The president's holiday

One of my favourite journalists says that August is the moronic month, the time when we all practically make a crusade of not being serious, of putting our intelligence back on the bookshelf as if it were an encyclopaedia that we'd just consulted. Then we turn around and we say, 'Well, fellas, it's August! What do we play?'

He was talking about the strange convention known as holiday reading which is a light-hearted phrase usually meaning junk. I don't want to sound holier than anybody but I can, I think, claim a privilege which has kept me all my life out of the hammock of holiday reading. It's simply that I cannot really recognise any part of the year when I'm, so to speak, on holiday. My holidays are always intertwined with some working assignment. 

So, I went off last August, for instance, to look over some of the latest gadgetry being used at the Atomic Energy Center in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The place, the very secret place in the early 1940s, where the first atom bomb was manufactured and I found myself driving off with the center director, no less, taking a camera and photographing some of the flora of six life zones. 

There are not many places where you can start in pretty nearly true desert at 100 degrees, with mesquite and various cactuses around and half an hour later be up in grazing lands with deer watching you go by. And then go up into timber country with bobcats hopping out and a coyote crying somewhere way off, like an abandoned child. And from there, winding on and up cold slopes at 8,000 feet, stiff with Douglas spruce and white pine. And up again, above the timber line, where only sheep and the Siberian juniper flourish. 

And, at last, you come to the so-called Arctic alpine zone where you're at 12,000 feet where there are no discoverable mammals and only sedges and rushes and a little larkspur and the Colorado poppy bending in the bitter wind. And then to tumble down again, to a cool, sharp evening in Los Alamos in time for the cup that cheers or, for that matter, the cup that inebriates. 

If this isn't a holiday away from inflation and how to save New York from bankruptcy, I don't know what is. And the next day I was in San Francisco talking to a marvellous old Irishman about the state of West Coast journalism and the day after that I found myself in the dream-like situation of explaining to the Soviet Consul General the purpose of a bunker. He pronounced it 'boonka' as in Hitler's 'bunker'. I was quick to explain it was what is technically known in golf as a hazard and in the end I could come up with nothing more sensible than Ben Hogan's definition as 'something you're meant to stay out of'. 

Well, on the front page of a great many of our newspapers, I guess, there was a photograph on Wednesday of President Ford playing golf two miles up in the Rockies. This is no altitude for a man in his sixties to be banging a ball though if he connects with it properly, it will go visibly farther than it goes in the desert. And I wondered how many people around the country sucked their teeth and asked anybody who'd listen, as they used to do with Eisenhower, what the president though he was doing playing around in a mountain valley while Portugal is in ferment and the biggest labour leader in the country has disappeared, and more villainous stuff is coming out about the sneaky intervention of the CIA in various South American republics. 

Well, President Ford is taking a holiday and he doesn't pretend it's a summit meeting and if there's one human species who, I think, ought to be put out to pasture at regular intervals and allowed to read junk or swipe at a ball, it's presidents and prime ministers because their working day goes through 24 hours most of the time and they're expected to know everything and to do something, either forceful or clever or compassionate every hour of the day. 

President Ford, on holiday, gets up and has breakfast like the rest of us, but even so early it's hard for him to eat alone. Dr Kissinger or some whiz kid from the treasury is along feeding him the terms that Cairo is feeding to Tel Aviv or telling him he's going to have to shell out another $300 million for public transportation for some state whose railroad is going bust. 

Our old friend, H. L. Mencken – long gone, more's the pity, what a time he'd have had with Nixon – he wrote a piece over 40 years ago about the daily life of the president and even before America was top dog, it presents a picture so incomparably harrowing about the ceaseless routine of being at once head of state and head of government that I'd like to read you a chunk of it. 

'When a president goes travelling,' Mencken begins, 'he never goes alone, but always with a huge staff of secretaries, secret service agents, doctors, nurses and newspaper reporters. The cost, to be sure, is borne by the tax payers but the president has to put up with the company. And when his train arrives anywhere, all the town bores and scoundrels gather to greet the chief magistrate and that night he has to eat a bad dinner and listen to three hours of bad speeches. The president has less privacy than any other American. Thousands of persons have the right of access to him beginning – how long ago this was – beginning with the British ambassador and running down to the secretary of the Republican county committee of Zeebach County, South Dakota. Among them are the 96 members of the United States Senate, perhaps the windiest and most tedious group of men in Christendom. All day long, the Right Honourable Lord of us all sits listening solemnly to quacks who pretend to know what the farmers are thinking about in Nebraska and South Carolina, how the Swedes of Minnesota are taking the German moratorium. 

