Public back Carter on hostage crisis

Last Sunday evening, a friend was driving me back to my hotel in San Francisco after a warm, mellow day down the peninsula. As we switchbacked down and up the hills to THE hill, Nob Hill – so named after the new rich nobs of the Gold Rush – the usual blare of a modern city started to increase its decibel account. I mean no more than the whine of police sirens, somebody blasting a new building site, the peep-peep of motor horns from people late for their in-laws or their cocktail party, or whatever.

But as we started along California Street and the clock of Grace Cathedral began to strike seven, we saw ahead of us a traffic jam along the single block that tops the hill. There were red and white lights flashing in the darkness, three or four police cars, taxis trying to swerve round them and up ahead an ambulance purring at the ready for the victims of whatever disaster had just happened – a mugging, hotel robbery, a murder perhaps? 

Anyway, the jam was so thick that my friend let me off on the opposite corner and I walked through a small, gaping crowd and a parcel of cops, and being allergic to physical violence or suffering, I took one swift glance at the ambulance and its white-coated attendants, suppressed my old reporter's instinct and went into the hotel and up to my room and into my slippers. 

Next morning, all was made clear. There was no mugging, no murder, no robbery, no accident. Simply, Senator Ted Kennedy was in town. He was, at that moment, at a cocktail party a mile away in a hotel, along with 500 Democrats who had paid $125 a person to sip the sauce and gaze at the senator. It was a fund-raising party for a California senator who is running for re-election and it's always thought that the presence of a party bigwig or glamour boy greatly enhances the prospects of the candidate. 

When the election's over, it's always too late to check on the actual worth of these fund-raising parties but the money has to come from somewhere; candidates need it for campaign literature, for buttons and bows, for television spots, for the rental of airplanes to fly them to other fund-raising parties. But the hubbub on Nob Hill was due to the fact that Senator Kennedy was staying there in the lavish apartment of a rich contributor to his campaign. In other words, wherever the senator moves, flies, lives, breathes and has his being, there has to be on hand all the appearance and the protective armament of the police and the secret service. By the way, as soon as any man declares himself a presidential candidate, he's entitled to secret service protection. 

Now it will occur to you that I wouldn't have gone into this if some other declared candidate had been in town, Senator Bush or Governor Connally or whoever, but the ambulance – that was the scary novelty. I understand that it has become a routine presence in all the places Senator Kennedy appears and it's a menacing reminder that he knows, and we know, that he's more vulnerable to an act of madness than any of the other candidates, including even the president. 

And I'd better to say it now, at the beginning of the long year, the long eight months, anyway, before the Democratic convention in New York decides who is to be its runner for president. It has occurred to every American capable of a second thought and it has certainly haunted the Kennedy family down the years from 1968 when Bobby Kennedy was murdered in that serving pantry in a Los Angeles hotel, that it would be remarkable if somewhere in this vast land there was not one lunatic, maybe a score of lunatics, who did not know enough about the tragic progression of the Kennedy family fortunes to think of John Kennedy shot in 1963, Bobby Kennedy in 1968... one, two, three. 

Now this is a morbid thought and nothing to dwell on but the gruesome thing to remember is that there are morbid people, very sick people, who living in deep and preoccupied obscurity yearn for fame. Such a one was a Hungarian immigrant to the United States, living in New York in June 1968 and one week after the death of Bobby Kennedy, he took a gun, he went into Central Park in New York, climbed on top of a lavatory and shot a young woman and her dog and an old man sitting on a bench nearby. He was so hidden in the summer foliage that it took a whole platoon of cops to shoot him out and when they finally spotted him, they had to shoot him and he died. 

And when they tracked down his mean little room, they found the walls plastered with newspaper pictures and clippings on two themes. One, pictures of Dr Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda hatchet man, but mostly pictures of Sirhan Sirhan, the killer of Bobby Kennedy. On the rude table that served as this man's desk, dining table, everything, were scores of newspaper accounts of Bobby Kennedy's assassination and all of them had underlined in ink the name 'Sirhan Sirhan'. 

