Foreign policy wobbles

Political journalists and commentators ought to know better than to bet, ever, on the political outcome of anything – an election, an armistice, an appointment or the stock market. But even in a profession which keeps files and old cuttings to show how vain and foolish are most political bets, the itch to be right at the expense of a friend is incurable.

Well, about a year ago, I made a bet with two friends, both of whom were convinced of the invulnerability of Senator Edward Kennedy. One of them, in fact, said it would be sensible and cheaper for everybody if in 1980 we simply called off the presidential election and advanced the inauguration of Kennedy to election day. At that moment I could not resist and impulse of pure or rather, as I've indicated, impure aggression and vanity. I said, 'What odds will you give me if I bet that the next President of the United States will be – wait for it – Gerald Ford?' Loud and uncouth were the hootings and jeerings from two of my oldest friends. They gave me dazzlingly attractive odds and the bet stands.

Now I fear Mr Ford has fumbled it by playing his hand or his chip shot too soon. The idea which shuffled around uncomfortably in the minds of most Republicans, especially strong partisans of Mr Reagan and Mr Bush, the two front runners, was that their men would stay neck and neck through the primaries and that the Republican convention next summer would be deadlocked, neither of them getting a required majority for nomination.

This has happened time and again in presidential nominating conventions. Most famously, most dramatically in the Democratic convention in New York in 1924 and just to show how dramatic it was, how incredible to any modern American politician, let me say that in the past 40 years, the convention game has changed so radically. The primaries have become such a powerful series of run-off elections. The likely candidates are out on the road months, even years, ahead, making promises in most of the 50 states, that by the time they get to the convention, there's seldom more than a token protest against the overwhelming strength of the front runner. So most of the drama has gone out of the balloting.

Since 1952, at the latest, there have been no surprises in the balloting for president at either the Democratic or the Republican conventions. Even in 1976 Jimmy Carter, an unknown the year before, had the nomination sewed up by the time the convention met.

The result has been a lot of hoopla and little drama and the tally runs to no more than two or three ballots at most. The last time an unknown or a late starter came roaring through the front-running giants was at the Republican convention in 1940 when a Wall Street utilities lawyer, Wendell Willkie, upset every expert calculation and shot through the legions of Governor Dewey and Senator Taft.

Well, this will provide the now usual grey background against which I can briefly suggest to you the thunder and lightning of the Democratic convention of 1924. There were two Titans met here in New York to fight it out – the governor of New York, one Al Smith and the man who had made Woodrow Wilson president, one William Gibbs McAdoo. On the first ballot, McAdoo had 431 votes and Smith 241.

I should say, by the way, that in those days drama was much more likely in the Democratic conventions, a choice for president harder to make because of the rule, since abolished, that the nominee must get not a simple majority, but two-thirds of the delegates' votes.

Well, the struggle went on for a day and a night and another day and night and another and, incidentally, no time out, no adjournments for sleep. Sinister plots can be hatched overnight. So, also in those days the delegates and their stand-ins, the so-called 'alternates' slept and voted in shifts. On the 71st – I said 71st – ballot, McAdoo reached his peak of 528 votes. On the 86th ballot, Smith passed him for the first time but Smith couldn't make it either. An unknown, a spoiler, began to rise. By the 100th ballot – it takes anything up to three hours for a ballot – by the 100th ballot, the two Titans and their armies were drooping in exhaustion and on the 103rd ballot, the convention voted by acclamation to give the nomination to an unknown, a mild, shrewd Wall Street lawyer named John W. Davis.

They had done battle for almost three weeks. Now this made for stirring drama and wonderful newspaper copy but such an unbridgeable rift in the Democratic party wrecked its hopes in the election. The Democrats were massacred in November by the incumbent president, Calvin Coolidge who'd been nominated at his convention on the first ballot.

Well, as I say, no such drama is to be expected in this or any foreseeable year but Mr Ford's hopes of getting back in the White House are based in a stand-off, a similar deadlock at the Republican convention this summer. The best chance of its happening, most of the pros agree, was for him to lie low, go on struggling to perfect his back swing while playing golf with Bob Hope and Arnold Palmer, enter no primaries, make no begging gesture, then get to the convention, sit back and wait and watch Reagan and Bush pound each other into a stalemate. And then let them come offering him, like Julius Caesar, the crown on their knees.