'Anon, a secretary rushes in with the news that some eminent movie actor or football coach has died and the president must seize a pen and write a telegram of condolence to the widow. Once a year he is repaid by receiving a cable on his birthday from the King of England. These autographs are cherished by presidents and they leave them, post mortem, to the library of Congress. There comes a day of public ceremonial and a chance to make a speech. 

'Alas, it must be made at the annual banquet of some organisation that's discovered at the last minute to be made up mainly of gentlemen under indictment or at the tomb of some statesman who escaped impeachment by a hair. A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days' hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next day, a dam must be opened somewhere. Four senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.' 

Now this describes an existence comparatively serene when you think what information and what persons President Ford has to put up with even on holiday way up in the Rockies. Ahead of time, a special switchboard is installed in his mountain cabin with lines out to Washington and Europe and the hot line always there to Moscow. Closed-circuit teleprinters chatter away, whatever he's doing, feeding him the gist of the diplomatic bag with messages marked 'Urgent' or 'Top Secret' or 'For President Only' about a civil war in Angola, how Tokyo felt about Prime Minister Miki's trip to the White House and some imminent clash between the Afghans and the Pakistanis and what the FBI is doing to track down James Hoffa or Patty Hearst. 

And even when he's on the golf course, just playing around with the local pro, trailing behind his caddy, there are electric golf carts carrying the secret service men and somewhere nearby, you can be sure, that lonely, eerie and ever-present figure who stays never more than 20 seconds away from the president, the man who carries in his pocket the day's scrambler code that can flash the signal and the combination to the red box nuclear alert system of the Strategic Air Command in the bowels of the earth below Omaha, Nebraska. 

If anybody thinks the president, asleep or awake, can lose his cares in a round of golf or dancing cheek-to-cheek with his wife, as he was doing the other evening, he has never seen a president trying gamely, and failing, to be carefree. And then he takes a drink and stretches his legs and remarks to a couple of old newspaper friends that he likes to fill his days and keep on the hop. 'Eating and sleeping', he said, 'are a waste of time.' Oops. The guileless sentence was no sooner in the papers next morning than the chefs and proprietors of 100 restaurants were on the phone to the White House and the president of their good food or haute cuisine society wrote an interminable letter lamenting the wounding blow the president had struck against the food industry of the United States. 

And Mrs Ford, whose health worried everybody for a time, is now feeling, she says, marvellous. Chipper enough, certainly, to agree to have an informal interview on a television network. So the interviewer says, 'How would you feel if your daughter, Susan, came to you and said, "Mother, I'm having an affair"?' 'Well', says Mrs Ford, very easy and relaxed, though one columnist called that question the absolute nadir of the colloquy, 'Well, I wouldn't be surprised. I think she's perfectly normal.' There's a thoughtful pause. Susan is 18. 'She's a human being, like all young girls. She's a big girl.' 

The fat exploded in the fire on two continents. Campaign managers for Mr Ford's presidential try next year groaned from coast to coast. A Catholic bishop was stunned. The president of a Protestant denomination moaned, 'I was aghast! Aghast! Imagine the First Lady sanctioning promiscuity for her daughter! The First Lady!' 

Of course, she didn't sanction any such thing. She said she'd like to look the young man over and hope that he was good news which provoked in some other people the accusation that she's a busybody supervising her daughter's affections. And said one old politician in Boston, the heart and capital of the Irish Catholics, 'Bang goes the Massachusetts vote!' 

A news conference was called by one of the elders of the Mormon Church of Latter-day saints. 'We feel very strongly about this,' he said, 'we deplore the deterioration of morality around the world.' I suspect that the unkindest cut came not from any public character but from Mrs Ford's son, Michael, who's a theology student. He could not agree with his mother's views on pre-marital sex. 'I guess,' he said, 'I'm more old-fashioned.' 

I see President Ford sitting alone at last with his wife at the end of that rocky day ruefully saying they ought to change the idiom, 'It's not true that you can't win them all. You can't win any of them.'

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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