Prescription for a Pessimist - 8 June 2001

This talk is going out, I just realise, on my daughter's birthday. I also realise, with a pang, that on this day she has exactly reversed the history of my exile.

Having finished college, all pink and excited at the prospect of spending a year abroad, it now turns out she's been there ever since - having, like me, spent two thirds of her life away from her native soil.

The ironic twist is that the place she chose to stay should have been England so that she's exposed, among other hazards, to these talks and therefore is able to rebuke me whenever she feels like it on my subject matter.

I have to say she's been mercifully sparing of such reproofs but in view of the subject on which I was going to start this talk I can never fail to remember her calling me up when she'd lived in London only a year or two suggesting that I make a point of talking about something other than - wait for it - golf!

Now it's possible I may have taken up the subject twice in the previous six months. The trouble is she'd heard both talks.

"So," she warned, "go easy on golf. It is after all a minority sport."

Absolutely correct except that is in Scotland and the United States where two thirds of all regular golfers do not belong to a club but play on public courses.

Well the effect of that one gentle reproof down the years has been to terrify me into talking about golf not more than once a year, which was always after attending, as I did for 35 Aprils, the Festival of the Masters in Augusta, Georgia. On a majestic landscape which was less like a golf tournament than a royal garden party of the Hoenzollerns in a forest near Potsdam perhaps.

I go no more. Mainly because taking two planes - one from New York to Atlanta, another one to Augusta and then doing the same thing back again - is to me an undertaking not unlike that of the one-legged man who decided to climb Mount Everest.

This overture, unlike most overtures, is not intended to give you a taste of the great themes to come but rather to assure listeners - my daughter, for instance, if she happens to be on hand - that I am positively not going to talk about golf, even if the first little story I begin with suggests the opposite.

Very well then. We were sitting around at Augusta not so many years ago trying to agree on a list of the best half dozen golfers ever - a foolish pastime - when Jack Nicklaus, then probably the best golfer who'd ever lived, said in a relaxed philosophical moment: "I don't suppose a day has gone by in the past 30-odd years that I haven't at some moment thought about the golf swing."

The golf swing, even with the longest club, takes just on, or a fraction over, two seconds to perform and it shows, among other things, what a world of nuance and subtlety lies waiting to be roused in those two seconds if the best player alive goes on day after day, year after year, hoping to improve his two-second swing.

I can say with equal candour that since I arrived in Washington in 1937, throughout 64 years, I doubt a day has ever gone by when I haven't thought about government and governing, the art or business of turning political power into effective laws. That may sound a rather pedantic definition but I didn't toss it off casually.

Neither presidents nor lawmakers are to be judged by the way they flourish power, by their charm on television, their gift for words- Clinton talked a wonderful presidency - nor even to be judged by the intelligence with which they grasp a great range of issues.

An old friend in San Francisco was recently reading over a list of presidents, arranged in order of excellence or effectiveness, compiled by a posse of historians. And he asked me how my list would concur or vary.

I had to say: "I have no list." It is impossible to set the achievements of any peacetime president or other democratic leader alongside the ones who presided over a nation at war.

Lincoln, Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman - all had the enormous advantage of being able to suspend, for the time being, some of the essential protections of a democracy. Freedom of speech has to go, censorship has to come in. Lincoln, almost at once, abolished habeas corpus and threw thousands into jail without trial.

Even considerations of humanity, which dare not be flouted in peacetime, have sometimes to be overwritten for the long-term good.

When over 300,000 mainly British and French men were desperately being evacuated in every sort of boat and tub from the sands of Dunkirk, Churchill was the first to ponder the fact that all the allied materiel - tanks, guns, supplies, everything - had been abandoned.

And that if ever British soldiers were to be rearmed and trained to re-invade France they would have to be the fittest we could find. With this grim thought in mind - he shared at the time only with his doctor - Churchill ordered that the last people to be evacuated should be the wounded.

