Ford and Reagan battle for Republican nomination

Three weeks from now, it's almost safe to say almost anything that happens abroad will drop into Madison Square Garden in New York like a stone dropped in a pond. The Democrats will be holding their presidential nominating convention and while the suspense about the eventual nominee is hardly unbearable, the Democrats will be writing their programme or platform. In fact, they've pretty well written it now. It's not an exaggeration to say that it has been rewritten and re-tailored to suit the opinions of Mr Jimmy Carter.

The last time the Democrats held their convention in New York in the old Madison Square Garden, it took them ten days and nights to pick a candidate. I say nights not as a bit of poetic licence. In those days, before television had drastically shortened the procedures and the ritual intrigues of bargaining, nobody dared to recess the convention once the balloting had started – too easy for cunning men to arrange overnight deals in smoky rooms. Well, how, you'll say right away, could hundreds of delegates go ten nights without sleep? 

Well, every main delegate has what ought to be called an 'alternative' but in America that word long ago died out – 'alternate' is the word – and as the balloting boomed on, a main delegate either brought a cot into the lobby or the basement of Madison Square Garden or nipped back to his hotel, woke his snoozing alternate and despatched him to the Garden while he took a snooze himself. In that ghastly midsummer – no air-conditioning then – the convention sweated and voted through 103 ballots and, in exhaustion and despair, came up with a Wall Street lawyer who for most of the sessions had been an interested onlooker and outsider. 

Well, after this frantic display of disunity, the Democrats lost the election with consummate ease. I mention this now because while the Democrats this time seem almost sheepishly united – so much so that their national chairman says he expects to go to sleep on the first morning of the convention and wake up four days later in time to hear Mr Carter make his acceptance speech – but the Republicans are, for the first time since 1964, certainly bitterly disunited and that's something we'll come to later on. 

What I started to say was that in the summer of a presidential campaign, nothing that happens abroad can fail to be treated as a provocation to American policy – a case of mice having a ball while the cat is otherwise engaged. Now, on the surface, this may seem absurdly arrogant but you have only to go back 50, 60 years and think of England to appreciate this American attitude. In those days, England was top dog, the only cat in sight and what mischief the mice cooked up in India or Bulgaria or Berlin or Peking was instantly reported in London and reacted to. Britain felt herself to be the keeper of the old order of the world all round. 

And today, while the United States still rubs a bruise or two and announces she cannot and will not be the world's policeman, she yet feels that disorder anywhere on earth affects her standing in the new order. 

No doubt the murder of the American ambassador and his two aides in Beirut and the riot in Johannesburg happened for their own murky reasons but America is forced by such remote disasters to rethink her policy in the Middle East and, by reflection, her promise to work for majority rule in Rhodesia. If there were no election, everybody would naturally look to the president and the Secretary of State for guidance and either accept or grumble over any solutions they proposed. 

The Democrats, having practically crowned their new king before his coronation, are at this stage likely to check with Mr Carter and tow whatever line he lays down. But about half the Republicans – who every night hear dreadful things from the polls and surveys – feel they have little to lose from opposing, worse, expressing automatic outrage against any move, opinion, assertion made by President Ford. 

America is in the position of the absent cat and the cat powerless to get back home because half of his party feel he doesn't belong there. I don't ever remember a case of a president in office feeling that he's already stripped of the authority of that office. He's mocked not only by the opposition, but by the challenger in his own party, Ronald Reagan. At the moment Mr Ford holds a lead in the polls that has diminished from fat to slender – a lead, that is, over Reagan. And every day one hears of doubts and disruption afflicting the body of Republican delegates who are, on paper, officially uncommitted to either him or Mr Reagan. 

The Reagan managers are systematically raiding the uncommitted wherever they can be found, especially in big states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and trying to persuade them either to commit themselves to Reagan or, in those states whose election laws require the delegates who were elected as uncommitted to remain so till convention time, the Reagan men are hoping to get such people to agree to be, so to speak, uncommitted for Reagan. 

