knew whether the hostages would be out next month or next year.

But, after four days of almost total saturation of our television networks with the sight of the hostages, news of them, scenes of their families, interviews with officials, reports and rumours and confessions about solitary confinement and other ill-treatment, then long hours, last Sunday, seeing the plane land at West Point, then the motorcade through Washington and the scenes in the White House and cut to Plains, Georgia for comments from ex-President Carter and, in the evenings, hastily assembled hour-long documentaries on the whole history of the capture, the Ayatollah, the failure in the desert, the wrecked helicopters, pages and pages in the newspapers every day reconstructing the events of 14 months, steady warnings from psychiatrists about the weight of the let-down the hostages would feel as they tried, after a hero's welcome, to adjust to their own people in their own towns. After what seemed like a perpetual circus staged with all the goodwill in the world, Secretary of State Haig telephoned Mayor Koch and told him that he thought the hostages might not be psychologically ready for a big New York ticker-tape parade.

General Haig, remember, saw combat in Korea and made many journeys to Vietnam and, certainly, has been well acquainted for 30 years or so with what was once called shell-shock and then battle fatigue and now, with more clinical follow-ups of soldiers subjected to imprisonment and loneliness, let alone torture, is known as psychiatric disability. Secretary Haig was at his desk first thing on the morning after the inauguration, beginning to repeat the ten to twelve-hour day he'd thrived on as White House chief of staff and NATO commander. When he telephoned Mayor Koch, he knew what we only began to learn about during lucid intervals of the unending celebration that, at the very least, a dozen of the hostages showed bad signs of depression, loss of memory, clinical sulkiness – a symptom that flared up, to the surprise of President Carter, when he went to embrace them in Wiesbaden.

But Mayor Koch was not going to let Washington rain on his parade. With his usual, carefree spontaneity, he spurned General Haig's warning suggestion. The army's own psychologist who interviewed them, he quoted, said that 'an outpouring of affection and respect was just what they needed. As for General Haig, I hope he'll be a whiz-bang as Secretary of State but as a doctor, he's not so good.'

So New York prepared to get out the cars for the motorcade and the ticker-tape was to be torn and showered on... on the hostages who agreed to show up. The significant thing here which reflects on the comparative merits of General Haig and Mayor Koch as psychiatrists is that only 21 men and 2 women hostages accepted the invitation; 29 turned it down.

What we've seen in the past week is what I can only call 'overkill by kindness'. Somebody said, somebody must have said, that a nation's vices are the excess of its virtues and no nation is less grudging of warm-heartedness when it comes up against a natural disaster – a flood, a fire, an earthquake or the sudden need to help a neighbour – and it's entirely understandable that a generous and quick-spirited people have endured a galling 14 months of frustration tantalised by the magic of television on which they could see their sons and husbands, hear them make uncomplaining noises – what else? – while they were still captive and be totally unable to do anything. And nothing could be more natural than the great cry of joy and relief when, at last and so suddenly, the deal was made.

At another time, I mean in another age, the hostages would have come back, they would have gone to their rejoicing homes, there certainly would have been in many a small town a local band and a local procession but what turned this natural expression of gratitude into a national trade fair of patriotism and sentiment was nothing but television. Where there are four competing national networks, none of them dared say we shall cover the take-off from Iran, the landing in Algiers, Mr Carter's welcome in Wiesbaden, the presidential greeting at the White House and there an end.

So they mobilised all their best people and stripped their bureaux everywhere else and waited and jealously watched to see what their rivals were doing and, once the planes were airborne over Tehran, they gave their all for fear they'd be accused of not giving their all.

I have often praised American television for the comprehensiveness of its evening news programmes. Even though half an hour every evening is little time to give to the news, the networks do show an alertness to what is going on in London and Berlin and Bonn and Stockholm and Tokyo, El Salvador, Mexico and in a half-dozen different places in the United States but this past week when, for instance, a thousand people drowned in a boat, apparently nothing has happened elsewhere. Even President Reagan has appeared only as a sort of master of ceremonies to the hostages.

Apart from the distortion that this orgy gives to the news of the world, I'm bound to wonder what it does to the ego of the hostages when they are out of their battledress, so to speak, and what it does to their families when they must face the irritability, the sense of defeat and suddenly the anonymity of an old hero which is bound to come.

As for the text of this talk, the larger question, the necessary recovery from a rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness against the Iranians, we can only hope that General Haig and the State Department, most of all President Reagan, are well aware of it and will begin to sound the Lincoln note and bind up the nation's wounds and go forward.

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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