BBC Radio 4 – Letter from America by Alistair Cooke, Grenada press ban lifted

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For the next two weeks I expect to be in the Antipodes, not a bad place to get a drastically different view of America or for that matter of Europe, both of whom talk about the Far East to define a part of the world the Australians and the New Zealanders call the Near North. So it would be risky in the extreme for me to pretend to a running commentary on what's happening in Lebanon or Grenada.

What I would like to do, and think might be useful, is to recount the day-by-day story as we received it, how the general public felt about it during the first week only. It may warn us not to take for granted any permanent majority view of the rights and wrongs of the affair.

As I talk, nothing has happened since the invasion that has been as dramatic as the act itself, but I thought it might be useful to clock the progress of the war for as long as I was on these shores. After the first shock of the thing itself, it developed that Americans were going to have the quite new experience of hearing about a war they were engaged in from nobody but their own government. No correspondents were allowed to accompany the invaders and this did not happen in the two world wars, in the Korean war, in Vietnam or in Lebanon.

For three days anyway, we had to take on trust the battle pictures that the Pentagon thought fit to release. By then there were already 400 correspondents of five or six nations fuming in hotels in Barbados, 150 miles away from the action, and they were just as dependent as the rest of us on the Pentagon's official account of what was going on. Namely, that 400 marines, helped by American rangers and then by another fifteen hundred, had secured Grenada in 24 hours and that the medical students had been protected. We saw film of two or three students weeping with gratitude – students who said they were frightened and who guessed, either then or earlier, that they had been in danger.

The official accounts began to lose their confidence when, by the fourth day, there was tough resistance. They admitted that intelligence had been scanty, that the Cubans numbered not 400 but closer to a thousand, that the pacifying operation was going to take maybe three days, maybe a week, maybe several weeks. At that point, on the Thursday night, President Reagan went on the air to say why he'd ordered the invasion, 'To avoid any repetition of the Iranian hostage horror by saving the Americans on the island, to restore the authority of the Queen's Governor-General and to make possible a return to free elections and a democratically-run Grenada.'

By now the Pentagon had recanted somewhat about press coverage. Mr Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, was asked in a pretty rough session with the press why correspondents had not gone in. He said the invasion commander didn't want them and he wouldn't dream of going above the ruling of a superior. That was, at best, a blunder in a country which has always believed, with the other democracies, that if war is not too important to be left to the generals, the conduct of it and the reporting of it must always be in the hands of civilians. Otherwise, as somebody said, why should Mr Weinberger and not General So and So be the Secretary of Defense?

So, soon correspondents were allowed in. First, gingerly, for an official tour of picked spots and then for six hours and by the end of the week they were chartering boats and scrambler planes, the television networks were let in and by last weekend the press had asserted its ancient right. By then, correspondents had interviewed refugees from Grenada, they'd talked to Barbadians who'd come back from there, they'd picked up uncensored film from the French.

And if we needed any other proof of the Pentagon's initial folly in barring war correspondents, even reporters staying in Washington were so much on the hop, tapping every source they knew inside the Defense Department, inside the marine corps and on the Caribbean intelligence desk, that Mr Weinberger might have wished he'd packed the whole Washington press corps off to the island at the start.

From these reporters it came out that most of the 6,000 men – by then, 6,000 – on or near Grenada had practically no prior information about the numbers, the arms of the enemy or where it was. How 400 Cuban construction workers turned into eleven hundred combat troops was put down by the Pentagon itself to weak intelligence. The Associated Press said that Cuba had been tipped off to the invasion 24 hours before it began and a source in Caribbean intelligence said that the CIA had no spies in Grenada until the day before the invasion. Some invasion units had only tourist maps to go on. Throughout the week, the Pentagon pessimistically revised its prediction at the first press briefing that the whole operation would be over in 24 hours.

Now all this, of course, had to do with the reports of an ill-prepared campaign and says nothing about the reason for mounting it. I went into, last time, the legal rationale that the State Department had to elaborate on – the rather frail argument that a request for help from the tiny islands of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States outweighed the charter of the United Nations and the charter of the Organisation of American States which ban all external intervention in an internal rebellion.

The first international body to act, inevitably, was the Security Council of the United Nations. Of its 15 members, the United States naturally vetoed the resolution being put to it which denounced the American intervention. Togo, Zaire and Great Britain abstained from a vote and eleven nations voted for it, though it has to be said that in private several of them said they'd voted reluctantly. They managed to soften the resolution from one of condemning the United States action to deeply deploring it.

Well, apart from the division of public opinion here which the president's speech apparently narrowed into a rather close division, the most striking thing domestically was something you had to search for since it's difficult to spot something that isn't there – namely, the reaction of the Democrats in general, and the five Democratic presidential runners in particular. They were very tight-lipped indeed for two or three days. Senator John Glenn, alone, saying that the president ought to have put out a warning about protecting the American students or have negotiated for their safekeeping. Speaker Tip O'Neill, the president's most dependable ideological opponent didn't want to imperil the morale of the troops until he saw how quickly they'd pacified the island.

But, once the Pentagon began to backtrack on its promises of an easy victory, the Democrats woke up. Speaker O'Neill said it was old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy and confessed that the president's foreign policies frightened him. Mr Mondale, the Democrats' leader in the presidential race, openly condemned the invasion as 'undermining our ability to criticise the Russians' suppression of liberty in Afghanistan, Poland and elsewhere'.

The Senate acted very quickly after a bristling debate to give the president no more than 60 days to withdraw the troops from Grenada. The vote was 64 to 20 which is a much larger majority than the Republicans enjoy in the Senate. The House foreign affairs committed voted 32 to 2 to do the same thing, a sure sign that the whole House would second the Senate.

An interesting dissenter from the majority view was not a senator or a congressman, but former President Carter's chief adviser on national security. Mr Brzezinski said he must be the only Democrat who felt President Reagan did what he had to do and that takes us to the historical background of a doctrine of American foreign policy that has not been cited much in the past few years, though President Kennedy reminded Americans of it at the height of the Cuban missile crisis.

And this is the so-called Monroe Doctrine. James Monroe was president between 1816 and 1824, a time of what? Thanks to Monroe's benign and diplomatic character was known as the 'era of good feeling'. The doctrine that bears his name was promulgated in 1823. It declared for all of Europe – Spain and France in particular – to hear that the United States would not tolerate any further colonisation or intervention in the Americas. All the Americas, North, Central and South.

I'm surprised that no one in the administration had not slipped Mr Reagan a powerful ace in claiming the Monroe Doctrine as a controlling cause in his invasion of Grenada. For what is beyond question, though it's rarely brought into question, is that the word, the act of intervention, has undergone a radical redefinition since the nineteenth century, since, most glaringly, the successful treachery of Major Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian who from inside his own country prepared the ground for an easy Nazi invasion and gave his name to the powerful form of intervention known as a fifth column.

It's now granted by the nations that were once aghast at President Kennedy's threat of invading Cuba that the planting of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba was a modern form of intervention in a sovereign state, rather more threatening than the hovering of the Spanish Armada off the English Channel.

If it's true that the Russians and Cubans had planted an enormous cache of arms in Grenada, that the alarmingly high Russian diplomatic establishment there of 69 persons and the thousand or more Cuban paramilitary, if they were only the advance guard of forces that could have overwhelmed the island and turned it into a foreign base, then it can at least be argued that that is intervention of the modern kind and that the most persuasive passage in Mr Reagan's speech last week was this:

'Grenada, we are told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn't. It was a Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time.'

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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