Kennedy's brief triumph

'Go west, young man!' said a famous New York editor a century ago and for at least several decades after he said it, it had a special invigorating meaning to Americans in the east. It was an invitation to pull up stakes, to tackle an untamed landscape, to start society all over again.

In the editorial in which the famous slogan was coined, Mr Greeley also foresaw the appeal to people weary of city life, the appeal of putting aside the main political wrangles of America and problems that were rooted in the populous and wealthy east. Most of the money for political campaigns came then from easterners and southerners and the eastern banks and putting aside, also, the nagging problems of what Americans then confidently called 'sick old Europe'.

It was recognised then that if this was a personal abdication of citizenship in the sense of abandoning national issues and politics, you were also taking on the obligations of what was much touted at the time, what was called 'the national destiny'. It was assumed – and rightly – that the future of national growth, of new empires, of crops, of fortunes and, ultimately, of political power, would rest in the opening up and domesticating of the west.

Well, it must be obvious that it all happened and that to leave the east today is in no way to lose touch with the problems either of the metropolitan east or of Europe or the Middle East or wherever. Probably the only Americans who suffer from the delusion that they are at the centre of things are New Yorkers, in some way the most parochial of Americans. I find that even among my cherished friends in New York, there's always at the back of their minds the comfortable assumption – it's really a transplanted European assumption – that the cities outside the capital city are provincial cities which, to the extent that they are distant from the big metropolis, are correspondingly gauche or ignorant or uninformed.

But America has always been like, say, Eastern Europe or Africa, a continent of regional capitals. Forty miles outside New York City you can snooze away, a rural uninvolved, like in a village as remote as a small town in Kansas. In Chicago or Los Angeles or Atlanta, you can no more escape the main problems of America than you can if you live in a street hard by Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC.

The main point is that today all the sources of news and debate, the news agencies, most of all the services of the four national television networks, are equally available to a reader and viewer in Crescent City, California as to an inhabitant of New York City. The columnists and commentators who have any talent are printed in Wichita, Kansas as well as in New Orleans. More of them, in fact, are available in Los Angeles or San Francisco than in New York City because Los Angeles and San Francisco have more newspapers under separate ownership than New York.

I always find that if I want to have at my elbow the widest range of national and international news and comment, it's much easier for me in San Francisco than it is in New York because of the coincidence of the time zones and the jet airplane. When I wake up in New York, the New York Times is on my doormat. If I'm particularly eager or conscientious, I can wait a few hours and go downtown and pick up a London Times but in San Francisco, when I wake up, the San Francisco Chronicle is outside my hotel door and so, if I want them, are that morning's New York Times and Los Angeles Times and London Times.

Consequently, when I come out here to San Francisco – and you'll notice the persistence of the old snobbish idiom 'out here' which means 'out from centre' – I often find myself spoiled for choice of a topic to talk about. I'd read a good deal in the past day or two about the transformation of popular art on the streets of Peking and Shanghai, the vanishing panoramas of noble soldiers and happy peasants labouring together for the perpetuity of paradise under the good god Mao and their replacement with positively sexy murals of naked girls drawing water and thrashing rice – still doing useful labour, you'll notice, but in a strangely elegant and provocative way. I decided this was unworthy of my serious listeners who, I'm told, carry around with them the thoughts of Chairman Carter or Chairperson Thatcher.

Then I got caught up in an interesting institution I'd heard little about – a department at Stamford University down the peninsula from here, a department of earthquake engineering. They have not been sitting idly by since the big horror of 1906. There are teams of scientists working away to establish methods of predicting the timing of earthquakes big and small, but what was new about the latest reports from this engineering department was the work being done to revolutionise the techniques of building, literally of designing structures capable of withstanding an earthquake of seven on the Richter scale.

