Carter boosted by summit

Some time during the bad days of the Second War, Winston Churchill was rebuked for doing something on his own initiative – come to think of it, he rarely did anything on anybody else's initiative – anyway, he did an unpopular thing and a subsequent Gallup poll proved that his standing with the voters had slipped.

He was told by a famous newspaper that he should spend more time keeping his ear to the ground. And, in a typical bit of buzz fuzz humour, he responded that the British people would find it hard to look up to a leader who spent so much time in that ungainly position.' 

Like all his generation and like all politicians since, he distrusted polls whenever they showed his own popularity declining. That was a time when statistical sampling, as it came to be called in the United States – 'mass observation', I believe, in Britain – was not a scientific specialty. To this day, it's hard to find a politician in power who thinks it is. But there did come a day when polling emerged from the realm of magic and voodoo, where astrology still flourishes, and was taken over by people trained in statistical method. 

I remember, it must have been 20 years ago, being told by the late Dr Alfred Kinsey that, within a year or two, it will be possible to interview a sailor in Times Square, an aircraft worker in Seattle, a housewife in Chicago and a businessman in Los Angeles and be able to say definitively how the American people feel about this or that. 

Well, it hasn't quite come to that but it's now very simple-minded to say that if Mr Lou Harris and his staff pick, say, sixteen hundred people across the United States, 'you' could find another sixteen hundred that would contradict all their findings. You, 'you' would find sixteen hundred people at random. Mr Harris finds, by an exhaustive mathematical method, sixteen hundred who represent a careful crosssection of Americans representative as to class, income, occupation, age, political belief, etc. etc. I believe that in the past 15 or 16 years, Mr Harris has never been more than one and a half per cent out in his statistical predictions in how people were going to vote. 

Well, this introduction is by way of my exercise in eating crow. A few days after my last week's talk, an American news magazine came out with a paragraph which sounded as if they'd heard my talk and were, as Richard Nixon, that old salt, used to say, 'deep sixing it'. I said then that Mr Carter's sudden spurt of popularity in the polls was probably a fleeting cheer, that Senator Edward Kennedy was the most popular politician in the United States and that he was the man to watch as the next Democratic nominee. 

So, Newsweek came out with a hallelujah chorus which began, 'The president's rising polls and refurbished image brought a kind of good cheer that hasn't been quite so palpable around the White House since Carter's inaugural day's stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue. His Camp David summitry had all but demolished the public perception of him as a well-meaning amateur. Easy talk about a challenge from Teddy Kennedy in 1980 suddenly sounded a bit hollow.' 

Well, there has not been, since Camp David, a poll showing the present comparative standing among the Democrats of the president and Senator Kennedy as the preferred presidential candidate next time. We shall have it, I'm sure, any day. But I'm also sure that Senator Kennedy is astute enough to belittle, or put on ice for the time being, his own presidential ambitions and manoeuvres. 

There is no question that Jimmy Carter has seemed, for the time being, to have shed his tortoise's skin and is enjoying a shower of popularity which is most extraordinary in coming from so many Republicans who were making all the jokes about him. The first misgivings after Camp David, the attitude of most of the Arab countries, brought a pause in the cheering, but the overwhelming vote of approval in the Israeli parliament has brought on a new round of applause. A Democratic senator running for re-election who had prayed that Mr Carter would not come in to his state to support him said, 'By golly! It just might work!'. And if Egypt and Israel go through with it – never mind the others – then the Congress is going to pay a good deal more attention to Jimmy Carter. And I don't think it can be a coincidence that the Congress started paying respectful attention this week. 

Until last Wednesday, the biggest failure of the Carter administration, the wound to the president's pride that has nagged him for more than a year, was the walloping that Congress has given his energy bill. Its defeat or dismantling only seemed to confirm the growing view of him as a political amateur because he'd said from his first days as president that this was going to be the big test of his skill and his power. Wily presidents do not start an administration by specifying which policy is going to be the true test of their success or failure. 

