Briefing-gate to be investigated

It must be a relief if you live in Britain, France, Germany, Australia, to have had a national election and know that for, say, four or five years you've had the business of electioneering and you don't have to wonder every time a politician makes a speech whether he means it or is making a campaign pitch.

How different it is in the United States. We are already well into the third year of our leader's term and while we don't know his intentions, he has more or less promised that he'll tell us by October if he's running again. So, in the next three months, everything he says can be taken as either a policy statement of an incumbent president or as a dry-run of his 1984 campaign.

What makes it tougher for Mr Reagan just to go on being president without second thoughts about the next election, is that there are already five Democrats who have declared themselves in the race. Literally everything they say is a campaign speech, deploring the Reagan administration, bemoaning what's happened to the country, practically anything sad or alarming they have in mind and promising a new dawn or a new era or a new deal come January 1985.

I know this is boring to you. It's incessantly boring to us and it has one effect which I don't think the men who are already running keep in mind. It gives us a sneaking nostalgia for the last administration. The man who's retired from the presidency always looks more serene than the man who's in, so busy defending this and that, trying to manage unmanageable things like the mess in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the troop withdrawals in Lebanon which begin to recede or advance farther and farther into the future.

Of course, when a new president comes in, you always feel heartened because every president has his own style and there's no way of knowing in the beginning that it might get boring. Jimmy Carter, for instance, came in walking down Pennsylvania Avenue on the day of his inauguration, hand in hand with his adoring wife – the big change from the fat, gliding, bullet-proof Cadillacs of previous presidents on the way from Capitol Hill to take up their new home.

Jimmy – and he wasn't even James – Jimmy made his first television speech dressed in a cardigan. His aides attended their big meetings in open shirts and sweaters. Pretty soon the people revolted. Who did this peanut farmer think he was? A peanut farmer? He was President of the United States, wasn't he? He'd better shape up and fly right! He did. He wore nothing but well-pressed suits and he began to get dry-lipped and verbose. He had a scandal on his hands with his director of the budget. He made his first boo-boos. He quoted his seven-year-old daughter, for instance, as saying that nuclear warfare was a frightening thing and the cartoonists showed him thereafter boning up on foreign policy with Amy. We began to yawn and look back and see the old Ford and Nixon days, quite falsely, as steady, dignified, interesting times. Interesting they were.

The only man who seems to have noticed this reflex of fickleness and nostalgia on our part is one of our best political humorists, a man named Calvin Trillin. He says that after a few months of Carter and his simplicity, Trillin began to think, 'I wonder what happened to poor old Bebe Rebozo?' Rebozo was an actual but invisible crony of Nixon's, a recluse in a mansion on Key Biscayne, Florida. He was thought of – by journalists who routinely protect themselves by using the word 'alleged' – Rebozo was 'alleged' to be a sort of Sun Belt Cardinal Richelieu. Trillin found himself saying, 'Rebozo wasn't so bad!'

And then, towards the end of the Carter administration, Trillin was down visiting some friends in Savannah, Georgia and they turned to their little daughter, a three-year-old and said, 'Do your imitation of Jimmy Carter!' The guest maintains that it was a super imitation. He gave it sincere applause till he began to think, 'My God, no wonder we're in trouble! For four years we've been in the hands of a man who can be imitated perfectly by a three-year-old child!'

Then came the Reagan inauguration – a ceremony which, to Trillin, was a parade of 'used car dealers' wives in their chinchilla coats and everything' and he thought, 'What's the matter with the Carters? I kinda miss the Carters now.'

Well, we always say, in this country, that what people get tired of are the policies, not the men. So that the main impulse at the end of one party's term is to throw out the old rascals and bring in the new rascals. But I think the stronger impulse is this irresistible temptation to get fed up with the reigning president's style as a man, as a speaker, as a human image.

However the most recent polls seem to give the lie to this theory. The third year is famously the toughest year for a president. He turns out not to be the Moses that everybody, or anyway, just over 50 per cent, thought they were voting for back there. But the polls say that Mr Reagan's popularity as a man is going up.

