Chernenko is Soviet leader

Well, you'll be relieved to know that I know no more about Mr Chernenko's intentions than the White House does, or the pundits. I have in front of me three magazines, the three American news magazines with a national, indeed an international, circulation. Their cover stories are all on topic A. These are their titles: 'What Next in Russia' 'Death in Moscow' 'Filling a Vacuum Again'.

The inside pieces, though long and strenuously thought out, ought not to intimidate anyone. They represent one of the more tedious necessary chores of journalists, like those pieces of speculation and guesswork that a sports writer has to do to be printed on the morning of the Cup Final. Poor chap, it will take only a few hours between sunrise and sunset for the reader to know that the man was spinning a theory or just filling space or was dead wrong.

Luckily for our Kremlinologists, by the time we know something, if we ever do, about Mr Chernenko, very few people will go trotting off to a library to check on the experts' reputation as prophets by re-reading the pieces they wrote in the third week of February 1984. We never did get to know Mr Andropov. The only man I know who was instantly prejudiced in Mr Andropov's favour when he became top man was an old jazz hound who was considerably bucked to hear from an American correspondent who'd done a long stint in Moscow that Mr Andropov, too, was a jazz fan, but when it was reported later that Mr Andropov collected Glenn Miller and Sammy K records, my old friend was disgusted. He said, 'Not only does Andropov not know the difference between jazz and Sammy K, but the correspondent doesn't know either. So I should trust him to tell me about Russia?'

The only aspect of the transition that I find interesting at the moment is Mr Chernenko's age. He's 72 and it was remarked on by some of the foreign dignitaries who attended the funeral that Mr Chernenko was short of breath and had trouble keeping his forearm rigid in a salute. Nobody that I've heard from saw anything particularly pathological in the wobbling forearm. I have a tough time keeping my left arm straight on the back swing but not one of the three doctors I play golf with regularly, two GPs and an orthopaedic surgeon, suggests that I'm in need of an operation. I think they'd agree I'm beyond it.

As for the shortness of breath, the only medical opinion we've been vouchsafed came from Dr David Owen, the Social Democratic leader. The New York Times man in Moscow offered a short quote from Dr Owen which is beguiling in its clinical simplicity. 'He has got,' Dr Owen is said to have said, 'He has got what we call emphysema, which is shortness of breath.' Which reminds me of Mark Twain's reply to a journalist who asked him about a man killed in a brawl in a silver mine in Nevada. 'What,' asked the conscientious reporter, 'was the cause of death?' 'He stopped living.'

I'm sure that Dr Owen, on reflection, would be happy to assure lots of people who are short of breath for other reasons that they don't have emphysema. But there seems to be no question that Mr Chernenko is not in top shape. He was gone from his office for over a month last spring with what some of his aides called bronchitis and others pneumonia. A little later on he was as invisible for quite some time, as invisible to the public as Mr Andropov. If he does have emphysema, he's not going to be hopping around much.

Which brings up the question, why did they choose another old man in dubious health? Well, the only reflection I have to offer on the coincidence of Chairman Chernenko being 72 and President Reagan being 73 is another question. Why should the two superpowers, so early in the historical era of superpowers, why should they both have two leaders in the seventies?

Twenty-four years ago, John Kennedy stood up in an icy wind in Washington and in his inaugural address said, 'The torch has been handed to a new generation' and whatever else was debatable about his soaring speech, that was true enough. We said, yes, Churchill, Attlee, Eisenhower, Bevin, De Gaulle – they're all going or gone. Mr Macmillan, we said, is there but in his late sixties and nobody agreed more generously than Mr Macmillan that, indeed, leadership from then on was going to come from the 40 and maybe the 50-year-olds. Kennedy was then 43 and under the inspiration of his election, a news magazine got out an issue which singled out 100 people – in those macho days, I seem to recall they were all men – they were all under 40 and the magazine decided that they were the men who, in the next ten or 20 years, would be the American leaders in business, in medicine, in science, most of all in politics.