The American Civil War saw the introduction into a battlefield of the marvel of anaesthetics, administered by a dentist from Atlanta. For the first time in history an army could be spared the agonies of surgery.

The northern army that is: President Lincoln banned the shipment of anaesthetics to the Confederates.

Well the sentence that brought on this meditation was not meant to go into so serious a theme. I simply said that in 64 years there can scarcely have been a day in which I didn't think about government and its associated problems.

I was going to go from there and say that during the past two weeks I've been taking a holiday from political news and refreshing myself with daily viewing of the French Open Tennis Championships.

At the end of it I noticed that my view of people and the world has become more cheerful, more amiable.

And from this has come a sharpening of a perception I had long ago, which is why certain friends I have and certain acquaintances I used to run into regularly, or as Americans say - on a regular basis - are so upbeat, so light-hearted, so apparently untroubled in their view of life.

For a short time before I had the revelation I envied them, being myself naturally a short-term optimist but a long-term pessimist.

Well I discovered that the prescription for being so blithesome all the time is quite simple. It was one that all such people had followed most of their lives without, so to speak, knowing that they had a prescription at all.

The thing to do is not to read a newspaper or watch the news. I was astounded when I heard from a close friend that he did neither.

From there down the years in my infrequent but regular association with sportsmen, especially professional golfers and tennis players, I saw my original observation confirmed: Golfers and tennis players - the pros I mean - spend all their waking hours playing their game or talking and arguing about it.

The world - of Washington, Africa, Tony Blair, the Balkans, Aids, poverty, warfare, the United Nations - is a very faint sound, like a distant breeze, on the horizon.

One of my favourite golfers was asked in an interview at the end of the last presidential campaign how he felt about either candidate. This charming man, and most cunning, beautiful golfer, was dumbstruck in an amused sort of way.

"Candidates?" he said. "How would I know. I don't vote. I'm not absolutely sure who's running. I'm not interested in politics."

He smiled, warmly shook the interviewer's hand and turned back on the practice range and started stroking slow, beautiful seven irons.

I'd admired this man, both his playing and his quiet amiable demeanour, for 10-15 years. Still I was staggered at his response in that brief interview.

I still admire him, as I admire a whole clutch of new, upcoming players in Paris - gifted, concentrated, each day and all the days, utterly devoted to one thing in life - becoming better than they are as tennis players.

You see I've been trying all this while to remain light-hearted by simply ignoring what's going on in the world of government and especially this weekend as the Senate is turned upside down.

And in the wake of elections in Argentina and in Peru and in Iran and in the United Kingdom - elections everywhere.

There are eight countries, I figure, in the past week that have been going to the polls to opt for Utopia or prevent the end of civilisation as we know it.

So I thought this a fine time to duck out of the political game and what do you know? I know sooner switched on Paris on the tele the other morning than there was the old rogue John McEnroe interviewing an old rogue of a former president of the United States, a perfect mating, but going on about McEnroe's qualifications for going into politics.

There was, it seemed, no way of escaping from what they call these days "the real world".

That being so I'd better check out of my state of blissful ignorance and mention at least one topic, the main topic, which is at the moment agitating or absorbing people. People that is who read newspapers and watch or listen to the news.

It's the question, once again, of whether or not Timothy McVeigh will be put to death. And this has added yet another scolding note to the high moral tone Europe claims during the current festival of Bush bashing.

"Every civilised nation," a French official declared the other day, "has abolished the death penalty."

This damming sentence was spoken the day an old, wise American with a gift for separating conscious from unconscious motives made the interesting suggestion that the death penalty is the humane punishment for a convicted murderer and that the preference for a life sentence without parole expresses an unconscious desire for revenge.

Instead of extinguishing a man in a trice you condemn him to the living hell of 30 or 40 years behind bars, thus fulfilling the vow of the Old Testament's God: Vengeance is mine. I will repay.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING 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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