The new First Lady

I hope, I believe, you won't mind if we enjoy a breather from watching Mr Reagan and his administration taking their first plunge into the choppy waters of the facts of life. The difference between any government's saying what it's going to do and then doing it is always the stuff of tragi-comedy and provides lots of fun – mean fun – to the outsider, especially to journalists whose enviable job is to say why things were set up wrong without any obligation to set them up right.

But before we come to more amusing matters, there's just one thing I ought to say about an apparent conflict inside the government which has upset America's allies because of a misunderstanding, the persistent misunderstanding, that the American system works like a parliamentary, a Cabinet, system. Some time soon I hope to go into this at length to show why, in spite of the Reagan team's present emphasis on Cabinet officers, what they mean to do and what they don't, why this is not a Cabinet form of government and isn't likely to be.

For now, I'd like to bring a little reassurance to people in Britain, West Germany, France, or wherever, who may be losing sleep over a recent tiff between Mr Stockman, who directs the office of the budget, and General Haig, the secretary of state. Mr Stockman announced last week that this administration will make drastic cuts in foreign aid. Secretary of State Haig retorted at once, 'Hold it!' he said, 'Not so fast!' Those were not the general's actual words – he was brought up in the Pentagon and talks in words of five and six syllables, even inventing his own verbs, as in, 'I think you are contextising that improperly, senator'.

Simply then, the budget director wants heavy cuts in foreign aid. Secretary Haig doesn't. Who to believe? This sort of conflict comes up time and again and produces a period of panic in the allies that are likely to be affected. Long ago, I remember an admiral who was the navy chief of staff suddenly announcing that this country was ready, if need be, to fight to protect Taiwan. The secretary of state, a Mr Dulles at the time, said, in effect, that this was news to him. The allies went into a flap. Mr Anthony Eden who was then the foreign secretary of Great Britain asked for urgent clarification, which is the Foreign Office way of saying, 'What the hell is going on here?'.

It was explained to Mr Eden that the admiral was sounding off on his own in the hope of frightening the enemy, the potential enemy at the time being Communist China. Mr Eden confided that, 'Well, he may or may not frighten the enemy, but he certainly frightens me.'

It is not conceivable, in a parliamentary country, that a Cabinet minister or a commanding general should sound off on his own, should announce a policy not, at the very least, cleared by the prime minister and the full Cabinet. In fact, he wouldn't be allowed to speak for himself at all. Well, everything calmed down when Mr Eden and the other worried allies were assured that the only word to be believed was that of the president. In that crisis, President Eisenhower.

Well, it's just as true today. Mr Reagan has been making such a big thing of consulting the Cabinet and seeming to give them their own independence, that it may take a little time and a few more panics for him to discover that when a Cabinet officer speaks out, America's allies assume that he's speaking for the president. When that time comes, Mr Reagan will tell his Cabinet officers to shut up. You'll hear less and less of them. Mr Reagan, the 40th president, will be the 40th man to learn that the presidency is, as an earlier president put it, 'a splendid misery' or, as Harry Truman said, tapping his White House desk, 'The buck stops here!'.

Now, for less frightening and fascinating matters. I was dining the other evening with a lady who lives in Beverly Hills. She was very upset about a cartoon that had appeared, done by one of the dozen or more first-rate cartoonists and first-rate draughtsmen that we have around just now.

It showed President Reagan relaxed in an armchair, reading his paper, his hair was tousled, he was wearing his dressing gown, or what Americans call his bathrobe. It was plainly the morning after. Standing in front of him was Mrs Reagan, a-dazzle with pearls and diamonds and sashaying in a great, swirling ballgown and the president is saying, 'The inaugural's over now, Nancy, you can put on your bathrobe' and she's saying, 'But this is my bathrobe'.

'Why', the California lady wanted to know, 'why are they taking off on them so soon?' I suspected that this charming lady from Beverly Hills, who has had no acquaintanceship with other First Ladies, was identifying with Mrs Reagan as a victim. 'Well,' I said, 'it always happens. Jimmy Carter was no sooner in the White House, in fact he wasn't yet there, before we were seeing cartoons of a toothy hillbilly chewing on peanuts.'

