Colin Powell and Ross Perot - 29 September 1995

I must have told you sometime about my first chief in the newspaper game and the reason he gave for retiring. He was the long gone but never to be forgotten Wilmot Harsent Lewis, Sir Bill as his ribbing pals called him in Washington. Sir Bill, who presided over his little one man office in the old national press building like an Archbishop at his prayers, silent mostly, but on their arrival, an old friend – or his new second string like me – would rise, beg you, in the parlance we picked up without offence from the universally black butlers of the time: "Please sir, won't you rest your hat and coat".

Almost the last time I saw him, this ram rod straight Welshman with the granity face of an old priest, tottered pitifully to his feet and bent over. He was alarmingly not himself and when I asked him what could possibly be the matter, he straightened up an inch or two and intoned: "Not colloquia nor the courts of Genghis Khan ever devised a torture so exquisite as the bimonthly massaging of the prostate gland," which was the remedy of choice in those days.

He talked like that and often wrote his dispatches in these sombre rolling cadencies, but when the time came for him to decide to quit, when his body told him brutally how old he was – I'd been I think to four or five of his 70th birthday parties – he handed over a small pack of cards, not playing cards indeed but press credentials: The Senate Gallery, the House Gallery, best of all the White House and a surprising bonus, the Time's credential for that years coming Republican party nominating convention. It was as if, in a grander context, a president or a monarch that handed over to a stripling his seals of office. "Why, why," I cried pretending grief in a situation, which of course delighted me. "Because my dear boy," he said. "Whatever happened yesterday and will happen again tomorrow." Well, if you really believe that, then surely it's time to stop being a reporter, even though over the long run of any observer, even the most random events begin to follow an anticipated pattern.

Of course it is true here as anywhere, but also there is a crazy inconsequence often an outlandishness about American events, which always catches you napping. My first American mentor a famous Baltimore newspaper man said to me at the beginning: "Cook, God be with you if you're going to spend your days reporting this country, it will astonish you, disgust you, tickle you, delight you, outrage you, you will meet in any given week, more clowns and mountebanks than you'd thought existed, but I promise you one thing: you'll never be bored, it's a nine ring circus." So it was and has been, though some of the acts are like bills going through Congress, are very complicated in performance and have to be followed with a computer.

Einstein, when he was playing deep thought at Princeton tried very hard to follow the workings of the federal government, but a colleague told me he gave up, and retreated into ideology – which is much easier on the nerves – announcing with high indignation what ought to be done, instead of trying to do it. Well now this is suddenly one of those rare weeks when what happens today positively didn't happen yesterday, when many chronic troubles or endlessly debated issues quite suddenly came to the boil.

After nine months, as I speak, the jury in the OJ Simpson trial is pondering it's verdict or is about to do so!

In states that have been threatening for years to privatise the hauling away of garbage it's been done.

And driving just recently, only a short stretch of the California coastline, no more than a few 100 miles or so, I saw that three, very extensive, far spreading army camps – including San Francisco's historic link with the Spanish, the 'Presidio' – have ceased to be threatened with closure: it's been done. One has turned overnight into yet another campus of the University of California, another is debating how much land should become a public, even a national park, a third is up for grabs and is, need I say, initiating a familiar conflict between the developers and the environmentalists.

Then we'd been playing, half-seriously, with the idea of General Colin Powell's perhaps being the answer to a disillusioned voter's prayer, when he burst onto hundreds of front pages and hundreds of television channels, with interviews he didn't have to seek. He's off around the country on the strenuous chore I believe, of what is known in Britain as 'flogging his book', his memoirs, a routine that entails: getting up at the crack of dawn everyday for a week or two, flying to a city, heading for an interview on a local breakfast show, being sandwiched in for a quick interview between a juggler and an Asian American lady who knows a special trick for cooking Won Ton soup. You bow out and you rush to the largest – you hope – of the local bookstores and sign – you hope – several hundred books, you go on, perhaps to a suburban bookstore, do the same, just in time to catch a flight to the next stop, the next routine at a city 400 miles away.

The itinerary is setup of course by the publisher and it's effectiveness in selling a lot of books depends mainly on his or her foresight and overall smartness. General Powell's publisher didn't need to be smart: the bookstores and the newspapers and the television stations and the star commentators came rushing at him before he'd taken his first flight. The coincidence, coincidence of a national poll, revealed at the of the first week of General Powell's safari that if the presidential election were held today and he was the Republican candidate he would swamp President Clinton by a rather amazing 50-odd percent to 30-odd percent. If he ran as an independent and the main bout was between Mr Clinton and Senator Dole as the Republican candidate, it would be as close to a three way tie as such things can be.

So you see while as late as a week ago we were banging the ball back and forth with thoughts about the general's possible candidacy would he, wouldn't he, when will he say? The media are acting after the publication of those polls as if he was already a declared candidate from one party or the other and the reams of speculation about what sort of president he'd make are as long as they would be in the high summer of 1996, the election year.

It will occur to any listener who's been there before that with 13 months to go to the election, there's going to be an awful lot of useless speculation. I mentioned not long ago the cautionary experience of the 1940 Republican convention when until one month before the convention there were only two men in the race, two Titans of the party. And in June, the convention after duly splitting the vote down the middle between these puffing Titans, suddenly nominated a man not a thousand people in the country had ever heard of, until, that March, he'd appeared on a popular quiz radio show – no TV then. That memory doesn't mean we're going to play our cards shiftily close to the chest until next summer.

There's one consolation I think we can count on, the general has promised to look the field over, and the problems, and make up his mind by, I think he said, Thanksgiving, anyway before the New Year, so for a couple of months or so we can let our blood pressure fall to normal when we consider the case of General Colin Powell. You'll have to learn to say Col'n not Colin for an interesting sort of reason that we'll be all too ready to explain, as with much other trivia, the day he throws his campaign cap in the ring.

Meanwhile, we've been saying that one thing you could bet on this time: no more Ross Perot – remember him? The twangy slangy little Texas billionaire who scared the daylights out of all the regular politicians last time by taking 19 per cent of the vote, mostly we believed, from President Bush and so allowing Mr Clinton to become what they call a minority president. That's a winner who takes less than half the total vote, never forget as no Republican is doing this time, that Mr Clinton's total was only 43 per cent.

Well this past week, who should come crackling onto the scene but the same Ross Perot announcing not that he's a candidate, but that he's decided the people are so fed up with the two regular parties, that he's hereby founding a third party, to be called the Independent Party, to be put on the ballots of all the states. For now, let's just quote, what to me is the most apt comment about the resurrection of Ross Perot: Maybe Mr Perot thinks that with his new third party he's creating a vehicle Colin Powell can drive to the White House. More likely he's just made General Powell a lot more attractive as a Republican candidate in the eyes of the party's sceptics.

I've said nothing so far about the big noise, the like of which has not been heard in 60 years, which the New York Times called "Washington's Political Earthquake," the Senate by 87 to 12, one senator absent, voted to go along with the House to dismantle the whole national welfare system, count the cost of it in each state and make out cheques for each of the 50 states and say, go ahead you manage your own welfare. Nobody thought this would ever happen. It's as if Britain repealed all the social legislation fought for and pushed through in the first decade of this century by those two radical Liberals, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The earthquake is such a stunner that we're still blinking in the dust and thunder of it, and I think only when the OJ Simpson case is gone and forgotten and General Powell has made up his mind, will we be able to see the effect, the first effects of a revolutionary coup, which doesn't just say, charity begins at home, but that home means the state capital and not Washington D.C..

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