The latest technique to emerge is one of cushioning the foundations of a building with concertina-like shock pads to isolate the building from the movement of the earth. It seems that this technique is well along, though the numbers of buildings that already have these pads are few and far between. Talk about this invention is, if I may coin a word, 'relevant' out here just now because the seismologists who are bound in California have been saying that a really big earthquake on the 1906 scale is long overdue.

However the California papers last Wednesday morning were just as overwhelmed as the papers of New York or Minneapolis or Chicago with the shock of a totally unpredicted landslide – the landslide win of Senator Edward Kennedy in the New York Democratic primary. The only shock pads the rest of the country heard about are the rhetorical shock pads being installed under the White House to cushion Mr Carter from the Kennedy rumble.

It is something quite new to hear the White House press spokesman going over on the defensive and explaining away a defeat. Mr Robert Strauss, the very alert and able Carter campaign manager, is not a man to twist in the wind. He blandly announced that the Kennedy landslide was only 'a dip in the road along the way to Mr Carter's renomination'.

Jody Powell, the youngest and usually the most confident of the president's spokesmen, reacted rather than responded by saying that, 'No, Mr Carter would not begin campaigning actively just now' implying that he might later on and would need to, though all along it has been the Carter strategy to remain in the White House as the conspicuous national leader, the captain on the bridge who dare not desert the ship of state in order to get into piddling dogfights with underlings about who was going to be the next captain.

'Anyway,' said Mr Powell, 'in order to tie up the Democratic nomination, Senator Kennedy would have to win 63 per cent of the delegates in the remaining 25 – 26 is it? – primaries.' Certainly there is a long road, however dipping, ahead to the midsummer convention in New York and it's a fact that so far Mr Carter has 746 delegates pledged to vote for him on the first ballot at least, while Senator Kennedy has only 385. Mr Carter is almost at the half way mark to the 1,666 required.

But there is nothing hidebound, or pledge-bound, about these figures. It's a mistake to assume that one or the other of them, or for that matter Governor Reagan or Mr Bush, will have the delegate strength necessary for nomination by the time the conventions meet. If that were so there would be no need of the conventions. The rules and obligations of the elected delegates vary widely and in all sorts of tricky ways. Only one or two states vote for delegates who are pledged to stay with their man through thick and thin or until he releases them to go for another hopeful, though in the end, that's what always happens.

When it becomes clear on the actual convention floor that your own man's cause is hopeless, the hopeless one always goes to the rostrum and makes the supreme sacrifice, tossing his delegates to the obvious winner. And the other hopeless ones do the same, for it's considered essential that they line up behind a single man, however repulsive he may have been to his rivals or to a majority of the delegates before the convention was called to order.

'Why?' everybody from coast to coast is asking, 'Why did Kennedy win in New York and why by the astounding margin of 59 per cent of the vote to Carter's 41 per cent?' I'm sure there is, there were, separate forces working to build up Kennedy, other forces working to corrode Carter. There seems to be no doubt among all the analysts, the psephologists, that Kennedy's strength came from the Jews who are still mad over the now notorious switch of the American vote in the United Nations condemning Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

We might notice, by the way, that apart from the technical bungle, this issue cannot even now be debated on its merits as a possibly valid act of American policy.

Kennedy's second big block of votes came from blacks embittered by the president's failure to fulfil his gaudy promises about repairing the New York slums,. But, independent of these arguments, President Carter lost former Carter supporters who are aghast at the soaring rate of inflation and others who are disillusioned with his handling of foreign affairs, who are sad and sorry and bewildered by the lack of any rousing American response to the capture of the hostages and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

At the moment, all one can say is that Senator Kennedy had better enjoy his triumph while he may. Ohio and Wisconsin, more still, Texas and California, have an enormous number of delegates and nothing like the weight of New York Jewish and black vote and – an interesting point made by the latest Harris poll – more than a third of the disillusioned Carterites who would have voted for Kennedy on the Israeli and the inflation issues stayed at home, baulked at a word which Kennedy's own campaign managers concede has grown as a menace since his campaign started. The word is 'Chappaquiddick'.

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.