If such a deadlock happens, there's little question that Ford would begin to look like Napoleon back from Elba, a rather testing golf course off the west coast of Italy. But... but, at the moment, anyway, the pros believe he has made a strategical error. He has asked to be wanted, something the best politicians know you should not do too early.

What has happened now is that, quite suddenly, this mild, modest man has provoked bitterness and division in his party, especially among the conservatives, by saying out loud that Reagan cannot be elected. Also, if he'd wanted to be a powerful figure at the Republican convention, he should have entered some early primaries. By now about 40 per cent of the Republican delegates are committed through the results of the primaries so far. Also, Ford has passed the deadline for filing his name in the coming primaries in New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois – three states with enough delegates almost to be able to swing a nomination.

Somehow I feel my bet is now in peril but from now on Reagan and Bush will know that there's a third hopeful waiting in the wings, or rather a fourth, for the startling surprise of the Massachusetts Republican primary was the sudden emergence of a white-haired, dog-eared little congressman from Illinois, John Anderson, an attractive Republican with mixed liberal and conservative sympathies who's been called the Democrats' favourite Republican. We'll talk about him a little more later on.

He'd just missed beating George Bush in Massachusetts. What Massachusetts did, however, more than anything on the Democratic side was to give a greatly needed lift to the tottering campaign of Senator Kennedy. It was conceivable but extremely unlikely that he would lose in his home state, where no Kennedy has ever lost an election. If he had lost, that would have been the end of him but his beating the president by two to one revealed some nasty omens for Mr Carter. Kennedy was expected to take the liberal vote and lose the poor Irish voters who resent his stand on the bussing of white and black children to school. Well, he got both. He was expected to make no sort of impression on the old respectable Bostonians who, when they are Democrats, lean to conservative Democrats. He got their vote too. He got most of the Italian votes. He did very well among the blacks.

After all the committed delegates are counted in all the primaries so far, Kennedy has 113 for him at the convention, Carter has 89. Now this will no doubt change drastically after three southern primaries where Kennedy decided there was no point in campaigning. The great test of the relative pull of Carter and Kennedy will come on the 18th, Tuesday week, in Illinois which is neither Carter country nor Kennedy country but I'm afraid it will be even more a test of national confidence in President Carter and in his grasp of foreign policy which, since the Iranian hostage problem and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, has seemed to be his strong hand.

Illinois will tell us, surely, how much damage has been done to that reputation by the appalling mismanagement of the American vote in the United Nations' Security Council last Saturday. You'll remember that what came to the vote was a resolution condemning the establishment of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The chief American delegate, Mr McHenry, was instructed to vote 'yes' against Israel.

There was such an outcry from Israel, from American Jews, from Senator Kennedy, that President Carter, in suspicious haste, announced on Monday that the vote was a mistake, a failure of communication between Washington and its man in New York. The president said he'd meant to abstain. Nobody believes this. The Arab world, of course, is furious. The diplomats at the United Nations find this clumsy switch impossible to credit in a great power with the most alert and intimate means of communication between the White House and its ambassadors everywhere.

The result has been to make people start recounting the administration's apparent wobblings and backtrackings in foreign policy in the past year or two, that America threatened Iran with military force and then wooed her as an ally once the Russians went into Afghanistan, that the United States refused a UN commission till the hostages were freed, then approved one but failed to get the release of the hostages made a condition of the commission's existence, that the president told the Russians to get a combat division out of Cuba till the Russians said it wasn't any such thing, that the president called the Russian invasion of Afghanistan 'the gravest threat to world peace since World War Two' – a threat he hasn't mentioned since the Afghans appeared to repulse it – and so on and so forth. These charges may be over-simple or even fallacious, but they are being made in this way.

Illinois, where last week the polls had the president with a five to one lead over Kennedy will tell us much more than the relative appeal of these two contenders. A close race there could signify the beginning of Mr Carter's winter and spring of discontent.

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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