Now, I bring this up because the name of this sad Hungarian was also a double name. First name and surname the same, I forgot now exactly what it was, but something like Harangi Harangi. I don't think it's too far-fetched to deduce that what fascinated this failed, this pathetic, immigrant was the coincidence between Sirhan Sirhan and Harangi Harangi. Strangely this was never pointed out at the time but, surely, in the sick mind of this disappointed man the coincidence offered the possibility of a similar fame. He, too, could go down in history as the man who killed, well, not a presidential candidate, brother of a president, but in an end that only Dostoyevsky or Thomas Hardy might have thought of he went out and shot a girl in a lavatory, a dog and an old man on a nearby bench. 

I've thought of this often since and wished that Senator Kennedy would never run for president and tantalise some anonymous psychopath. But that the thought has occurred to other people, not least the campaign team of the third Senator Kennedy is clear, from the rather grim presence of that ambulance. 

Well, this second thought will haunt his candidacy and make a lot of people dread what tomorrow's newspaper may say but we are responsible, healthy people, are we not? And it's my job to acquaint you with the responsible news. 

All right then! Senator Kennedy, in San Francisco, put his foot in it at least as far as the administration was concerned. He became the first presidential candidate to criticise President Carter's behaviour, treatment, if you like, treatment of the Shah. For no reason that anyone could deduce, he chose San Francisco as the place to condemn the Shah, or rather he made clear his own position on the Shah as a dictator who presided over a ruthless regime and looted his country of – as Kennedy put it – 'umpteen millions'. And then the senator rebutted the notion that the Shah should find a permanent haven in this country. 

Mind you, President Carter has been very careful never to say that the Shah was permanently welcome here. But last Sunday, at any rate, the nagging problem of the Tehran hostages was no nearer a solution and Senator Kennedy's campaign has to get moving. And I'm pretty sure that some aide, some adviser of his has noted, as we all have, the masterly way in which President Carter handled his press conference on Iran the week before. 

There has been, so far as I can gather, unqualified praise for his performance in fielding tricky questions, thoughtful questions, adroit and fatuous questions, most of all dangerous questions casually put, like that of the man who wondered how long the president would wait to use force after all peaceful solutions had been explored and exhausted. Mr Carter was not caught napping. It was not for him, he said, to state a deadline. There was never a deadline for peaceful negotiation. 

The papers, the television commentators, even Republicans in Congress, have said the Republicans, grudgingly, that Mr Carter has never looked and sounded so impressively like 'President' Carter as he did in that press conference. He actually neutralised all criticism from the six or seven other presidential candidates, and I mentioned last time how mum they'd been, mainly because they didn't have a solution either. He neutralised them by implying that their silence was an admirable gesture of national unity. 

Well, after that now-famous press conference, the first survey of public opinion showed that two Americans in three thought Mr Carter had handled the Iranian crisis excellently. A week later, another poll showed Mr Carter advancing – he really had no way to go but up – advancing from his lowest state and being almost equal in popularity with Senator Kennedy. Well, the other presidential candidates were content to lie low and bide their time till the problem of the hostages is solved. But the Kennedy campaign team is made up of eager young beavers or young eager beavers. It may be its fatal flaw. They were disturbed by the sudden impression, quite new during this administration, that after all President Carter might be just the leader we need – informed, responsible, patient and, as he showed back there, last Tuesday week, eloquent and adroit and genuine, and all off the cuff, on the spurt of the moment. 

So, Senator Kennedy moved in with a rattle of guns against the Shah. This produced an uproar in the media and an immediate note of regret from the White House and from the Secretary of State. They felt that this was not the time to bring up what surely is bound to be brought up later, namely the repressive regime of the Shah and the cruelties of it that give some credence to grievances of the Iranian people. At the moment, everyone agreed the issues are the Ayatollah's flagrant violation of international law and the physical safety of the hostages. Senator Kennedy's remarks prompted the most tart, even acid, responses from the Republicans, one of whom wondered aloud whether the senator shouldn't sign up as an agent for the Ayatollah Khomeini. 

Well, months from now, Senator Kennedy may come to seem like a man, brave at the wrong time, but now he appears as a candidate who made political capital of an agonising national issue on which the president, abandoning for the time his own political campaign, chose to speak, and nobly, for the American people.

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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