An unhappy Thanksgiving

There was a happy time when, without embarrassment or the feeling of recycling old material, I used to enjoy sitting down in the third week in November to ring a change or two on the most American of American festivals and the pleasantest and the one least tarnished with marketing tinsel.

It is, of course, the annual celebration, observed by presidential proclamation in all the states, of Thanksgiving, originally put on by the first pilgrims who, the Yorkshireman William Bradford, wrote in his rather blood-curdling diary, had suffered a long and frightful journey across the ocean and, by God's grace, arrived on an inhospitable shore, the coast of Massachusetts, and there found no lodging nor friend nor hope of sustenance.

But, pretty soon, they did find friendly Indians who taught them what to do with a very succulent source of sustenance, namely maize – ever afterwards in the Americas known as corn – who built themselves rude shacks and ploughed the fields and were, at first, astonished and then delighted to find the cranberry bogs and the pumpkins and, strutting through the brush, this extraordinary strange bird, the turkey.

By the first fall, they had a harvest and they knew they would survive and did fall on our knees and thank the Lord God Almighty who had brought us safely across the perilous ocean into his keeping.

So, ever since, Thanksgiving has been the unique family festival, more so, in a country of many religions, than Christmas. It's figured that something like 27 million Americans were flying home on Wednesday and the rest would be driving there, a few miles or a few hundred miles, and there were a few million covering a thousand miles or more by bus, but only six in a hundred going by train – a form of transportation which, except for suburban commuters, and even then only in the cities of the north-eastern seaboard, is becoming as obsolete as the horse and buggy.

Our daughter, the baby daughter, is 37. I don't believe she has ever been on a train in her life. To and from Vermont, it's been a plane or a car and now, with five infants in tow, in a high-axled family car the size of a moving van. In Vermont, it's the van for shopping, skis down the snow slopes and the horse on level ground.

Well, this year, all these families will sit down to that traditional meal with turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, corn pudding as the staples, with regional additions in different parts of the country; 47 million turkeys had met their fate by Wednesday night at the latest.

The feast was always accompanied in the early days by a traditional prayer of Thanksgiving and there's a very tuneful hymn to go with the words and, today, a remarkable number, something like 60 million Americans, one in four, claim enough religious affiliation to observe the old custom. On the eve of Thanksgiving, the Wednesday night, it's usual for the president to give a little radio homily. Franklin Roosevelt always did it and ended with a resonant prayer in his soaring tenor and this time, I'm sure, Mr Reagan couldn't wait to be able to do the same and urge on his countrymen and women a bout of compassion and help for suffering or unfortunate neighbours.

It's a line at which he's very good since he's always believed – he's been most comfortable with – the folksy form of social help, house to house, neighbour to neighbour, practised in his boyhood in his home-town of Dixon, Illinois. Need I say, this time he made no mention of politics and next day was winging off to his ranch in California, there to feast too and ride and chop trees and, like the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II on his estate in Holland, try to put behind him the calamities of his reign.

But Ronald Reagan has not abdicated. His reign is not over. And in the long intervals between the horses and the wood chopping, he will be bombarded with information and advice and, no doubt, living in dread of hearing yet worse news to come.

Really the events of the past week have come at us – come at him – with such a tumbling clatter that it would be pointless of me at this stage to try and arrange their chronology. When I first heard about the incredible – every other senator and congressman has been working the word 'incredible' overtime – when I heard about the transfer of $30 million by Israel through a Swiss bank to be passed on to the motley band of Nicaraguan democrats, mercenaries and the relics of dictator Somoza's bully boys, whom the president insists on calling freedom fighters, I found myself verbally paralysed – a very rare condition with me – and falling back time and again on 'incredible', spoken like a tolling bell.

