Young's final diplomacy

The finest thing that Canada exports to the United States is the north-west wind. We suffer in summer – we, being the entire east coast and most of the continental mainland – we suffer from a prevailing south, worse south-east wind, which you hardly need a map to tell you comes up from the tropical islands of the Caribbean, across a thousand miles or more of ocean, wind as hot as a sauna and limp as a dishcloth. And it hits our warm coast and condenses into an infernal stew.

For the past month, we've had atrocious weather of, I'm sorry to say, an entirely normal kind. Three-quarters of this continent has been slopping in temperatures between 90 and a hundred with close to maximum humidity and, such is the progress of what we call civilisation, that people droop and grouch about it much more than they did before the Second War or, for that matter, a decade after it, when we had no air-conditioning. But suddenly, after a colossal storm over the weekend, the north-west wind came in and everything is like the fall – the skies washed clean, crisp air, the light ringing like a bell. 

What this does is to make you feel as you do when you come suddenly out of a fever, you're in focus again and can think clearly. Now it would be nice after this ordeal to be able to think nice, clean, clear and happy thought. However, this week a nasty storm blew up over the political horizon and we'll need all the mental focus we can manage to see how and why it happened. 

It looked at first like yet another episode in the continuing soap opera called 'Andrew Young, Diplomat'. Well, I don't want to rehearse the whole series of gaffes performed by Mr Young since President Carter appointed him two and a half years ago to be the United States ambassador to the United Nations. From the first shock to American policy of his saying that Cuban troops in Angola were a stabilising influence, through his cocky remarks about Britain having been the inventor of racism, down to this week's sad blunder, the political consequences of which both at home and abroad it's, at the moment, impossible to guess at. 

It will be enough to stir uncomfortable memories in most of you if I remind you of probably his most unfortunate, and certainly to the Western world his most damaging, remark made when Mr Carter was in the middle of his humane campaign to get the Soviets to recognise that one gross violation of the Helsinki Agreements was the continuing practice of jailing people for their political opinions. Mr Young chose that delicate time to muse aloud that the United States, and that meant his president, ought not to scold other nations because, after all, the United States, quote, 'probably has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of political prisoners', unquote. 

Well, the United States did not have any political prisoners, except, it struck some of us at the time, one – Mr Carter, it seemed then was surely a political prisoner of Mr Young, for Mr Young, it became increasingly evident, simply could not be fired. He's a close friend of Mr Carter, who must wish some nights that he had fewer close friends and more distant enemies. Mr Young is, without question, very able. An extremely intelligent man who has grasped the nettle of many, very prickly, political problems, particularly in Africa, perhaps because, as he said without self-pity and with straightforward dignity the other night, unfortunately but by birth I come from the ranks of those who have known some level of oppression in the world. So, by choice, I continued to identify with what would be called, in biblical terms, the least of these, my brothers. 

Mr Young, in short, is a black man who has managed to plant confidence in American intentions in some of the most powerful of the black leaders in Africa. Mr Carter once went so far as to say that American relations, in as many as 50 countries, were better than they had been because of Andrew Young. 'An extraordinary asset', he called him. And he kept him on, in spite of regular, almost dependable, public statements that were an embarrassment to the president and the secretary of state. Why? 

Well, Mr Carter must have gone over in his mind many times the fact that firing him would bound to be seen as a discriminating act throughout most of Africa, most of the coloured world, and, worse for Mr Carter, who is now hot for re-election, it would be taken by the blacks of America, however unjustly, as a rejection, a spurning of black leadership in the counsels of the Carter administration. 

Let's look for a moment at the typical plot of an Andrew Young gaffe. He makes his remark about hundreds, probably thousands, of political prisoners in the United States at just the moment that the Soviets and their world are being reminded of the precise and galling definition WE give to the phrase 'political prisoner'. There's a storm of protest, Congress bristles with men demanding Mr Young's resignation. Then Mr Young says he's been misinterpreted. What he meant, in a fuzzy way, was that Americans too can suffer in some measure from being agin the government and, in this country as in all more or less free countries, there are people who are discriminated against, in jobs, in court cases, for example, either because they have a history of protest or, quite simply in some places and by no means exclusively in the South, because they're black. 