It's when you hear the reasons for shifts in allegiance, especially from Ford to Reagan, that you realise how impotent President Ford is to pull rank on Ronald Reagan and how effortlessly Mr Reagan can feign shock and horror at practically everything Mr Ford has done or proposes to do, especially in foreign policy. Mr Reagan is, for a candidate, in the enviable position of being able to appear responsible without authority and authoritative without having to bear any responsibility. This is always the carefree privilege of the opposition but it's very tough indeed when your own party has a powerful rump which is more indignant about your foreign policy than the opposition itself. 

So, a technically uncommitted Republican in Illinois who was seen to be wobbling explained himself in this fashion, 'I don't like Ford's foreign policy – too much détente, too chummy with the Soviet Union'. Another says, 'I'm not against Ford but an incumbent president ought to have it locked up by now. He looks weak and I like the fact that Reagan's not tied to the Washington scene.' That's true enough and, for Mr Reagan, a blessing. He can say the United States ought to send troops to guarantee a stable Rhodesia and, next day, take his foot out of his mouth and say he didn't mean it quite that way, maybe the United States and Britain could get together to arrange an orderly transition. Nobody has asked Mr Reagan what he thinks Britain has been doing all this time. 

Mr Reagan has put his foot in it at least two other times, once leaving the impression that he'd cut off $9 billion in social security, then he began to claim American sovereignty over Panama while the Panamanians are trying to end American control of the Canal Zone – not quite the same thing – and, in fact, a treaty towards that end is being amicably negotiated by both sides. 

The people, from the White House down, who knew Reagan to be wrong on his facts said so, but their corrections provoked no cheers which the next appearance of Mr Reagan almost anywhere in the country certainly does because Mr Reagan is a splendid speaker, while Mr Ford seems often to be stumbling through a language he's just learned. Mr Reagan has an actor's practised ease before a camera or an audience. In fact he converts any rally, even an interview, into an audience ready to chuckle, weep, cheer, in accordance with his timing. Mr Ford, it would be cruel to stress it, has no more timing than a drone. 

I suppose that what used to be called the 'well-informed' man is not taken in by such beguilements and decides things only on the issues. I really doubt this is true even of well-informed men who are probably more susceptible than they know to the human appeals which move us all, one way or another, of the candidate’s warmth, or lack of it, ah, his voice, his smile, the set of his eyes, the way he does his hair. Certainly an electorate of, say, 80 million voters does not pick its president by putting the issues on a scale and weighing trends. Like the chief editorial writer of a fair-minded newspaper, one minute's close-up on television, I'm convinced, has more drawing power than all the leaders ever written. 

When these two have been seen and listened to – and there can, by now, be hardly anybody in the country who wouldn't recognise Ford and Reagan through the wrong end of a telescope – it seems to come down to a choice not very different from the choice the Republicans had to make in 1964 between a candidate who claimed to be at the centre but was suspiciously close to the Democrats who, to the Republicans, are notorious leaners to the left, and a candidate who appeared as Wyatt Earp, a manly, self-sufficient, frontier sheriff who stalked the empty streets at high noon and was ready with a gun for the meanies and the baddies. In 1964, it was Barry Goldwater. Today, it's Ronald Reagan – a younger looking, though actually older sheriff, about to take no nonsense from the Russians, the Chinese or even the Panamanians. A man who declares, over and over again in resounding tones, with the chin up and the eyes shining, his passionate belief in the uniqueness of America and her mission to lead the free world. 

I think it'll all be a question of the general mood when it comes to the polling booth, whether Americans are disposed more to a crusade or an accommodation, whether they want a man who stresses the greatness of America or, like Jimmy Carter, the goodness waiting to get out but, once the speeches are over, whether the patriotic tenor of Ronald Reagan or the baritone drone of Mr Ford, they both seem to be in deep trouble. 

NBC took a statistical survey last week and reported that if Ford is the Republican choice, 44 per cent of the Republican vote will go to the Democrat Carter and that, if Reagan is the choice, 43 per cent of the Republican vote will swing over to Carter. If this is only roughly true by August when the Republicans meet in Kansas City, Ford and Reagan will be fighting for the glory of being the loser. And if it's true in November, the Republican Party could find itself broken, perhaps beyond repair.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.