Once, when Harry S Truman was President of the United States, he was conducting a party of mature ladies around the White House and environs. When he got to the Rose Garden he displayed an enthusiasm for cultivation of the flowers and expounded on the virtues of manure, or, as he pronounced it, “manoor.” This disappointed one lady, who expected more refined terminology from George Washington’s successor. Later the lady told Mrs Truman how much she enjoyed her visit but asked why the President didn’t use the word “fertiliser” rather than “manure.” ” It’s taken me thirty years” sighed the First Lady, ” to get him to call it “manoor.”.
Nearly sixty years later, a former Editor of THE TIMES of London, Sir Simon Jenkins, boasted in the same paper of his failed attempt to scupper the Irish Peace Process by briefing White House Staff in 1994. Taoiseach Albert Reynolds having consulted, amongst others, John Hume and Gerry Adams, had contacted President Bill Clinton, requesting a visa for Gerry Adams, holder of an Irish passport. The CIA in Langley Virginia, and the State Department in Foggy Bottom, were intimately involved with the British Government, which had no desire to advance the peace movement. Getting the Americans to fight Britain’s wars has been a constant and successful objective of British diplomacy/propaganda, trickery and skulduggery since at least 1914, and no holds were barred. Doing his patriotic duty, Briton Simon Jenkins told White House Staff that since 1969 the IRA had killed “3,000 Britons.”
In fact about 3,000 people in all had been killed since 1969 including great numbers who would not contemplate carrying British passports nor submit to the description “British.” A very high proportion of those killed (including some describing themselves as British) were killed by British “Loyalists” , British soldiers and other British Crown Forces and their agents, and it is inconceivable that a journalist as intelligent and experienced as Jenkins did not know it.
Perhaps he briefed the White House Staff in the Rose Garden, and, sharing President Truman’s enthusiasm, was a bit too flaithiul with the “manoor.”
But it seems President Clinton recognises fertiliser, however it is described. For he ensured that Gerry Adams got his visa and the peace movement went from strength to strength .
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