America on Standby - 21 September 2001

I make no apology for beginning, yet again, with a memory, which has never faded, of the First World War.

The late Dr Sigmund Freud said: "The unconscious has a long memory and a logic all its own", and the senses of a small child of between the ages of six and 10 are here to prove it.

When, last week, I first saw what so many firemen, doctors and nurses were moving about in - the huge, raw landscape of fog and rubble and twisted steel and what we now call, without a wince, body parts - my memory immediately matched the scene with the newsreel pictures we saw 80-odd years ago every week in what to me was known as the local picturedrome - a rotted landscape, no foliage, no leaves, trees shot down to broken matchsticks in a miles-wide tangle of barbed wire decorated with body parts.

In the midst of one thundering battle there appeared in the night sky a glowing figure in a frame of blinding light.

All the thousands of soldiers saw was the figure of an angel - it became known as the Angel of Mons - and in time the sensible wisdom was that it had been seen by either the very religious or the very naïve.

But hundreds of soldiers who were neither swore they had seen in it an angel of deliverance.

Mons was where the British, in the earliest days of the war, first engaged the Germans and Mons was recaptured on the last day of the war, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918.

Ever since there has been an annual memorial service in Mons dedicated to Saint George, who, you recall, slew the dragon.

Well, while on that dreadful Tuesday morning, a week and more ago, we lay, stood or patted in the first terrified days of seeing the hellish scene, there arose - to be less poetic buy more correct, I think I should saw there popped up - a figure pointing, taking charge, in a suit, in a sweater, in a helmet, in the downtown hell, in an uptown church.

A well-known figure, not hitherto thought of as an angel - a fallen angel perhaps with a rather messy private life - known to most Americans as a very quick-witted public prosecutor and active public servant who had greatly reduced crime and performed other virtuous services in his job as the second most powerful executive in the United States - namely the mayor of New York City.

More than any mayor in my lifetime, except Fiorello La Guardia, Rudolph Giuliani has been loved and loathed.

All the truly effective mayors alienate one group or another - whites, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, the Irish, the Italians, whoever, whatever.

The inimitable Ed "how am I doing" Koch said, with his foxy smile: "Being well hated in one quarter or another goes with the job."

Even Mayor Giuliani's noisiest detractors admit that during his boisterous and active reign the crime figures have dropped dramatically - the drug traffic has been temporarily crippled.

His career as a United States attorney has been so long that even admirers have forgotten or never knew that he broke the Mafia, that he put away many famous scoundrels, he filed that alarming list of criminal charges against the lately notorious Mark Rich who was, however, pardoned by the retiring President Clinton and so left free to enjoy the ski slopes of Switzerland.

If before 11 September we'd been asked to sum up the mayoralty of Mr Giuliani - his term ends in December - most of us I think would have said, a small man, a battery of energy, brainy, ruthless with opponents, whether likeable or not immensely competent.

Tuesday morning, within the hour of the shattering of the towers, we saw deep in the grey-black fog and the writhing steel and the rubble a man barely recognisable as Rudolph Giuliani and from then till now, 20 hours a day, everywhere there was trouble, and mourning, and work to be done and ordered, here he was, gentle with widows and old people, enormously instructive at all times, exercising almost saintly patience with the press, never striking a wrong emotional note, never sentimental or platitudinous, never showing a spark of temper.

He was what the Greeks called "an epiphany" - a manifestation of a super human being.

And thanks to worldwide television he was seen for many days as the leader of the nation - an impression that of course flashed to us an almost guilty reflection: Where, in a word, was the president?

It took our leading newspaper only two days to write a scolding editorial complaining that it was not Mr Bush who had so gallantly and quickly stood among the firefighters and the grieving, comforting at a hospital bedside, praying in a humble church.

By weird coincidence, directly opposite the scolding editorial was a piece written by one of the paper's political columnists - but this was not a matter of opinion, it was hard reporting, and when Mr William Safire turns reporter he seems to have a direct line to the horse's mouth.

It was an account of how Vice-President Cheney took command of the whole security emergency, realised in an instant the personal peril the president was in, guessed correctly that the Pentagon bomber was at first intended for the White House, and directed the president to be flown off to secret locations in three other places - one of them, the nuclear control centre deep in the bowels of the prairie in Nebraska.

This astonishing story, in effect scolding the scolding editorial, was confirmed in every detail the following Sunday by the vice-president himself in a network television interview.

This journalistic jumping of the gun of judgement should alert us, I think, to the role of the press, the media, today - surely a naïve question to ask - isn't the media's function what it's always been, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable?

After this catastrophe the second half of that injunction carries a quite new peril - to afflict the comfortable has always meant in practice to keep an eye on government on behalf of the governed.

But in the past quarter century there has been a tendency in this country certainly to assume that a reporter's job is primarily to smell out corruption, and on bad days invent it.

This drift is due to the remarkable success in the early 1970s of the two Washington reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, in unearthing the dirt of the Watergate scandal and pushing Richard Nixon out of the presidency.

Not too long ago I asked a young college graduate what he wanted to be - he said an investigative reporter. Why not, I suggested, just a reporter?

This ambition flourishes today in reporters who honestly believe that their first job is to find out who's to blame and already in the interminable procession of television talk shows and round table discussions we discover that the country's absolutely teeming with professors, international affairs gurus, ex-cabinet officers, journalists who are, surprisingly, experts on terrorism.

We're going, I think, to have trouble with this side of the media. I suggest now is not the time to stomp around looking for someone to blame.

Of course the government must always be open to criticism, but since most living American journalists have never covered a war there may be lots of trouble and ill-feeling ahead if, as happens in all wars, there has to be a form of censorship.

Most journalists I've listened to have, I'm sure, no idea that 12 years ago Vice-President Cheney, who was then Secretary of Defence Cheney, was busy drawing up a study of the care and destruction of counter-terrorism, especially in the Arab world or out of the Arab world into America.

An old friend, long in government but now on the sidelines of the aged, mentioned how grateful we - President Bush more than any of us - should be that he has on his team Mr Cheney, General - now Secretary of State - Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld, once and present Secretary of Defence, ambassador to Nato, special envoy to the Middle East.

These three and a whole squad of CIA and FBI unknowns were in the thick of the conduct of the Gulf War and explain, I think, the uncanny job done so far by the FBI in tracking down, without panic or illegal tactics, hot suspects in the most unlikely public places and in obscure suburbs from Maine to California.

For the great mass of people - the people I suppose is a better word - the job ahead is in the long run of understanding, along with the government, the nature of this new war.

In the short run the more difficult task for all of us is the emotional, the psychological one, of knowing this as a new age and knowing how we should act in it.

On the first day of the apocalypse Mayor Giuliani was asked by a news reporter what we ordinary people ought to do.

He said: "Take your kids on a picnic, take in a show, go out and buy something, pray to God and do your usual job whatever it is, however humble."

Almost four centuries ago an Englishman, George Herbert - a poet, later a priest, in a very turbulent time in English history - urged the same advice:

"A servant ... Makes drudgery divine: Who sweeps a room as by thy laws Makes that and the action fine."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING 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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