Biden and Kinnock - 6 December 1991

On my irregular visits to London, I've noticed that MPs and for any listening American, I hasten to say I'm not talking about military police but members of Parliament, members of Parliament noticeably don't quote from the history books so much as Americans do or did, in the House and the Senate. By the history books, I mean in the main, making comparisons with the situation then under debate and the similar situation a hundred, 50, 20 years ago.

There was, in Britain, one bright exception, Winston Churchill who, by 1939 had been in the House as long as anyone, and it was one of his strengths, as a war leader and as a persuasive orator, that he could recognise in the present, a situation, a peril, a problem that had come up once, perhaps often, before. A speech after the evacuation of 300,000 men from Dunkirk to the south coast of England: We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles. This has often been thought of before. When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat bottomed boats and his Grande Armée, he was told by someone, there are bitter weeds in England. There are certainly a great many more of them since the British Expeditionary Force returned.

But Churchill was the glaring exception. In the American Congress, you don't hear scholarly references to Henry Clay or Alexander Hamilton's idea about a central bank because Congress is not notably recruited from scholarly types. Not much in Britain any more, I fancy.

When I first followed, covered the Congress, 50 or more years ago, the Senate in particular reverberated with colourful oratory laced with brave advices or grim reminders from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Lincoln. The Southerners especially were a joy to listen to. They could quote, as well as anybody, the sayings of the founding saints, but the Southerner's oratory had two elements that were all their own.

All Southerners, in those days, had absorbed the Bible with their mother's milk and, as countrymen, they'd been since boyhood very sharp observers of the habits of the raccoon, the opossum, the skunk, the muskrat, not to mention the hound dog. So that one of the old great Southern senators standing up there in his seersucker suit and his string tie would, especially in anger, combine the most memorable, undulating cadences from the Old Testament with instructive lessons in animal biology. All this has gone and whereas, say 30 years ago, senators and congressmen would quote some older politician he admired, even if he got it wrong, closer to what he wanted it to be, the only way to check on him would have been to go to the Library of Congress and bone up on the Congressional Record, which is the equivalent of Hansard.

But there has been a most dramatic and warning change. Whenever a politician says or mutters anything in public, the thing is taped for sound and whenever it's a talk before an audience, it goes on to videotape. The four national television networks have, by this time, huge, bulging libraries. In a few years they will have libraries of all human knowledge, not bulging at all, since the Japanese promise us a disc the size of a 50p which contains great recordings of all nine Beethoven symphonies, And, if I know the Japanese, I'll bet they soon develop a smaller coin which contains all 10 Beethoven symphonies, never mind that he didn't write a tenth.

Well, I don't know how it is in your country but here a politician had better not, ever, use the four letter word as a joke or in anger or make a joke about, say, a lesbian. One presidential candidate has just done it and has been deeply and quickly repentant. Or what you'd think might never be noticed, lift a passage without quotation marks, so to speak, from some other memorable orator. This has been common practice down the ages and, of course, some of the most famous political slogans and phrases were not coined by the men who made them famous from Roosevelt's forgotten man, to Churchill's Iron Curtain. But since the nightly television news replaced the old cinema newsreel, only at his peril can a politician quote without attribution, a passage from somebody else's speech.

Four, three years ago, one of the Democrats who decided to run for president was the engaging, smart, sweet-talking senator from Delaware, Joseph Biden. Even foreigners might recognise him today because, as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over and was much in evidence in, the confirmation hearings of Judge Robert Bork, rejected, and Judge Clarence Thomas, approved. While he was actually in the spotlight, literally, while the session of the very tense Bork hearings was under way, Senator Biden excused himself from the committee chairmanship, ducked out, came back as adorably urbane as ever.

But in the luncheon break he'd announced to an astonished world that he had decided to withdraw from the presidential race. Why? By that time he didn't need to elaborate. Somebody, somebody at one of the TV networks, a film editor or such, was putting together a small feature on Senator Biden's campaign and he was clipping in the impressive part, the purple patch of a speech Mr Biden had made at several stops along the trail. The passage was indeed a favourite of Senator Biden's.

Unfortunately he repeated it once too often and there it was on film and there the on-looking editor or whoever thought it stuck a chord. The man, it seems, had covered the last British election and he remembered something and in the network film library he found what he'd expected to find when the penny dropped. A speech by one Neil Kinnock, proudly announcing how he, and I think his wife, had been the first in their families to be able to go to college. Well they played over the Kinnock speech and the recent Biden speech, both very moving, but not just the same theme, the same exact words and flow of the sentences. In other words, a straightforward theft. The theft of Kinnock's purple patch. It was enough to make Senator Biden announce he was, on second thoughts, not running for president.

So I expect before the race is run, in the next 11 months, one or other or more of the six Democratic candidates will make some gaffe and drop out, but I'll bet whatever their own private amusements may be, after the disastrous fate of Senator Gary Hart, there will be no more sly weekends on little yachts with nubile blondes. Mention of Gary Hart reminds me how drastically times have changes for politicians in another way. In the media's new feeling that the private life of a politician is and ought to be, the public's concern, if this belief has been general among us reporters thirty years ago, there most certainly would never have been a President Kennedy.

This weekend we shall be seeing clips of black smoke billowing out of sunken battleships. We shall see with a little printed subtitle, file material, Japanese bombing planes zooming through a blank sky and we shall see and hear President Roosevelt say over and over, or as he would have said, again and again and again, standing before Congress, "Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."

There's really not much more to show of Washington on 7 December 50 years ago and of course that was shot, filmed, only stuff that could be seen in the movie theatres and the newsreels. Since there was no television, no audio taping of anything, the fearless journalistic types, the conspiracy buffs, fans, have had to fall back on diaries, histories, hearsay, to make the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor intriguing, tantalising, sexy. To advance the alarming claim that both Churchill and Roosevelt knew, days before, that Pearl Harbor was going to be bombed/ What's the loss of 19 warships, the naval air force and 2,300 men between friends? That a famous Japanese message, decoded in Washington at the end of November, gave warning of the attack in a disguised weather forecast. That Pearl Harbor pushed Hitler into the war.

There will be an orgy this weekend of charges, the unveiling of dreaded secrets, the venting of appalling hypocrisies and so on. After going over much of this stuff in the past six months, I can only say I'm relieved and impressed by the work, the book of Mr Stanley Weintraub. He's just written a book entitled Long Day's Journey Into War: December 7, 1941.

His conclusion? Though Pearl Harbor was a disaster, it was not a catastrophe. More than half the American planes destroyed were obsolete, there were no aircraft carriers there, the Japanese admiral who planned the attack wrote later, I achieved less than a grand slam. Secondly, there was no connivance between Churchill and Roosevelt, no foreknowledge. The so-called secret weather code from Tokyo never existed. Thirdly, Hitler was delighted over Pearl Harbor and had decided before then to fight the United States because its military was so woefully ill-prepared.

Three myths, no catastrophe, no conspiracy, no Hitler plan. Thank goodness there was no audio and videotape. We should this weekend be seeing thousands and thousands of feet of film and hearing hundreds of hours of memos, speeches, press briefings, reminiscences, what's called oral history, none of which would show cause why Mr Weintraub might be wrong.

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