The first thing that crossed my mind was that somebody over the phone was not giving me the news but reading aloud a column by the Washington Post's resident funny man, Art Buchwald. Or, more likely, since Buchwald is comic and outrageous but never savage, reading the balloon captions of a particularly mean comic strip of Doonesbury. That, I thought, is going too far. But, like much else in this sorry story, the incredible turns out to be true and has to be believed.

The second thought, not more comforting than the first, was that it took two years with Watergate – two years of investigative reporting by two newspapers and a Senate investigation and a prolonged hearing by the House Judiciary Committee and a final, fatal order by the Supreme Court to release a well-hidden tape – two years before the involvement of the White House could be established.

Here, we had a spate of horrendous charges substantiated and the involvement of the White House established within a few days. It's surely one of the most galling ironies in recent American history that after the first explosion of the scandal, when Mr Reagan was saying his only motive was to improve American-Iranian relations and – surprise, surprise – the Iranians were generous enough to return three hostages, the president received a telephone call from the man who'd been there before, from Mr Nixon, himself, who urged the president to come clean now. No manly denials, quibbling, protestations of shocked innocence. Tell it all, before the harsh voice of the truth confounded him.

Well, it very soon became irrelevant to know whether or not Mr Reagan had decided to act on this advice. The hurtful truth, itself, anticipated him. The president's protestations of honest bewilderment required him to reveal that if he wasn't guilty of, at best, howling incompetence, somebody in his administration was. And who should they be, but two people, two underlings with no power sanctioned either by the voters or the State Department or Congress, two men whom barely one American in a million had ever heard of.

Now their being anonymous is, in itself, immaterial. All governments have able men doing quiet, important work – quite apart from the men who must guard their anonymity in the intelligence services. President Roosevelt used to boast of the passion for anonymity of some of his most intelligent and competent White House staff, but such men did not handle, let alone initiate, crucial foreign policy in secret without the knowledge of the president or the secretary of state. They did not ship arms to an enemy state against the proclaimed policy of their own chief, the president. They did not follow a policy which had been enacted into law by Congress as a criminal act.

Because of undeniable intelligence coming out of Israel, and confirmed by the staff of at least one congressional committee preparing for hearings on the whole mess, it became impossible at the beginning of last week to stifle the names of the three men who had, in fact, been conducting their own secret American foreign policy.

Mr Robert McFarlane, ex-head of the National Security Council and the two unknowns, an admiral and a marine colonel. Vice Admiral Poindexter, National Security adviser, and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a 43-year-old marine who has handled many secret missions, but always with the permission of the president. He got into trouble with Congress once before when he ran a private supply network giving aid to the Contras, the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. He was cleared of breaking the law.

When it was established beyond doubt that this trio, McFarlane, Poindexter and North, had been negotiating for eighteen months in Iran, had arranged to ship arms to Iran over the opposition of the secretary of state and defence and had then gone on – and the president swears, without his knowledge – to transfer the profits from the sale by Israel through a Swiss bank and give it to the Contras, both actions kept quiet from the CIA, both acts for which American citizens could be prosecuted, the president, all his affable defences down, first swore that they would not be fired and next day fired them. Or, in the usual fashion, saw to it that they resigned.

Two questions come up now, the answers to which will decide if the United States is to regain any credibility with its allies, with the Arab world, not to mention with any Soviet missions they have to deal with. One is the function and the respectability of the National Security Council – an institution set up only after the Second World War, which too often has quarrelled with the secretaries of state and defence and, under this administration, actually evaded and deceived them, and possibly the president, himself.

The other, more pressing, grave question turns on the honesty of the president, himself. How much did he really know and sanction of these incredible goings-on? It's the same question whose stony answer brought down President Nixon and we shan't know the truth until the congressional hearings get really underway. They have great powers to subpoena the highest officers of the administration and get at the truth, as we saw with the Ervin Senate committee that probed into Watergate.

In the meantime, the sauce that soured our appetite for the Thanksgiving turkey was the knowledge that, for the moment, the United States has no declared foreign policy that either friends or enemies can believe in.

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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