Congressional hearings - 13 September 1991

In his just published memoirs, Kingsley Amis, the English novelist, expresses his view that Americans, those of the greater part of this century, anyway, are not much good at high art, fine art. Well, we won't start a debate on that. According to what's meant by high art, we could go on for hours and hours. But, he says, Americans are unequalled at art merged with entertainment, as science fiction, jazz – until it became high art, and films, especially the Western and the animated cartoon.

I think I should add in the category of art as entertainment, trials. Court trials, on television especially. And in life Americans love a trial and swarm and queue up for a seat at not only the trials of sexpots and multiple murderers but also for naughty cases of treachery, fraud that are likely to go on for weeks or months. They stop short, however, of trials of business mismanagement that require a deep knowledge of corporation law.

There's one trial going on now involving a very distinguished old firm which is, I believe, in its 10th year. The last expert guess was that it would very likely be over or at least the first part, the verdict rendered, by 1994. After that, of course, will come a year or two for appeals to be sustained or rejected.

I don't know why it is that trials go on for ever in a nation which, in the Bill of Rights that established it, laid down that, in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial. Maybe Sigmund Freud, who plausibly explained many contradictions between what you feel and what you think, had a point when he remarked that anxious people like to use the word which describes the virtue they don't have. In short, honourable people rarely use the word honour. Remember Emerson about some speech maker, "The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons".

Well, this week and in the coming weeks, Americans are going to be able to sit down and develop television arthritis in front of the box. For ahead, is an orgy of trials and/or of the surrogate trials that go under the name of Congressional committee hearings. In a courtroom in Miami, Florida, General Manuel Noriega, the former dictator of Panama, has just gone on trial as an accessory to cocaine smuggling and money laundering, after awaiting his day in court in a Miami jail for the past 18 months. So much for his right to a speedy and public trial.

On Tuesday, in Washington, in, not a courtroom but a Senate committee room which to a foreigner must have seemed after an hour or two to be an inquisition chamber. A black man appeared, to be questioned, quizzed, challenged, and harried a little, by the 14 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is the one that passes on the president's nominees for federal court judges. Mr, or rather Judge Clarence Thomas, he's already on an appeals court, has been picked by President Bush to succeed Justice Thurgood Marshall who was old and ailing and has retired.

This hearing is intended to demonstrate to the committee members, whether or not Mr Thomas is fit to move on to the Supreme Court. It's expected to go on for two weeks and I suppose young Americans present assume that this is the usual leisurely procedure. On the contrary, it's a very recent development. And must be due as much as anything to the beautiful shop window that television provides for Senators who, after exhibiting themselves in full legal flow, 13 of the 14 used to be lawyers, can expect at the end of two weeks to be recognised on the public streets, just like Clint Eastwood. And, on Wednesday, in another Congressional committee room, the House Banking Committee listened sceptically to the assurances of Mr Clark Clifford, the venerable 86-year-old elder Statesman of the Democratic Party. His assurances that for nine years he had no suspicion that the Washington bank whose presidency he had assumed in 1981 was owned, the puppet strings pulled by the now famously corrupt BCCI.

On Wednesday, too, a former national security advisor to President Reagan, Robert McFarlane, was ordered to appear in a federal court in a rather peculiar hearing. He was there to say whether the televising of a notorious congressional investigation had prejudiced him against a prominent witness who subsequently came to trial and against whom Mr McFarlane had testified. Do you know who that witness, later defendant, is? No other than former Marine Colonel Oliver North. The Iran-Contra scandal. Remember the undercover sale of arms to Iran? The use of the proceeds to buy military aid for the Nicaraguan rebels? Just when Congress had, by law, forbidden it. That's back in 1984-85.

