One of the more memorable images was that of Senator Orrin Hatch, a crusted conservative from Mormon, Utah, who so far departed from senatorial gravitas as to mutter, “What a jerk!”. (The cruise missiles have already persuaded him to change that judgment.)There is in all of this a genuine news story. It does matter to all of us who is President of the United States, what kind of man he is, how he behaves himself, whether he will survive and whether we can trust him. But long before the end of the week, another agenda was beginning to show through the Jerry Springer, Vanessa Feltz agenda. (Vanessa pushed her luck too far this week, and was fired by Anglia for asking for almost as many pounds in salary as she gets viewers to her freak show.)This new agenda is the unconcealed inquisitiveness of Your Call, Sky’s “interactive” programme “You have your say on the main issues of the day”. (Sky’s regular coverage, it should be said, was respectable.)The presenter sits in the middle of what looked like a Internet website.

Behind him pictures of Monica Lewinsky in a swimsuit, even an offer of “eleven nude pictures” of Monica floated by as “you” – we? – had our say. Every now and then the presenter interrupted to say, off the top of his head, that call-ins were running two to one in the President’s favour.Andrew from London said: “The guy’s doing a good job.” Jane from Epsom thought Clinton’s private life was his own business. And Lana from London asked a good question: “Does anybody care?” Uninformed opinion about titillating trivia? Is this the future of television news?One of the advantages to an American President of sending in the cruise missiles, the Marines or the fighter-bombers, is that the White House is in control of the story. With the grand jury story, the networks are free to roam at will, finding contrary opinion to offset whatever the President says, from Little Rock to Monica’s Beach. But on Thursday, all there was to show was the President, in a dark suit, standing in front of a giant American flag, with a shot of some buildings on fire near Khartoum, and archive footage of Osama bin Laden.So, literally, the networks, and the American people, rally round the flag. In time, they will get around to asking: Was the response proportionate? Was it effective? Was it, to borrow a word from the President’s earlier speech, “inappropriate”? But those are questions for the future.We may have uneasy memories of earlier presidential coups that didn’t turn out to be quite what we were told: of Johnson and the Tonkin Gulf; Nixon and the Middle East, Reagan and Libya and Grenada, George Bush and those smart bombs sailing “surgically” through Baghdad windows.

But television has learnt once again that, when the trumpet sounds, the man in the White House doesn’t charge: he writes the script.. AT FIRST SIGHT the image resembles a dance, perhaps a line-up to bouzouki accompaniment in a Greek taverna, or in the Old Cathedral plaza in Barcelona where sardanas are danced in linked circles on Sunday evenings. Look more closely, read the caption, and one realises the three “dancers” with their held hands and crossed shins are all blind, led by the only one who is not a dancer – a small child, apparently leading them towards the communal dining hall in an Israeli “village for blind immigrants”. The three men are silhouetted against a perfect mackerel sky, fronted by a diminishing line of huts whose angle accentuates that of their reaching arms and sideways gait. Their circus aspect is accentuated by the diamond lozenges on the jerkin of the middle man; the rakish angle of the cane propping the man next to him; even the fact that, though dressed in rags and largely barefoot, all three wear caps.

The sighted child scowls in concentration over her task; the man she leads looks as if, roles reversed, he is attentively attempting to help her. The sightlessness of the other pair lends them a near-beatific remoteness, like tightrope walkers.
Robert Capa went to Israel for its inauguration in May 1948, stayed six weeks and returned many times in 1949 and 1950. Neither his diaries, nor Irwin Shaw’s text in Report on Israel (the book they published together in 1950) make detailed mention of this nameless village described as somewhere “south of Tel Aviv”. None the less, the New Jerusalem was, for many new immigrants, a disappointment, even a betrayal.Interned in camps, or pressed into uniform to fight the Arab Legion, it was (as Shaw wrote) “history going in a slightly different direction from what was expected”. It produced, he concluded, “a state which the early Zionists never imagined but in which a million Jews have found sanctuary from their enemies and can wrestle with their own enemies”. Shaw wrote candidly of the racism against, not the Arabs, but North African or Palestinian- born Jews, such as those in the picture.Capa was a man whom one biographer, Jean Lacouture, called “a young and exuberant Jew .. the Hungarian loner with the velvet-black eyes …

proclaiming cheerfully that no curse exists that cannot be swept away by courage and an enterprising spirit”. He was also more than the war-junkie some have made him out to be. In his early twenties, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, he harnessed not only his courage but also his political convictions and his self-taught craft. And in the process, he lost the great love of his life, to whom he dedicated his first book in 1937: “For Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front and who stayed on.”In Spain, Capa also learned the cruel importance of remaining consistent to his calling, although it took until 1941 for the message to be reasoned out in his mind. The British fighter pilot with the gashed head whose sardonic enquiry: “Are these the pictures you were waiting for, photographer?” so caused Capa “to hate myself and my profession” that “a conversation with myself about the incompatibility of being a reporter and hanging onto a tender soul at the same time” fired his determination to “show people the real aspect of war”.It is less the gore than the humanitarian aspect of his war images, widely published in Picture Post, Life and Illustrated that strike home.