Indict and remand - 15 July 1988

For people whose breath is going to bate at the prospect of next week’s invasion of Atlanta, Georgia, where the Democrats will choose, or rather confirm their choice, of a presidential candidate, let me say only a few words and then move on.

There was a time when any talk a day or two before a presidential nominating convention was bound to be about nothing else because the convention system was then as exciting as a cup final, as subtle and cunning in its moves as a chess tournament and as gaudy as a circus.

All that remains these days is the circus. There are no more breath-taking ballots to look forward to, not the faintest prospect that, as at the Republican convention in 1940, the two or three titans who go there as the certain favourites will fall apart and on the fifth ballot the convention would suddenly start to bay an unknown name and crown a man who had never campaigned, a man who had never voted anything but Democrat.

As I’ve explained early in the spring, the nationwide spread of primary elections in over 30 states has acted as a sort of national referendum which has short-circuited the convention system. The one surprise element in an American presidential election which made it so much more dramatic than a parliamentary election, the fact that you did not know ahead of time who would be the leader of each party, this has gone, anticipated in the verdict of the primaries.

So now the pollsters and the punters and the pundits have to compete in showing off their know-how by guessing not what’s going to happen in Atlanta in July and New Orleans in August but to the country in November and I notice among friends and other knowledgeable wizards that their careful scientific appraisals wind up in wishful thinking. They see great writhing forces at work to elect the man they want for president. All right?

In the meantime, a correspondent who describes himself as a simple listener but who is in fact a man of such distinction that I blush to name him, he writes to ask me to explain once for all a word that he says is rarely understood – it’s American meaning anyway – outside America. The word is “indicted”.

The first shock that this was so came to me very many years ago when I was a humble stringer for the-then mighty Times of London. This must have been – it was – before the Second War, on the eve of it. The foreign editor in London alerted me to the imminent arrival of our chief diplomatic correspondent, a man I didn’t know - how dare I from my lowly position? – but one whose very title conveyed to me the certainty that I was about to meet somebody of the stature of Machiavelli or Lord Balfour.

I was told to appear at his hotel the morning after his arrival and before I could ask him what he desired he said, “Tell me, somebody in this country always seems to be being indicted – what does it mean?”

He had good cause to wonder. We’re talking about the late 1930s, a very busy season for indictments in New York City which was then being run with all the threatening energy of a fire engine by the little spunky dynamo of a mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, or you could say that the city at that time was more quietly and ruthlessly run when it came to such things as public services and the transport of food supplies by racketeers.

In fact before I sailed back into New York in the spring of 1937 I’d done a piece on New York’s rackets for The Listener with an American newspaper man based at the time in London. We went into the whole protection business whereby the island of Manhattan – which must ferry in much of its meat and vegetables and other produce – was held to ransom at the ferry terminals and the underwater tunnels by gangsters' agents who demanded a weekly toll for the safe delivery of these goods.

The system was very simple and very scary, as you could learn at the time from many movies on the subject. There was one I remember with Bette Davis called A Marked Woman about the prostitution racket which was, I now remember, the springboard of our broadcast discussion.

If you want to see painlessly how this brutal system worked all you have to do is to get some theatre or network to revive a movie made in the '40s called The Great McGinty, still the funniest and most callous movie satire on American local politics in which Brian Donlevy is the shakedown man.

In one morning he moves briskly from a laundry to a fruit stall, to a butcher, to a lone shark and says in effect “You don’t want any trouble running your store, do you? You don’t want some clut pouring lime on your vegetables, do you, or waking up one day to find the morning’s laundry bundles all spoiled with acid? That would be messy, wouldn’t it? But you hand me $30 a week and the men who run this great city will take care of those bums who’d ruin your business.”

Of course the men who collected the protection money were also the men who would see to the ruination of the business if the money wasn’t paid. The American reporter and I figured that, at the time, every citizen of Manhattan was paying out a hidden tax of, say, $10 a week in protection.

During the last day or so of our transatlantic voyage to New York I’d become friendly with an older American and I showed him the Listener piece. He seemed a responsive, a very friendly type, but evidently he snuck off to the purser and the purser told the captain and when we came to go through immigration on the last hours up the bay I was held for questioning on suspicion that I might be an unwelcome, not to say an undesirable, immigrant.

Luckily my father-in-law had come aboard along with the coastguard. He was a tall, austere man of almost alarming probity. He’d been New York’s commissioner of health and was well acquainted with the work, and some of the shenanigans, of some of the inspectors. They were relieved to take his work that I would not be a burden on the city or that I would kick up a fuss likely to require the protection of the United States army, navy and marine corps.

I was let in and never heard any more about these underground rackets until I came to cover a trial of a famous city Democrat leader on charges of corruption. It was a lurid day, the day he was indicted. There – indicted.

The simple fact is that the Americans have maintained an institution that fell into disuse in England in about 1913 and was officially abolished 20 years later. The institution is the Grand Jury, an English institution if ever there was one that started way back, I think, in the 14th or 15th Century. It was a very practical institution.

When you didn’t have the country divided up into judicial districts with courts presided over by judges in permanent session, it made sense to appoint judges who would go off on circuit, riding around the country and stopping to consider criminal and other serious charges in communities along the way.

Since the judge would not be familiar with the life of the region and the characters who lived in it, it made much sense to pick a posse of local characters – 16 was the usual number – call them a Grand Jury and leave it up to them to decide if there was a case against Uncle Tom Cobley, all of whom knew him pretty well, and if they decided there was a case, they brought in what was called a ‘true bill’, a Bill of Indictment, and then the man would go to trial.

As the country and the population grew so did the number of courts and the jurisdictions they presided over and I think it was just before the First World War that the late, famous Lord Birkenhead pointed out that in London, a city then of six millions or so, it seemed pretty unrealistic or naive to sift through the population and find 16 people who knew well every person suspected of a crime.

The Grand Jury languished and tribunals and magistrates courts decided who should be, not publicised as "indicted" but remanded for trial. "Remanded" is the unknown word in America.

Anyway, as I say, the system was abolished in Britain. It has been kept in the United States and once a person is accused of a crime the next thing is the calling of the Grand Jury. They meet in secret and the district attorney or the chief law officer of the region presents the case for the prosecution. Next thing you know it, the suspect is famous, there’s a headline “President’s aid Michael Deaver indicted”. More recently “Colonel North indicted”. Then comes the trial.

This whole question, the word and the institution it represents, was brought up by my correspondent because of a special prosecutor’s criminal investigation of the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, the attorney general, no less, Mr Edwin Meese.

Well the Grand Jury sat for many weeks and at the end of it the special prosecutor announced that Mr Meese’s rather murky relations with friends who had business with government contractors, his suspected involvement in bribes or something very like them had produced no evidence of criminality. Therefore, there would be no indictment, no criminal prosecution. Mr Meese was legally in the clear. So, to no one’s surprise, Mr Meese resigned as attorney general.

He says he has been vindicated but many people think he should never have got into a situation in which he could even have been suspected of such shady goings-on. This administration, however, has not been famous for upholding the old civil service maxim that a public servant should not only be above suspicion, he should be better than the rest of us by never giving even the appearance of wrong-doing.

President Reagan kept on saying, “Mr Meese shouldn’t be judged until he’s been indicted”, which is a rather alarming test for public honesty in an attorney general. It reminds me of a rascal of a politician in Buffalo, New York who was suspected of all sorts of shady doings. He ran for reelection on the slogan "Never been indicted".

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.