Kennedy's last stand

Senator Edward Kennedy – who has everything to lose next Tuesday from the great prize of Democratic delegates available in the Pennsylvania primary – is throwing subtlety and thoughtfulness to the winds and becoming a great expert at righteous indignation.

He used to try and appear judicial in an almost uncanny verbal parody of his brother, Jack and say things like, 'I am not, er... unaware of the, er... er... direction in which I am moving'. Now, like Wendy Hiller, he's more inclined to bellow what she said wistfully, 'I know where I'm going'.

The other night, he pounded a podium in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, only ten miles from Three Mile Island where last year's nuclear leak took place, and he expressed scorn for Mr Carter and his nuclear advisers. They had, he thundered, turned their backs on the residents of Three Mile Island. 'We have got', he shouted, 'to develop alternatives to nuclear power.' And there was a great cheer from a huge crowd which, like Senator Kennedy, was only too happy to ignore the uncomfortable fact that Mr Carter and his nuclear advisers turned their backs in order to do just that, to quicken the search which scientists are engaged in everywhere for a practical alternative to nuclear power.

It took me back to a sunny August day, and I wince to realise just how long, 35 years ago. I was lying on a beach at the end of Long Island playing chess with an old close friend. It was some days after the United States had dropped the first atomic bombs, one on Hiroshima, the other on Nagasaki and the New York Times had come out with the first notice of the long secret labours of what was called 'the Manhattan Project'.

Obviously, there'd been no reporting of the first test of the bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico but it later appeared that one journalist, a New York Times science correspondent, had been present at the test and once the thing itself had been used and the Japanese had surrendered, the wartime ban was lifted and the Times had reams of incomprehensible stuff about the theory and manufacture of the bomb.

Back then, I ought to remind you, even the phrase 'nuclear fission' was as strange to most people as 'computerised axial tomography', the CAT scanner, is to people today. Luckily my friend, sprawled over the chessboard, was a patent – or should I say 'patent' – lawyer and his special field was industrial and chemical research. I asked him what it all meant. He said, 'I'll tell you what it means. It means that about five years from now, automobiles will no longer run on gasoline, petrol, they'll run on nuclear energy.'

This excited my reporter's instinct and my memory. I recall two other rousing prophecies.

During the war, I'd spent a couple of days with Henry Kaiser, the wizard of the Liberty ships which were put together much as a small boy puts together the marked pieces of a Meccano set. Kaiser knew nothing about shipbuilding and was laughingly derided by the professionals. However, he laid out his yards with numbered squares, piled up the ingredients, had cranes swivel the numbered pieces to the bays where little armies of men rushed in and electrically welded the bits together. Result – after a year's practice he was turning out one Liberty freighter every two days. He told me then that all industry would be revolutionised after the war. All the old materials like copper, steel, bronze, timber would be abandoned in the coming age of light metals.

And a little later, I was flying over the coast of central California with the governor of the state and, at one point, I noticed that the magnificent coastline – the mountains drenched with purple lupins and yellow mustard plunging into the ocean – this majestic spectacle was marred by smoke stacks and some sort of cement plant and I asked him what this nasty bit of work signified.

'That,' he said, giving off the same sort of apocalyptic joy with which Henry Kaiser and my chess partner had announced the age of light metals and the age of nuclear power, 'that guarantees the golden age of California,' he said. 'No more worries about water power. We can welcome all the millions who want to come in. That is a desalination plant. We can take all the water we want from the ocean, take out the salt and presto! No more dependence on the Imperial Valley or the Sierra watershed.'

Well, as I say, these splendid expert prophecies were made not less than 35 years ago. Light metals have, undoubtedly, been used but I notice we've just come through a gruelling steel strike. They're still sucking away at the Pacific Ocean in that malodorous plant and I'm told that taking the salt out of a quart of seawater still costs a mint and – it will be no news to anybody – automobiles still run, alas, on petrol.

As for the ringing declaration of Senator Kennedy that we MUST develop alternatives to nuclear power, scientists have been sweating away for years, decades, to find any cheap alternatives and so far the best general alternative discovered by American engineers, researchers and the Carter administration is coal.

