The bank of the House of Representatives - 20 March 1992

Before we get on to something really interesting, let me say a heartening thing about the presidential election campaign. Heartening, I hasten to say, to people who find American politics either boring or bewildering. It seems now practically certain that the choice in November is going to be between Mr Bush and Governor Clinton of Arkansas.

There's just one little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, as we say, though I don't know why. A dark cloud that hovers over both candidates, which just could produce a wholly unexpected drama of some sort, either at the Democratic convention or in the election itself or at both and that is the fact, quite unique in my time, which goes back to the first Roosevelt election in 1932. The fact that so far, in all the primaries held, something more than a third of the voters of both parties, are unhappy, not only with the choice of candidates, but wish the man they voted for was somebody else.

And I ought to mention another element that always lurks behind politics in this country, it's the cloak and dagger and the sudden pouncing movements of melodrama. I don't know why it is, something perhaps in the mixture, the always fermenting brew of ethnic types from all over the world, that encourages melodrama. What I'm saying is, beware of even the most expert, the most seasoned prophets, who are now writing reams about the strengths and weaknesses of the contenders for the championship bout, just as if it was already November. Don't sell short the American love of looking for a rabbit in a hat and producing a lion.

Oh, just to say that the cloud has a silver lining, for Mr Bush at least. There is a sun shining his way – the economy. The dark limping ghost that caused all the panic in the first place, causing Mr Bush to drop his great and good concern with the European revolutions and pretend that his only interests in life are with America's health, education, crime, drugs and automobiles – the economy.

This week, for the first time since last midsummer, there are positive signs that the recession is collapsing – may, according to some quite cautious economists, may have died. In the indices that matter, output at factories, mines, utilities all help a little, but home building, housing almost 10% in January and the United States has overtaken Germany as the world's leader in exports. The Federal Reserve is said not to think just now of any more lowering of the prime interest rate, which is always a fire bell in hard times, and the New York Times on Wednesday – which thinks three times before publishing a startling fact which, if there's an earthquake or a fire, always publishes the lowest estimate of casualties – the New York Times on Wednesday said there was conclusive proof of an economic recovery and, unless American history is to be turned upside down, I'm not so sure you couldn't say American and European history, a rising economy, the flush of prosperity always helps the incumbent government.

Now, talking of melodrama, we've just plunged into a very tasty one. It's wrong from the start to call it the great cheque-bouncing scandal, but that's a neat and scary way of putting it and I'm afraid when all the true explanations have been given, that's the way it will go on being thought about. Anyway, here it is. It started last December, though we didn't know it at the time, tucked off in the bottom corner of an inside page of your favourite newspaper then, there must have been printed two or three simple sentences. The Bank of the House of Representatives has just closed down. The House bank, which was established for the convenience of Congressmen and the staffs, has been in business since 1838. It took about three months for the practical meaning of this announcement to stun the country. When it came out that since last autumn, the special panel of the House Ethics Committee, equal members of Democrats and Republicans, had been looking into the running of this private bank and discovered 355 present and/or former Members of Congress, who had over a three-year period, consistently written personal cheques when there was no money to cover them in their account. They were writing cheques against an overdraft.

Now let me at once point to a moral or identify a social difference between the United States and at least my native country. An overdraft is in this country not exactly a criminal act but it's a grievous bit of behaviour and will count heavily against you if you come to want a credit card, a mortgage, a bank loan or whatever. I was shocked to discover this in my first weeks in this country. I'd come almost directly to the country from Oxbridge, where undergraduates in those days joked about, even boasted about the size of their overdrafts. The tutors of rich boys, county boys, the loitering heirs of city directors might scold their pupils for various sins, but they would never bring up the chronic fact that their tailor's bill was unpaid and would go on being unpaid for months, even years on end.

On the contrary, I was warned when I arrived at Yale, by my first student friends, that if you overdrew your bank account by as much as a dollar, you would get a note or a telephone call from the bank, warning you that you were delinquent. Or if you were away, you would come back and find letter, enclosing the first cheque you'd written that went into the overdraft. It was being returned to you and had stamped across it a dire phrase in blue capitals, insufficient funds. It's always been so here.

Imagine then, the effect on ordinary citizens when they wake up one morning and read that most sitting Congressmen and some retired, over 300, had consistently written what, to our bank managers, would be bad cheques. We would be chronic cheque-bouncers. In the days, the weeks since this scandal was unveiled, the news lead into it has always been something like: did your c

congressman bounce his cheques? The Ethics Panel says it will publish the names of all 355 but for now they've put out the worst offenders, 21, who most seriously over-drew, some of them into hundreds of thousands of dollars. All 21 are Democrats and I suppose because the Democrats have such a heavy majority in the House, which they've held for most of 50 years, most of the other sinners will be seen to be Democrats.

First though, let me say that to talk about cheque bouncing is very misleading. One congressman, a few years ago, came to look at his account and found over $20,000 missing. It had gone with the wind and an embezzler, a member of his staff. He wanted his money back. The teller, the clerk, whoever, said "You can't have your money back, this isn't a bank." He was right. Not by any definition known to all of us. It didn't lend money, it didn't offer interest, it didn't sell mortgages, issue credit cards, more important, it didn't, as every other bank here does, charge a penalty on an overdraft. Moreover, it didn't report overdrafts, ever to the Congressmen and their families, staffs, the depositors. In fact it had a rule about overdrafts, you were allowed, almost expected, to run an overdraft as large as your next month's pay cheque. Since they never reported the size of your account or how much you were overdrawn, it's easy to see that 300 depositors could hardly be excused of sneaky wrongdoing. Most Congressmen, it's clear, are righteously indignant at being confused with the ones, a small minority who plainly abused the system and knew they were doing it. One man, now happily retired, wrote cheques which in just over three years amounted to 996 overdrafts. It sounds awful but he exceeded his pay cheque less than half the time.

The truth which dragged behind the first scandalous announcement is that this bank, really it was a payroll office. Was abominably run. It had no cumulative records, no list of overdrafts, it flagrantly violated its own rules, including reporting overdrafts to the culprit and the return of cheques. There is very sparse evidence of this ever having been done, so the House closed it for ever in December. But the story is out, the damage is done. Every other citizen who is interviewed says, "Imagine, letting them get away with a thing like that" or "Fine thing, we have to pay a penalty", and "I'll tell you what, we bounce cheques in the army, we go to gaol" and, on all sides, a sentence the Republicans love to hear, "Throw the bums out". Understandably the great Republican hope is that this scandal will stay known as the cheque-bouncing scandal; and will damage the Democrats so badly that come November, hope, pray they will, for the first time in 38 years, lose control of the House.

What else? Until last week, the oldest known person alive in the United States was a lady who finally died at the age of 114. As always happens with such marvels, shortly before the end she was asked her recipe for longevity. She didn't hesitate for a moment. "A chocolate milk shake every day," she said. I love the recipes of the aged. The most memorable I know, came from a former Vice-President of the United States, an old, crusty, poker-playing frontiersman, a Texan named John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt's first vice-president. I have to throw in a word of background. When a Southerner asks for branch or branch with his whisky, he means branch water, the water from a stream or brook that runs into a creek. All right, when he was 90, Garner was interviewed, how come his great age, what was his secret? He said "Bourbon and branch." When he was 99, he was interviewed again. To what do you attribute? He said "Laying off bourbon and branch." He died a few months later.

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