Polishing up his Escutcheon - 9 June 2000

An old friend of mine - long gone, but an eccentric and original I still miss - came into this country in, I believe, about 1902 as a very poor immigrant boy, his mother beside him in a shawl, and he left this life an immensely rich man with quite possibly the finest private house in New York containing a collection of late 17th and early 18th Century English furniture that the Metropolitan Museum might and did envy.

And how did this dumpy, plain man - he was the spitting image of Yasser Arafat - how did this wily old man acquire these millions? As a public relations counsel.

Really there must, in the Western world, be millions of PR men, each in normal social conversation more boring than the next.

But my man had a totally individual if not unique view of his trade once he'd gone through the mill of getting famous names in newspapers and issuing press releases about the marvels of a client's product.

He despised this routine and he dropped it by middle life.

His gift was for taking a man known as a banker, say, or the founder of a bus company and get him publicly known for something rather more cultural or aesthetic.

For instance he was approached one day by a man who was a famous, or perhaps better to say, a notorious Wall Street raider. A raider is one who becomes expert at taking over companies or getting enough shares of a company's stock so as to exercise, or threaten to exercise, control of it.

Within six months this man's name had appeared as the generous patron of a children's hospital.

At an auction of fine paintings he was somehow mysteriously but impressively allowed to take over the auctioneer's hammer for the disposal of a Renoir he had been encouraged to buy a year before.

Well within the next year or so his name appeared in the news magazines identified not as a Wall Street tycoon but as the Wall Street tycoon and art lover - a title for which he rewarded my friend very handsomely.

I remember once at a party for visiting English publishers, a young Englishman came up to me and at a break in the conversation he drew me aside and he whispered: "What does your friend do?"

Unfortunately this particular Englishman's whisper was another man's bellow and my old, droll friend turned around, soothed his drooping moustache, and said: "Young man I make large pedestals for small statues. I polish up faded escutcheons."

I can't think of a more apt phrase to describe President Clinton's recent excursions into so-called treaty summits - the international meetings first about trade with China and last week the meeting with Russia's Mr Putin in the matter of arms control.

Both times Mr Clinton said that he hoped he'd achieved something that would be forever remembered as a precious part of his legacy. So in my old friend's words he is now, until the November presidential election - or you could say for the remaining five months of his effective presidency - he is "polishing up his escutcheon."

Well it did take on a new shine when the House of Representatives voted to approve permanent trade relations with China but that shine was administered more by the three in four Republican Congressmen/women who voted for it.

Obviously the two thirds of Mr Clinton's own party weren't very good polishers - they voted against it. Because they're all coming up for re-election in November - remember the House members have only a two-year term - and, since by November Mr Clinton will be on his way to immortality or obscurity, the Democrats, many of whom were privately in favour of trading with China, don't want to say so in public, especially if they have union labour among their constituents - the line of the unions being, as you recall, that they're, on principle, against trading with a brutal dictatorship. The real practical electioneering reason was, of course, their fear that the Chinese would take away hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

So Mr Clinton's escutcheon - his reputation - may not have been blotted by the China deal but it certainly wasn't given a new glow.

At the ceremony, during which he will sign the bill, he may claim it as a triumph for his administration but he'll really be acting and looking very like, not the President of the United States, but, say, the French président de la républic - the head of state, the number one figurehead of the republic, not the head of government.

In cruder terms this is a reminder that Mr Clinton is very much a lame duck president.

The attention of most of the politicians who deal with him has been switched to the next man - Vice President Gore or Governor Bush.

And all who deal with him, I began to realise this past weekend, includes foreign politicians as much as his own - a point that seems to have been missed by many earnest commentators and onlookers who wrote up dark warnings about dealing with Mr Putin - the warrior of Chechenya, the KGB expert who appoints as reformers old Soviet and KGB hands.

So President Clinton was going to Moscow to further his policy of what he calls "engaging the new Russia in a helpful way."

He got on well with Mr Yeltsin and he hopes, of course, to get on with Mr Putin.

But Mr Clinton went specifically to announce a move in American policy which he must have known Mr Putin and most of the European allies are very much against: a revival of President Reagan's star wars idea - the missile shield, built by the United States for the protection of the United States against incoming missiles aimed at the United States.

This proposal, say its opponents here and in Europe, violates the spirit and the letter of the anti-ballistic missile treaty signed by both superpowers in 1972.

Since then there has been a whole raft of agreements and treaties signed always by the United States and the Soviet Union or by the United States and Russia.

But, the anti-ballistic treaty of 1972 is supposed to be the basic agreement and it's still in force and it stated precisely "a treaty of indefinite duration that restricts anti-ballistic or defensive missiles to 200 on each side."

The treaty was amended later to reduce the permitted missiles to 100 each side.

After that there were other agreements, other treaties, but always about reducing the strength of each other's arsenal.

But this time Mr Clinton had a new proposition because, while the United States shares the concern of its allies about the growth of nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran, Middle Eastern terrorists and what everybody calls now "rogue states", that the principal American concern is North Korea.

The United States has actually paid out billions of dollars to North Korea to exact a promise that it will not go nuclear, though there's fairly solid proof that some of those billions might have been used - you've guessed it.

So the United States, Mr Clinton went to Moscow to announce, proposes building that old security blanket - an American nuclear missile shield located in Alaska to stop or defuse any missiles fired from the Pacific at the United States.

Mr Putin didn't go for it. He began by suggesting for the record that both sides declare the 1972 treaty to be still in place, restricting anti-ballistic and any single country's defensive missile programme.

Mr Putin admitted that both countries were vulnerable to a terrorist nuclear launch. He was sympathetic to the threat from North Korea and he proposed a joint defensive base - somewhere in the Pacific - to intercept any boosted missile aimed at either country.

However, I have to say that the whole discussion - the summit itself - was really undermined by Mr Putin's passing remark that: "We know that today in the United States there is a campaign going on."

Well, so much for Mr Clinton's legacy. Mr Putin was quietly telling Mr Clinton to go home and attend to his knitting until we know, by 8 or 9 November, who the next president is to be.

In the state of what the media call Vice-President Gore's sagging polls, he has not declared himself on the independent missile shield.

Mr Bush, who's come out of his dazed expression and begins to act presidential, says he would welcome Mr Putin to a joint missile defence if he'd accept a cruiser-based defence system which is now being developed by the United States Navy.

This first Bush initiative has been warmly welcomed by the European allies, who uniformly agree that for America to go off and build its own "star wars" would must likely fuel a new nuclear race with Russia building its own and the forbidden and rogue states heaping on the plutonium, or whatever, and breaking all extant treaties.

It's an anxious situation but thanks to Mr Putin we can say, for the moment, not to worry.

Mr Putin really put an end to any significant summit by saying aloud what most American politicians of both parties are too polite to mention except behind the palm of the hands - that whatever Mr Clinton wants, or does, or signs, between now and November does not, as the Southern senators used to say: "Does not signify, Sir."

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