The heat wave continues - 2 September 1988

I'm sure you'll be relieved to hear that this week we're going to leave Mr Bush and Mr Dukakis to their own devices.

And they are both very busy dreaming up lots of devices. The only thing that's remarkable about this decision to steer clear of the two contenders for a while is that it's the first time in forty years at this season of the year that I haven't thought it compulsory to talk about the campaign. That's because next Monday is Labor Day, the official end of the summer, and Labor Day in a presidential year always marked the launching of the presidential campaign. Between the conventions, which used to be held in June, and Labor Day, the chosen candidates used to get lost or go fishing.

But in a drastic change which has become the norm, they've been at it since the winter, slogging and talking through the snows of the mountains and the prairies as they are now sweating and talking across the whole country. There were even times, I remember, when I used to have to remind listeners who the rivals were when by the time they stood up on Labor Day – always in some industrial city – and kick off the campaign with a hallelujah chorus chanting the glories of the American working man by day, and finagling by night, to get the endorsement of the national industrial union, the AFL-CIO. But so little of American labour is organised – down to 22 per cent – that it's a delicate point to decide whether the union's endorsement is a help or a hindrance.

There's only one other aspect of the campaign I'd like to mention, because it marks a new style of campaigning so shamelessly practised for several years now, that even American's greying into their early forties are probably unaware that it's new. This has to do with the ding-dong persistence of personal attacks. It was a habit amounting to a tradition for the candidate leaving the convention that had crowned him to announce that once the battle got underway he would scrupulously avoid all personalities and talk only about the issues. Roosevelt went through, certainly three of his four campaigns, maybe even all of them, without ever mentioning the name of his opponent. He would say, the Republicans, or, they would have you believe so and so, and then with a great sigh of tolerance he would confide to his radio audience, but you and I know better.

In the first trips after Labor Day we reporters paid very careful attention to the speeches, before we learned them by heart, to see if either man broke this courteous tradition. The only time I leapt on it as a godsend for my paper was after I'd had a beseeching cable from my editor. It was September 1952 and my editor, the cagey, mischievous, spiky-haired Lancashire man A P Wadsworth was sad at heart. The trustees, or whoever, had decided that the paper must once for all follow practically every other national paper in Britain and abolish the sheet of advertisements – that looked like a railway timetable – and put news on the front page. Wadsworth didn't like this new-fangled idea, he didn't want it, but he'd had to give in. He cabled me: "Regret going news front page Monday, would appreciate something snappy".

On the previous Saturday I'd gone up the river, the Hudson River that is, with the Democratic candidate, the gallant, chivalrous gentleman from Illinois, Mr Adlai Stevenson. He was going to make a campaign speech by the graveside of Franklin Roosevelt at his old colonial Dutch house overlooking the river. Stevenson was the last candidate you'd expect to violate a civil code and I had very low expectations of salvaging anything snappy from his remarks. However at the end of them, he was going on in his confident, eloquent way about the hopes of the poverty stricken people of the Third World. Their plight, he said, would not be cured or rescued by the "general's baton," a direct thrust, it seemed to me, at his opponent General Eisenhower.

It doesn't sound much to go on now but it evoked low whistles, from veteran reporters accustomed to whistle low at shocking news. I had my snappy item. Next morning I rattled off my dispatch well before the deadline and began it with some such lead sentence as: Standing by the grave of Franklin Roosevelt yesterday, Governor Stevenson surprisingly broke an old taboo with a personal attack on General Eisenhower.

I waited impatiently for Monday morning's paper to be flown over here to see what blood-curdling or attention grabbing headline the paper had fashioned for my copy – the paper in those days, as now, had many splendid gifts, but the gift for a snappy headline was not one of them. The paper arrived in its startling new guise, there at the top of the front page, two columns wide, was the breathtaking headline over my piece. It said: "Mr Stevenson moderates his usual urbanity." Wow. I never again tried to hype a tiny passing remark into a mountainous insult. And I do believe we never had cause again to note a personal attack from either candidate.

I don't know when this civilised custom began to wane but it is long gone, and this year, since long before the conventions, both candidates have been snapping and yelping at each other in the nastiest way. And we're promised, almost, by both sides, it's going to get worse. It seems that for a decent, relevant, discussion of the issues we're going to have to wait for their television debates.

Well it seems that the appalling, the infernal summer of 1988 is at or coming to an end. In the places you'd expect, in the California Nevada Desert and throughout most of Texas and Oklahoma, they are still in the Fahrenheit 90s, where for much of the summer they expect to be. But in most of the rest of the country we are back to normal in the blissful low 80s, and pretty soon, no doubt we shall wake up one morning and give thanks for the sparkling, the incomparable fall.

In the East here, a very provincial section of the country, we just give thanks that we didn't suffer more power failures from the enormous drag on electric power, mainly from the 24-hour maintenance of our air conditioners. To be fair, we ought to be toasting the people who maintained the electricity grid – at one point when the use of available power was touching 95 per cent here, the New York State authority called on Canada, on power stations in Ontario, and to meet the demand, they in turn went all the way west to Manitoba, and their power stations threw the switches and fed eastern Canada, which then fed Upstate New York and down to the city, the power stations of the north-east. This has hardly been reported and so there have been no festivals of gratitude to the people we once called "our Canadian cousins".

But if you move away from the Northeastern seaboard into the Midwest and then the West you come on a pretty grim accounting for the two to three months of dreadful heat and the year long drought. About one half of the Midwestern farms, an area the size of Spain and a chunk of France, have suffered irreparable damage to their staple crops and to the livestock, which to us, will show up in the autumn and winter as stiff increases in the price of meat and vegetables, that we shall grumble about. Further west, in five western states in California, Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Wyoming, the picture is of a long heroic battle, that Easterners can barely imagine, of forest fires.

The Rockies, which have over a hundred peaks above ten thousand feet are high enough – they are also the continental watershed – are high enough really not to be affected. But the last great western ranges, the Sierra and the Cascades, have provided an enormous stand of tinder. Out there, there have been over sixty thousand forest fires, and still blazing away are 60 major forest fires. And for once "major" is not an American exaggeration. The national forest service of course has a regular fire fighting force, this year it has been pitifully inadequate. The National Guard, the state militias, have been called in to emergency service from as far away as New England. About thirty thousand men are at it night and day, as I talk, trying to control the three-and-a half-million acres out of control. That's about six thousand square miles, rather larger than Northern Ireland. About a quarter of Yellowstone, the first of the great national parks, has gone to ashes – Yellowstone itself is three and a half million square miles, almost half the size of Wales.

What Americans everywhere are doing is taking seriously for the first time, what twenty years ago was an obsession about as nutty as the flat earth society. It has finally come home to serious men and women as a quite likely world-wide disaster, and that is the possibility that this year's persistent rise of the continental temperature, 10 or 15 or degrees above the normal hot summer, may be a foretaste of the coming greenhouse effect, namely the locked-in contamination of the polluted atmosphere around the globe, to the point where within the next fifty years whole city populations would have to be evacuated.

With ten billion people on the planet, the question is to where? This has engaged the concern of scientists of the greatest distinction, Paul Crutzen, for instance of the director of Max Planck institute. But that's another matter, and no doubt another talk.

Note: The AFL-CIO is The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. The national forest service, referred to is the US Forest Service.

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