The Treasury Department announced today that it is lowering the guaranteed interest rate on some US savings bonds. NPR's Barbara Mantell reports that the 1.5 point decline to 6% came as no surprise to investors. "The Treasury said it is lowering the rate on savings bonds to bring it in line with other market interest rates which have been falling all year. For instance, money market mutual funds are now yielding just over 5%; five-year treasury notes are trading at about 6.5%. So the government has been paying a premium to people buying savings bonds, and it's turned out to be an expensive way to finance the public debt. The relatively generous 7.5% rate on the bonds have made them very popular in the past few months. Since the beginning of August, sales have been about double the usual pace. And this week, the rush to buy savings bonds intensified because of reports that the Treasury was going to cut the rate any day, and people wanted to lock in the old rate. Savings bonds bought before tomorrow, the day the cut goes into effect, will still yield 7.5% I'm Barbara Mantell in New York."
After a meeting today of southern Africa's front line states, Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda said a number of front line leaders hold South Africa directly responsible for the plane crash that killed Mozambique President Samora Machel. Kaunda said there was circumstantial evidence linking South Africa to the crash, but he didn't say what that evidence was. He said it's up to the Pretoria government to prove to the contrary. Official Soviet radio said today all clues point to Soviet-South African complicity in the death of Machel.
President Reagan today named a black career diplomat to be US Ambassador to South Africa. Edward Perkins, now Ambassador to Liberia, would succeed retiring Ambassador Herman Nickel. NPR's Phyllis Crockett has more: "Perkins is the third man President Reagan has considered in three months in his attempt to appoint a black to this sensitive post. North Carolina businessman, Robert Brown, turned down the job after questions were raised about his business dealings while he served in the Nixon Administration. Then Terrance Todman, Ambassador to Denmark, turned down the job, apparently because he disagrees with the Reagan Administration policy towards South Africa. Perkins has been a foreign service officer for twenty-eight years. He's fifty-eight years old and has served in Taiwan, Thailand, Ghana and at the State Department before becoming Deputy Chief of the US Embassy in Liberia in 1981. He became Ambassador in 1985. Black and white South Africans as well as many in this country have said that naming a black ambassador is meaningless as long as US policy toward the white-ruled government remains the same. I'm Phyllis Crockett in Washington."
President Reagan today nominated a career foreign service officer to become the first black US ambassador to South Africa. The long expected move comes as the Senate get set to vote tomorrow on overriding President Reagan's veto of a bill that would impose more economic sanctions on South Africa. The newly named envoy is Edward Perkins. He is now the American Ambassador to the west African nation of Liberia. NPR's Phyllis Crockett has a report:
It's been three months since President Reagan first indicated his desire to appoint a black to this sensitive post. Perkins is the President's third choice. In July, the President had planned to name a black ambassador during a televised speech on South Africa. But the man under consideration, businessman and former Nixon-aide Robert Brown, withdrew his name after questions were raised about his business dealings.
Then, the administration's next choice, Terrence Todman, Ambassador to Denmark, turned down the job, apparently because he disagrees with the Reagan Administration policy towards South Africa.
In contrast to the President's plan to name his first choice in a national speech, today's announcement came with no fanfare. There was no news conference, no press briefing, no opportunity for questions today. Instead, a notice was handed out to reporters at the White House that Perkins was the President's choice. Apparently, the low key announcement was a response to the earlier embarrassment of some top White House officials who felt the first two names became public before adequate scrutiny. They expect Perkins to be easily confirmed by the Senate.
Perkins has been a foreign service officer for twenty-eight years. He has served in Taiwan, Thailand, Ghana and in Washington, D.C. In 1981, he became the 2nd in command at the US Embassy in Liberia. In 1985, he became Ambassador. He is fifty-eight years old. His wife is Chinese. They have two children.
When President Reagan first indicated his intention to appoint a black ambassador, blacks and whites in South Africa said that naming a black will make little difference if US policy remains the same. The Perkins announcement comes one day after President Reagan offered to impose strong sanctions against the South African government if Congress drops its stronger sanctions.
Secretary of State, George Shultz, told Republican senators today that a vote to override the President's veto of a sanctions bill would undermine his negotiating position in next month's summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The House overrode the veto yesterday. The Senate is expected to take it up tomorrow. I'm Phyllis Crockett in Washington.
