Fruit fly battle

Washington these days has been described by one journalist as something like a Damon Runyon floating crap game in that the luncheons flow into the receptions which flow into the dinners, but the cast of characters stays pretty much the same. We all bid farewell to the Carterites, make contact with the Reaganites and search for truth, insight and a nice piece of smoked salmon on a crisp cracker.

Compared with any other political capital I know, Washington has always been a wide open town. I mean wide open to the curiosity and energy of the journalist. Not, I hasten to say, open to the cretinous, scratching of those ferrets who, we are told, make life hideous from dawn to dusk for any girl who has the misfortune to be considered a likely bride for the Prince of Wales. We have our gossip columnists, too, once known here as keyhole reporters, but they don't have either the status or the access to government of the Washington press corps which is, with few exceptions, alert and responsible, without being in any way solemn.

Naturally, there's the liveliest competition just now between the hundreds of Washington correspondents of the press and the scores of correspondents from television to be firstest with the mostest of information about the characters and the political intentions of the incoming Reaganites and, naturally, too, those incoming Reaganites have to keep a leash on their tongues for fear of committing the president-elect to promises he won't be able to keep. But they're all available to any journalist who can be trusted not to make a flaring headline out of a dropped hope or fear and who can be trusted, too, not to print at all a useful confidence.

It's always been so in Washington in my time that if you could become known as trustworthy and not out for personal vainglory, you could tap anybody from the president down for views and information that would help you to make sense of what was happening. Let me give you one memorable example and, in wartime, too.

Some time in, I think, it must have been 1943, much of the press here and in Britain was lashing itself into paroxysms of indignation over the Allies failure to mount a Second Front in Europe while the Russians were bleeding from the invading Nazi hordes. The Russians were the first in their government-controlled press to accuse America and Britain of laziness, incompetence and even outright treachery in not coming into Europe to draw away from the Eastern Front the staggering weight of Hitler's armies. Roosevelt and Churchill had promised a second front in 1942 but, a year later, there was no sign that it was ready. 'Why?' We all wondered and 'Why?' My own paper wanted to know.

Now you'd rightly guess that the date of the Allied invasion and the state of its preparation were absolutely top-secret items. There was one man, other than President Roosevelt, who would surely know the reason for this baffling and humiliating delay. He was the army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. He was very much more than that. He had armed the republic, transforming in two years an army the size of the standing army of Sweden into a mechanised fighting force of millions in Europe and Africa and a great navy with its air arm covering the quarter of the globe that is the Pacific Ocean.

He'd been offered by Roosevelt the supreme allied command in Europe, to the delight of the British who knew him as a consummate strategical planner and a man of iron integrity. He turned down Roosevelt's insistent offer three times. With characteristic selflessness, he suggested the command go to a younger man who'd been a major only two years before, name of Eisenhower because, Marshall told Roosevelt, 'somebody had to stay in Washington and oversee the colossal, the duller job of planning, as they used to call it, the Two-Ocean War'. He stayed.

Now, he would know better than anybody why the Allies were, in the canting phrase of the day, dragging their feet so shamelessly but Marshall was a man of extraordinary reserve, quite un-American in his distaste for the poking and probing of the press. Never an interview. However, with the help of the-then British ambassador and Eisenhower's deputy, Air Marshal Tedder, who luckily was in Washington at the time, I managed to get in to see him. I made it clear in a letter that I was not seeking anything so fatuous as a scoop, he would not be quoted, nothing he said in fact would be reported by me until it could do no harm, maybe never. I wanted simply to know as much as I needed to stop writing nonsense in the months ahead.

Well, on that understanding, he told me directly and simply that the United States had taken a long time to recover from the crippling blow of Pearl Harbor, that the supply lines were strung across the Pacific, many thousands of miles, that the famous Liberty ships were being delivered at the rate of one every four days, that the first of them had been used to replenish the dwindling food stocks of Britain. Every one of the rest ploughed the Pacific. There could be no invasion of Europe, he said, until enough Liberty ships could be released from the war in the Pacific to guarantee a continuous chain of supply across the English Channel. Otherwise, an invading force would either be massacred on the beaches of Europe or compelled later to repeat the disaster of Dunkirk.