However, by the time Mr Young said to us he'd been misinterpreted, the damage had been done. Russia and Albania and Poland and the rest would certainly not print bold stories headlined, 'A Retraction' saying what Mr Young had really meant. On the contrary, they had a field day pointing out to their own subject populations that in the United States even the chief American delegate to the United Nations admitted there were political prisoners in his country. Something Mr Gromyko would never admit for local or any other sort of publication. 

Well, let's now sketch the sequence of events in the latest and fatal booboo. It has been American policy reiterated time and again to Israel that the United States would have no contact with the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, until IT publicly grants the right of the state of Israel to exist. Mr Arafat said only the other day that was one thing he would never grant. You'd expect that even Mr Young would not break this promise and move on to the treacherous ground where an American official could be seen bargaining with the PLO. But it came out on Wednesday that Mr Young had last month met the Kuwait ambassador in his apartment and talked there with a Mr Terzi, the official observer of the PLO at the United Nations. 

Now I think it could be maintained that Mr Young's motive was not only benign, but courageous. Next month he was to be, according to the usual system of rotation, the president of the UN's security council. As such, he would be the proper person to suggest, in any sort of crisis or confusion over pending business, the postponement of a council meeting and that's exactly what he was after. Kuwait comes into it because last month it had a resolution before the council that dealt with the rights of Palestinians. 

One of these rights mentioned was the right to have an independent state, something that is anathema to Israelis. And because of America's sympathetic policy towards Israel, the State Department knew it was going to have to veto the Kuwait resolutions. So the State Department asked Mr Young to consult the members of the Security Council and see if they wouldn't agree to postpone their meeting until Kuwait, or some other country, could be persuaded to frame a milder resolution agreeable to Israel. And that's exactly what Mr Young was seeking. 

But his procedure for getting a consensus of the council was to go to the contending parties of the first part, namely Kuwait and the PLO. It was the kind of risk that diplomats must take in private – and let's not pretend that the State Department would have been miffed if it had come off. If it had come off, it might well have been hailed as a diplomatic triumph. Unfortunately, as everybody knows, Israel, in the past month or so, has been increasingly suspicious of American policy in the Middle East and haunted by the fear that in the last ditch the United States might cave in to threats from the oil-exporting Arabs. 

And unfortunately the Israelis heard about this secret meeting and leaked it to an American magazine. Mr Young's horror can be imagined. He had begged them not to protest in public. But then, the fatal mistake. He at first said that the meeting with the PLO man was accidental. Then when the Israelis blew the story, he had to tell the State Department that he'd not given an accurate account. In a word, he lied. And we all recall Mr Carter's saying on television during his presidential campaign 'that if ever a member of my Cabinet lies to you, he'll be gone the next day!' 

Mr Young had done what the State Department asked him to do but in a way that he was forbidden to do. The Secretary of State was furious. Mr Carter was said to be heartsick. Mr Young had thrown a sinister light on American policy, quite unwittingly, but glaringly. So, he had to go. 

He had performed a bold act of personal initiative which sooner or later I suppose will have to be taken in the interests of Palestine, Israel and the peace of the Middle East but he'd also performed a dangerously un-diplomatic act and was caught. The night after he resigned, he had dinner in his spacious ambassadorial apartment with a friend and he spent most of the evening, on into the morning, on the phone to friends, to famous black leaders who were raging about Carter's slamming the door on the black vote. He told them to cool it. He begged them not to fan the rising fire of recrimination between blacks and Jews what could turn into a wholly disastrous conflict between the Jews of America and the blacks of America. 

On his last night, it has to be said, Andrew Young did the state some service.

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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