Fifty years ago, British aviator Beryl Markham became the first person to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean, from east to west. Her achievement was marred, though, as were many of her accomplishments.
Markham had set out to fly from London to New York. She ended up flying from London to Nova Scotia. That flight and other aspects of her extraordinary life are told in Markham's book West with the Night . This week, many public television stations will broadcast a documentary about Markham called "World without Walls". NPR's Susan Stanberg tells Beryl Markham's story.
New York City, September 6th, 1936, a ticker-tape parade, and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia greeting a tall, blond English woman who, just the day before, had completed a 21-hour-and-25-minute flight across the Atlantic, Ebbingdon, England to a nameless swamp, non-stop.
"Miss Markham, may I, on behalf of the city of New York, extend to you, a sincere welcome and our congratulations on your splendid flight across the ocean."
"Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much."
Nine years after Lindbergh, and going in the other direction, his Spirit of Saint Louis, soloed New York to Paris, Beryl Markham, thirty-four years old, had flown seventeen of the twenty-one and a half hours in fog and darkness, with no fuel gauge, no radio, no idea where she was most of the time, to crash land, after the engine of her monoplane died in a bog on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. The next day, she was being cheered in New York.
"It was a hard battle against the elements above the ocean, fog and storm, but pluck and endurance crowned one of the most grueling flights on record."
"I am so pleased to have got here; I only wish I could come in my own machine."
"And now, onto a New York hotel, to be interviewed by a movie waker, Mrs. Markham, just what were you thinking about while flying through all that fog and storm?"
"Well, my one thought and ambition was to get to America."
"When above the sea, what did you eat or drink?"
"I didn't have anything until the last half hour when I had a taste of brandy."
"Just one?"
"No, two, I'm afraid."
Aviation was very young then. Every single day without fail, there were two or three articles in the newspapers about people being killed in aircraft. It was completely new sport. Mary Lovell has just completed a biography of Beryl Markham. The book will be published next spring.
The engines were not very reliable. All she had was a compass and some kind of direction-finding equipment that didn't work very well. She really didn't know where she was for a long time. She had no idea how far off the coast she was, whether her fuel would last. I think the one time in her life she has been frightened was then.
For most of her eighty-three years, Beryl Markham was indeed fearless. As a child growing up in Africa, she faced down a marauding lion. As a trainer, she forced high-strung racehorses to obey her. As an old woman, she drove her car through a machine gun fire during an attempted coup in Kenya. She wanted to keep a luncheon date. It was simply her nature to confront danger.
"There's a coolness to her. She's not a very trusting person." Writer Judith Theuman. "I think any person who's lived by her wits would probably have developed that coolness. Look at the astronauts. I mean, it's a quality that you see it in fliers. You see it in sailors, or you see it in hunters, and Beryl was of that stamp."
There were other interpretations of Markham's coolness. Some said she lacked the sense to be afraid. People often said nasty things about Beryl Markham, especially other women. It's easy to figure out why.
"She was beautiful. She was very seductive. She was well born. And she was strong and ambitious and fearless and smart. So, you know, it's a lot to take."
Ironically, recognition did come to Beryl Markham, but only in the last years of her life. Since West with the Night was reissued three years ago, it's sold briskly. There are 300,000 copies in print now, and royalties from the book gave much needed financial security. More recognition will come with the showing on public television this week, of the documentary about her. More recognitions still, when Mary Lovell's biography comes out next spring. And another biography is in the work for publication in a few years. So the story of the woman who flew west on that difficult, dangerous night in 1936 will be told and re-told.
Through the darkness, wedged between extra fuel tanks that had been fitted into the cabin for the long journey, her small plane bucking fog and storms and headwinds, the Atlantic Ocean black beneath her, Beryl Markham flew west with the night, completely alone.
"You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents, each man to see what the other looked like. Being alone in an aeroplane, for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness. Nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage. Nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces and hopes rooted in your mind. Such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger."
Beryl Markham died in Kenya this past August. She was eighty-three. Her ashes were scattered from a light aircraft over the hills at Inguro—her beloved childhood home. In Washington, I'm Susan Stanberg.
|