Well in 1989, Colonel North was brought to trial on 12 criminal charges. The jury threw out nine of them and convicted him on three. A year later, a federal appeals court found one count irrelevant and set aside, discounted the other two. In a word, old, young Ollie North, after three years of plotting, a year or more of Congressional hearings and investigations, then two years and a trial, now was free. I have no intention of going into and going over and going on about that case. I brought it up only to marvel that after seven years, the chief defendant's case is still unresolved that the special prosecutor, after spending four years and $20 million of the taxpayers' money, would still like to try Colonel North again. I can't think of another country that would grind along, year after year, through the interminable legal channels that American law provides.

Of the 55 men who wrote the United States' Constitution, the so-called Founding Fathers, more than half of them were lawyers and, ever since, lawyers here have tended to go into government. But they also multiplied into society. And at some time, which no historian I know of has ever defined, America began to license more lawyers than any other country. Which must mean that at some time Americans turned more readily to lawyers for the cure of their ills, the settling of their grievances. There was one time I can think of when the population of a certain type of shyster lawyer greatly increased and flourished in the 20 years during which the United States built a national railroad network. Slangingly known as "ambulance chasers", they promoted suits against railroads on behalf of injured clients whom they charged anything from 20 to 50% of the damages they sought to recover. The ambulance chasers enjoyed their heyday in the decade of the European immigrant tidal wave, in the first decade of this century. They settled like leeches on the docks. Greeted helpless immigrants. Got them jobs and lodgings. Waited for a while. Followed them on street cars, protested every little accident, invented some, and for a percentage of their immigrants' wages, swore to save him from the depredations of just such types as themselves.

Why, now, lawyers have doubled and tripled their numbers and why the ordinary American rushes more than ever to the courts, I do not know. The fact is, today in Japan, there are 11 lawyers for every 100,000 of the population. In the UK, 82. In the United States, 281. And just to stay only with the federal courts, never mind state and municipal courts, whereas in 1960 there were 80,000 new cases, last year there were a quarter of a million. Some people, sociologists of a theoretical kind mostly, have put it all down to the American urge for perfection. The pursuit of happiness being greatly helped along if you have a smart lawyer on hand who can compensate you for being cheated or wronged, or upset, in any way. In the past 10-15 years, obstetricians in this country have been deserting their specialty in droves since American mothers expect every time the emergence of a physiologically perfect baby. And any imperfection, which was once put down to an act of God, is now put down to a blundering doctor who will be sued. Certainly in no other country in the world do doctors of every kind have to pay out such enormous annual premiums against the ever-present risk of suits for malpractice.

The papers and the whimsical end pieces of the nightly television news' slots are full of suits of preposterous and expensive triviality. Drunk drivers who get into accidents regularly sue, and often successfully, the owners of the bar where they had one too many. A girl, a deaf girl, who competed in a Miss America contest, took an interpreter on stage to help her to lip-read questions. She didn't win the contest and accordingly sued for violation of civil rights, humiliation and degradation. A man in Massachusetts stole a car from a parking lot, drove off and was killed in an accident. His estate sued the owner of the parking lot for, quote, "failing to prevent automobile threats". Three of the policemen, who stood by and watched that beating of a black man by Los Angeles' police, are demanding workman's compensation on a claim of suffering anxiety and stress.

Many, many years ago in Madrid, I was having drinks, late on a Sunday afternoon, with an old Spaniard whose apartment looked out over the main drag that led up to the bullring. About three or four every Sunday afternoon, he said you could hear outside his window a surging sound, like an incoming tide. A stranger might lean out the window and see a great brisk marching crowd. Where are you going? And the cry would come roaring back, "To the bulls! To the bulls!" The old man paused. And lit his cigarette. Two hours later, he said, you'd hear outside my window a large murmuring sound like a wind moaning through a forest. You go to the window. Where have you been? They're returning dejected. They say, "To the bulls, to the bulls."

Well, you read all the time about more and more Americans after every accident, every offence, insult, disappointment, rushing "To the courts! To the courts!" You seldom read about the turtle's pace of the litigation, the alarming sums paid out to the lawyers and the unsatisfactory result much of the time.

Where did they go? To the courts. To the courts.

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