The whole interview took about five minutes. I stopped writing nonsense but I was, naturally, pretty bucked to bite my tongue in the presence of experts who gave other, more sophisticated and gabby reasons. Incidentally, as a glaring proof of how warily you should trust a self-proclaimed expert willing to talk, I came on this startling passage the other night. I've recently acquired the nine volumes of the late James Agate's diary 'Ego' and find them to be a bed book about ten times more absorbing than Samuel Pepys or Boswell's 'Johnson'.

During the war, when the 'Ego' diaries were coming out at intervals of about one every two years, Agate was constantly nagged and attacked for making scarcely a mention of the war and it was true that, apart from recording that nobody would fix the electricity in his bedroom so that he had to read by a solitary candle and apart from minor irritations in the blackout, he went on unashamedly day after day about plays, music, ponies, French literature, comedians, golf, who he liked, disliked, supped with, played with. He kept saying the war was not his business and he would make himself look foolish if he published any opinions about it, but in the raging storm over the Second Front, he decided to speak out, to his diary, at least.

'I will put down,' he writes, 'the best I can do about such data as I possess. I do not know to within a hundred thousand tons what daily supplies would be necessary to keep an army of one million in the field and, even if I knew this, I couldn't calculate how much shipping would be required according as the invasion takes place at Boulogne, Biarritz or Narvik. Even if I could, I still should not know whether we have the ships and can safeguard them or how many airplanes would be necessary and whether we have them. The upshot of all my brilliant thinking, therefore, is that I ought not to have, have not and will not allow myself to have any view as to whether there should be a Second Front or not. The whole question is entirely above my competence. In the meantime, a friend, who has as logical a brain as any man I know, gives next week as the probable time and over a month ago I heard from the best possible source that the actual date is the day after tomorrow.'

That was written on 3 August 1942. The invasion was nearly two years away. Agate was exactly right and if he'd insisted on saying so at the time, this florid, racy, cocky theatre-goer would have been the laughing stock of Westminster and Mayfair and Shaftesbury Avenue, perhaps also of Whitehall.

Well, about the intentions and the competence of the coming Reagan administration, I find myself about halfway between General Marshall and James Agate. Politics is very much part of my business but I don't know the new men or woman and am not privy to their thoughts. I should like very much to retail to you the rumours, stories, plans, disappointments, developing feuds and hints of scandal that swirl around the Reaganites. The Washington boys are working overtime to pierce the vale of anonymity behind which most of the newly formed Reagan cabinet have lived their lives, but it's hard at this stage to separate evidence from hearsay.

There are, however, one or two things that can be said which are now matters of record. Several of Mr Reagan's advisers said, the day after the election, that the choosing of the cabinet would go off in record time. They were right. It's gone off in record slow time. 'Why,' people were asking, two, three weeks ago, 'why is he taking so long to pick a cabinet?' 'The answer', said one senator, the rarity of a witty Republican, 'is simple. He's been choosing rich men.' He was right. It's not that rich men have more to hide but that they have more to disclose.

Mr Reagan is the first president-elect to become the victim of a new law passed in 1978 which requires the most stringent examination, personal as well as financial, of any persons accepting the offer of a cabinet post. A full financial statement of all their property, real and otherwise, all their stock holdings to be put in escrow or sold, their company's relations, if any, with foreign governments or companies and with American companies that have had, or hope to have, government contracts.

This takes a little longer than it took Mr Micawber to explain annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen six, result happiness. Also, the new act requires some soul searching about character. Have you ever, for example, been to a psychiatrist? If so, why? 'It was,' said one early choice, 'like taking your pants down in public.'

About a half of Mr Reagan's first choices listened to their board of directors or their wives or their consciences and respectfully declined, but now the cabinet is complete and the Senate committees are going into their open hearings to judge the fitness or unfitness of the chosen.

I stay mum about those early hearings, as about the backtracking of the Reagan team on several of its campaign promises. I've always gone on the principle that, for the first few months anyway, any administration democratically elected deserves to be given the benefit of every doubt.

'You're quite right', said a disgruntled and defeated southerner. 'As we say back home, we like to give a man a fair trial before we lynch him.'

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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