For a time, I'm sure, his unrelieved jauntiness got on people's nerves, his fixed chuckle leaving airplanes whether he was coming back from a summit meeting, a party rally, a funeral, anything, but he's kept it up and now he's saying, 'Look! It's not me! It's my policies! It should make you chuckle too!'

Inflation is practically non-existent, though restaurant and hotel owners ignore the fact and just order up a new print job on their room rates, menus about once every three months. Interest rates are half what they were in in Carter's time. The builders, what we racily call the construction industry, is pounding away again. And now, after a couple of years of reading funeral orations over the grave of the Detroit automobile industry, we hear that the sale of American cars is up over this time last year 40 per cent and 50 per cent and, in one firm, 75 per cent.

The economy, which six months ago came up from the underground and took a furtive peek at us, like the groundhog, is now up and bouncing. Even the Democrats have to recognise that and the five Democratic presidential runners are up nights with their speech writers fretting and thrashing over how to explain it without attributing it to Reagan.

However, there's another bit of nostalgia at work – a process, not a human reflex which was responsible for dumping Richard Nixon. Nixon, we all know, was doomed by Watergate. Well, now, how about Briefing-gate?

The suffix, the final syllable 'gate', has an interesting history in American idiom, by the way. Jazz men will remember tail gate, applied to trombonists and shortened into a greeting, 'Hi there, gate!' But, in general, tailgate is a very old word in American, being a gate or barrier in the tail race of a water mill. It was in the tail race that the Scotsman, James Marshall, spotted 135 years ago, those little, hard peas that turned out to be splinters of gold. By extension, you can guess the origin of Watergate.

In Washington it was simply the name given to an apartment building, a block of flats that overlooks the Potomac River and it was there that the ludicrous and eventually fateful break-in to the Democratic headquarters took place.

Well, now we have another suspected break-in or theft of one party's papers acquired somehow by the opposition. This is what happened three years ago and this is how we learned about it only ten days ago.

You may recall the famous stand-up debate between Carter and Reagan one evening in the 1980 presidential campaign. Earlier that day, one David Stockman, now a Cabinet officer but then an unknown Michigan congressman, was addressing a small audience of buddies at lunch in the inconsiderable town of Cassopolis, Michigan. He'd just spent four days pretending to be Jimmy Carter in a sort of private, mock debate with Mr Reagan, a rehearsal for the actual event.

Every candidate, if he's on the ball, does this, of course. His staff fish out the opponent's well-known positions on issues, domestic and foreign and they try them out on the candidate, but young 33-year-old Mr Stockman boasted to his audience that the rehearsal had been a specially whopping success because he'd had access to what he called 'a pilfered copy' of the briefing book that Mr Carter's aides had prepared for him.

Next day, a neighbouring newspaper, the Elkhart Truth, covered the actual Carter-Reagan debate and noted that several times the two candidates said almost word for word what Stockman had predicted. The files of the Elkhart Truth lay untouched, unprobed, for three years till, a couple of weeks ago, the paper itself resurrected and reprinted its story.

The boys in the White House said at first, in effect, 'No big deal, we have stacks of Carter papers on file'. The president was challenged at a press conference. He said he'd never heard of the Carter briefing papers but Stockman had spoken and he couldn't go back on his story. Who purloined the papers? Were they stolen? Or did some disaffected mole on the Carter staff slip them to the Reagan campaign team?

At the moment Mr James Baker, who is the top Reagan aide, says he got a copy of Carter's briefing book from Mr Casey who is now the head of the CIA. Mr Casey says he has no recollection. Mr Casey says 'Nonsense!', Mr Casey says he wouldn't have touched any such material with a ten-foot pole.

Somebody is lying. Some White House aides say the papers were useful, very useful, in alerting Mr Reagan to the sort of questions President Carter would put to him and the president, after brushing the whole thing off as trivial, almost funny, dropped his chuckle and ordered the Justice Department to begin a criminal investigation.

The FBI, as the department's investigating arm, has moved in and Briefing-gate already has a nostalgic creepiness of its own. It is not going away. A culprit or a team of culprits will be found. Somebody could go to jail. The White House is haunted by a hollow voice intoning, 'I have been here before.'

Two weeks ago, Briefing-gate seemed facetious and pointless and it may turn out to be so. Maybe not.

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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