President Carter is giving a tax credit to homeowners who convert their houses to solar power but doing that in the first place costs a whole lot more than the tax credit. A famous car manufacturer now advertises a sleek model that runs on diesel fuel but diesel is still a heavy petroleum fraction. In a word, it's not conceivable that Mr Carter or Mrs Thatcher or Herr Schmidt would turn their backs on any plausible, practical alternative to nuclear power, which still costs the earth. On the contrary, they would, as Ernest Bevin said about the Marshall Plan, 'grab it with both hands'.

I don't wish to knock Senator Kennedy's campaign or Governor Reagan's either, except that, as campaigns, they are moving into that stage typical of all campaigns when nervous exhaustion begins to take its toll. It's the stage of resounding exaggeration and slam-bang promises. Last time round, Governor Reagan – before his hopes were quashed by President Ford – used to see a vision. It was the biblical vision of a city on a hill. It provoked cheers and tears in large gatherings, though it was never made plain how that shining city on the hill, the new Reagan-ised United States, would be financed any better than New York City, that city on two rivers.

This time, Mr Reagan has forsworn visions for simple, downright facts. 'Why should it be,' he cries, 'that we're the only nation in the world that wants to boycott the Moscow Olympics?' He said this over and over until he was presented with a list of the other 24 nations that have announced a boycott. It's a dreadful thought that the real American presidential campaign has not yet begun and won't begin for another four and a half months, when the two candidates are chosen and stand back for the kick-off on Labor Day.

Yet, already, Americans are yearning for forthright, manly solutions to problems of a complexity which only the man who sees the overnight cables, namely the President of the United States, can properly understand. His opponents and his allies both – Governor Reagan, Ambassador Bush, Senator Kennedy, the French and now the Germans – are at one in deploring President Carter's backing and filling on the hostages in Iran and the Russians in Afghanistan.

Yet, they're all careful to avoid offering any simple, bold alternatives. The moment you ask the impatient critics, 'What would you do?', they growl and grow silent or indulge in high-minded, vague rhetoric about showing a firm hand in Iran but holding fast to détente with the Russians and this usually means, 'Don't upset our trade figures with Moscow!' And the poor Japanese, possibly the most uncompromising stout ally of the United States, take one look at the stony fact that they import 13 per cent of all their oil from Iran and then they dive under the bed.

It must be clear that in two situations in which the United States is gagged and bound, since sending in the marines has become an impossible policy, the most hapless victim is the sitting President of the United States, whoever he happens to be. He happens to be Jimmy Carter and about his private ordeals of searching for a response to Iran, to the Soviet Union, searching for a substitute for nuclear power, for any promising solution to inflation.

I can only quote a remark he made recently to the national conference of the building and construction trades: 'In Iran we have been restrained and patient, and patience is not an ordinary characteristic of American people.' So it isn't and it's the president's misfortune that he should have to go on asking for something as uninspiring as patience in an election year. And in his frustration he looks beyond the seas and yearns for some heartening solution, some exciting help from America's allies. What he hears is Europe's dependence on OPEC oil and Western Europe's understandable desire not to lose its trade with the Soviet Union by being beastly to the Russians.

Well, we turn almost in relief to something that can be settled, like a primary election, like next Tuesday's showdown between Mr Carter and Senator Kennedy in Pennsylvania. It's not the last of the big primaries, the ones in which there is treasure trove for the winner, but it is the last one, probably, in which a win for Senator Kennedy might not merely reinvigorate his campaign, but might pave the way for an actual delegate battle in the Democratic convention itself. Even the president's own pollster concedes that in his figures Senator Kennedy is now ahead.

If Kennedy wins and we have, before the convention, three more months of what cannot help but look like a floundering or helpless president, then it seems to me entirely possible that the Democratic convention could ignore the delegate majority for Carter and explode into a knock-down, drag-out fight in which neither of the two factions for Carter and Kennedy would yield, except to a third man both could go with.

Nobody has yet suggested that this third man might be the very attractive, the liberal conservative, Vice-President Mondale – nobody, perhaps, except Vice-President Mondale.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.