I recall one in particular – a masterpiece by, I'm pretty sure the great MacNelly. Jimmy Carter had just picked Senator Fritz Mondale as his vice-presidential running-mate. Senator Mondale, you may recall, is a handsome, a very smooth and dapper character. This gave Mr Carter the honest, home-spun Huck Finn, an image problem. The cartoon showed a great Mississippi steamboat coming up the river, funnels black with smoke, bearing down on a raft on which Huck Finn (Mr Carter) was standing with, according to the immortal incident in Mark Twain, Nigger Jim. Nigger Jim, in black silhouette, was not very convincingly Senator Mondale. Huck Finn Carter is looking up at the steamboat and shouting, 'Nobody here but me and ma man Jim.' He then mutters out of the side of his mouth, 'Shuffle a little, Jim!' And Mondale replies, 'I can't. I'd scuff my Guccis!'

'Well, it's not quite the same', said the lady from Beverly Hills. I could only console her or brace her with the promise that it would get worse before it gets better. Every president, by the time he gets to the White House, has developed his own way of life, his lifestyle, as we now say, even if it has no style at all. Surely a man of 70 knows what he likes and what he doesn't? Already Mr Reagan's fondness for having jelly beans on hand, small beans of chocolate with a soupçon of jelly inside, this weakness is already being deplored by the dentists.

And, from time to time, the president's wife offers juicy meat to the cartoonists, too. Mrs Franklin Roosevelt was a godsend to them. She busied herself with good works up and down the country like no First Lady before or since. She was always on the hop, visiting hospitals, schools for the poor, YMCAs, youth training programmes, universities. The New Yorker carried a famous cartoon showing two coalminers on their knees hacking away at the black bowels of their cave. A light glimmered at the end of the tunnel and one of them said, 'My God, it's Mrs Roosevelt!'.

On the contrary, come to think of it, I don't believe Mrs Truman – a housekeeper and protector – who kept very much in the background was ever in a cartoon. Mrs Kennedy, with her high style and her beauty was a difficult object of ridicule. In fact, it was President Kennedy who became the butt when it was known that whereas she'd hired a splendid French chef and was producing gourmet meals, the president kept to his old Boston preference for a bowl of clam chowder and a plate of baked beans. And Mrs Carter came into range of fire towards the end as a brave, hand-holding mate, trying to keep the sinking Jimmy Carter on his feet.

But the Beverly Hills lady has a point. I don't remember when the cartoonists seized with such speed and such glee on the First Lady as the prime target. It must be because Mrs Reagan is always and everywhere at the president's side, that she dresses with extreme chic, that she's clearly more of a boss around the White House than anyone since Woodrow Wilson's second wife.

I think the main stimulus to all the talk and flutter, and to the cartoons, about Mrs Reagan is the universal growth – growth in the West, anyway – of the gossipy press, what is now nauseatingly called 'people journalism'. We're more inquisitive, it seems, hungrier than ever, for personal private details about the lives of the great or, more probably, we've been made so by a new type of press baron. Private foibles and failings, both tasty and scandalous, sell papers and, for a sociological reason I can't fathom and don't want to, the itch to probe into this sort of thing has spread to reputable papers. I doubt that the White House is responsible for this rash of tittle-tattle. The fact is that the White House and its tenants can no longer expect a decent silence from the people they deal with, shop with, dine with.

Mrs Reagan's California hairdresser, for example, was the one who announced he's about to open a salon in Washington. Immediately he had 50 phone calls for appointments from ladies who want Mrs Reagan's hair-do. California wines of all kinds – and the best of them are superb – are flooding the dining tables of Washington. The Los Angeles Times, in my book the second best newspaper in America, is starting to distribute every morning in Washington.

Mrs Reagan herself is going to have, I think, a tricky time maintaining her chic, personal style. She was seen at the inauguration in a Chinese red coat and an adorable matching little hat. At once, 200 women want to know how, where and who did it. No wonder Mrs Reagan has to spend a great deal of money on her clothes. Soon, to be original at all, she'll have to be wearing originals once only.

And the Washington hostesses, who once wouldn't be seen out or in without Jackie Kennedy's bouffant hairdo, are now besieging Mrs Reagan's man. And the moment we heard that Mrs Reagan has, at her beck and call, something called a floral decorator – that's a florist – he, too, is about to do a land-office business.

The last, the best word on this copycat mania came the other day from an old Washingtonian, a man who has seen a dozen administrations come and go. 'Power,' he said, 'is always fashionable. Everybody will try to be like the Reagans for a while. Then, like the Carters, they'll get ground up.'

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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