Well, on Wednesday, the Senate voted by a comfortable majority to do what the president had fruitlessly begged them, to lift American price controls on natural gas by 1985. Now it doesn’t exactly sound like the invasion of Europe but, again, Mr Carter had said that all his efforts to conserve energy hinged on it. The claim, which 57 senators supported, is that this new measure will allow enough new gas to be discovered to make possible a reduction in oil imports by one and a half million barrels a day by 1985. 

In Bonn, last summer, Mr Carter boasted to sceptical Europeans that he would reduce oil imports by two million barrels. And it's also going to mean that the ordinary, the average American family, will pay another $25 a year for heating its home. The... the phrase 'newly discovered gas' may possibly puzzle you, since price controls will be kept on the regular sources beyond 1985. Well, the expert guess in the oil industry is that with this encouragement towards a free price, seven years from now, between 50 and 70 per cent of all gas will be 'newly discovered'.

Incidentally, the president is hoping that before Congress recesses again, in the middle of next month, it will move with the momentum of Camp David, to look kindly on two other bills that have been stalled, and which he also regards as essential to his prestige and maybe to a happy showing for his party in the November congressional elections. One is a bill making wholesale reforms in the civil service and the other is a new tax bill. 

So much for the business of Washington, which is crowded at this time of the year with tourists wandering through the brilliant days of the early fall, going up to the top of the Washington Monument, standing mute before the massive marble figure of Lincoln, trooping in a hush through the Jefferson Memorial and, with a little more oohing and aahing, padding through the daily tours of the White House. Or explaining to each other the knotty wonders of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Air and Space Museum. And maybe scudding off in a taxi for a guilty peak at the curving tower block of apartments known as Watergate. 

Washington is a very satisfying tourist town. It has very wide avenues, majestic circles which a Frenchman originally designed as military vantage points, an ocean of foliage and, in the rambling forest of Rock Creek Park, what Lord Bryce called 'the finest park I know entirely within the confines of a city'. 

But Washington has a problem of reputation which is beginning to disturb the city fathers and, by extension, the Congress, which supervises its government. The problem is the spreading legend of Washington as a dangerous and violent city. The city fathers and travel agents are groaning just now over the text of a guidebook to Washington that has just been published in Italy. It says, in an introductory passage, 'Washington is a very clean city, where the main industry is, undoubtedly, government. The wide avenues and the low houses make Washington an agreeable place to visit but it is not advisable to live there because Washington has become the most dangerous capital in the world. Do not forget it!' (Exclamation point). 

People who do live there, nevertheless, feel that the Italians are writing their guidebook about ten years too late. They don't like to recall that Mr Nixon, in one of his blasting outbursts at rioters and wandering criminals once said that Washington DC could stand not for District of Columbia, but for Disorder and Crime. 

But that was during the black year of 1968. Since then, Washington, which used to be in the first six of crime-ridden cities, has seen a drop in the crime rate more dramatic than that of the first 20 cities. It has also opened the splendid Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts and a new wing of the National Gallery. There has been a lively return of young people who performed a lively exodus to the suburbs in the riotous Sixties. 

But, still, too many intending tourists see in the mind's eye the 1960s image and appear to share the Italian guidebook's prejudice without ever having read it – 1968 was evidently a trauma. A sightseeing company doing a bounding business until 1968 is still doing less than two-thirds of its mid-Sixties business. A shipping line that built three fine boats to sail along the Potomac in the bicentennial year went bust. 

So, Washington, though it has more crime than New York but much less than San Francisco or Phoenix, Arizona, cannot shed the stigma that they've never acquired. No tourist thinks twice about going to San Francisco. But even a Londoner I know paused before the suggestion of a trip to Washington. 'Is it safe?' he asked. 

He'd just come back from a weekend in Sussex to find his London house very thoroughly robbed of its carpets, silver, china, jewels and electronics.

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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