And again we said, I said, reflecting soberly on the fact that for the first time in my time there was a president younger than I was, I said, yes, it's time to start boning up on the careers of these young men because pretty soon they'll be running the presidency and the Congress and the governors' mansions.

So what happened? Well, the next President after Kennedy – admittedly by accident – Lyndon Johnson, 56. Then Nixon, 55 and 59 beginning his second term. Then by another accident, the accident of Nixon's abdication, Gerald Ford, 61. Then we really had a youngster, Jimmy Carter, 52. Then something happened to that torch and the new torch-bearers. It got lost or handed back to the generation that had come to maturity, to adulthood anyway, during the Depression. Ronald Reagan, two weeks short of 70 when he went into the White House, 74 when – if – he goes in next time, 78 when he comes out.

About a year ago, I looked back to that 24-year-old issue of the news magazine that picked the next generation of leaders and I could recognise only two names of men who had achieved the greatness that the magazine had thrust upon them. Greatness is a large word. Let's say they became distinguished in their professions. Carter was not among them and, needless to say, neither was Reagan.

I just wonder whether the United States and the Soviet Union have not something in common that both of them would strenuously deny – namely, a common yearning for the old days, what we sometimes call the old values which, in Russia, would be the solidly established party bureaucracy made up of the old reliable revolutionaries and, in America, would be the old rural certainties of the settled family, the town meeting, the Sunday church-going, the brass band on 4 July, the helping hand to a neighbour, the community chest, compassion for the sick, the kindly, small-town America of the Frank Capra movies.

Well, I for one certainly expected that 20 years after Kennedy we'd hear no more of the happy – the imagined happy – America of the late Twenties before the Great Depression in which, by the way, the Reagan family had to scrape a bare living. Sooner or later, I suspect that this nostalgia, especially applied to government in both countries is going to fade and in the Soviet Union we shouldn't be surprised if it fades pretty soon. Indeed, much of the speculation about Russia under Mr Chernenko is surely gratuitous. We should be thinking about the next man, and from the available candidates it appears he may well be in his fifties.

As for this country, I've promised not to speculate for some time to come about who the next president is going to be but I should guess that sooner than we now think, the Kennedy torch will be picked up again, wherever it fell, and handed on to the next new generation. We shall have to wait indefinitely and see for, as young idealists and crusaders discover to their chagrin in middle age, few things in government and politics are ever resolved.

One thing was resolved this past week and it will bring a tear to everybody who's ever read about or seen a movie about the old mountain men of the Southern highlands. I'm talking about the immortal feud between the families of the Hatfields and the McCoys. There are two competing versions of how it all began. One says that in 1882 in Williamson, West Virginia, one Johnse Hatfield tried to elope with one Roseanna McCoy during an election just across the border in Pike county, Kentucky. Some boys of the McCoy family intervened and shot a Hatfield who'd also intervened on the side of the elopers.

The other version is slightly less romantic. It says that the feud boiled up when a Hatfield was accused of stealing a hog belonging to one Randolph McCoy but the two versions come together in the arrest of the three sons of Randolph for the killing of a Hatfield, whether it was the eloper or the pig-stealer or the same man still remains a subject of thrashing dispute.

Anyway, while the three McCoy boys were being taken off to court they were brutally murdered and through the next decade – we're in the 1880s and early '90s – there was a regular sequence of Hatfields being arrested in their own state of West Virginia and being set free by the local judge and McCoys being arrested in Kentucky and being freed by, naturally, Kentucky judges. Sometimes they foolishly got arrested in the wrong state and were either hanged or jailed for life or jailed for as long as it took for a posse of the rival clan to break up the jail and set them free.

Never, since the Old Testament or the Montagues and Capulets, can two families have discovered or engineered more frightful charges and punished them with such brutal retaliations. In all, over 14 years, about 150 members of the two families were killed. The war ended more or less in 1890 when Kentucky police killed two Hatfields and captured nine more and imprisoned them. Need I say that the descendants have never exactly been buddies. There's been sporadic violence and there've been threats and law suits ever since.

However, a year ago, the last male survivors of the two families shook hands and last week the last of the Hatfields died aged 99.

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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