Carter's civil defence policy

Last time I ended the talk with the phrase 'next week'. Now there's a snag in that phrase and I certainly ought to spot it by now.

Well, as I recall I left you last time by mentioning two speeches. One was thought at the time to be a very tough speech given by President Carter to the graduating class of the Naval Academy at Annapolis. The other was an even tougher speech amounting to a denunciation of the Western world's way of life given by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at this year's Harvard commencement. I said we'd go on from there and look into the debate which now absorbs and disturbs Washington about the change, if there is one, in American policy toward the Soviet Union. 

But in the intervening week we've learned that President Carter's speech was not tough at all and we have this from the man who wrote it, none other than Mr Vance, the secretary of state who went before a house committee this week to explain what American policy toward the Russians is all about. He didn't succeed. And we've also looked at the Solzhenitsyn speech in full and find that it's composed of other elements than the brimstone which was extracted to make fiery headlines. 

The two speeches are still two serious variations on the same theme but it's fair to say that while Mr Solzhenitsyn seems to have had his say and is not going to back down, the administration has been backing and filling ever since Annapolis. And both Mr Brezhnev and now President Tito have got into the act. There's still a fairly tense battle going on inside the White House about what its Russian policy ought to be and in spite of Mr Carter's reassurance that all he wants, as everybody does, is to seek peace and pursue it, he started something the other day which suggests that the White House and the Pentagon between them know enough to decide suddenly that this country is woefully unprepared to face a nuclear war. How's that again? 

Well, it's true enough that for the past 20 years, America's so-called civil defence programme has practically lapsed, the building of shelters stopped long ago. The bright yellow arrows which through the 1950s pointed to underground shelters in the cities have long ago peeled away. Why? Because during the long period of what we call 'détente', it came to be taken for granted here, and we believed the Russians had also taken it for granted, that a nuclear was, if not unthinkable, a practical, universal disaster, that there would be no winners and that neither country was ever likely to start one. 

But the White House and the Pentagon have recently been looking at the Russian civil defence programme. They find that, far from lapsing, it has been developed and strengthened at enormous expense which suggests to some people here that the Russians, whatever their motives, don't rule out a nuclear war. And don't rule out the possibility that the nation which could see, say, 40 per cent of its population survive, could force a surrender on the nation that saw only, say, 20 per cent of its population still alive. 

This is so awful a thought that I wouldn't bring it up if it were an obsession of alarmists but it's a sudden preoccupation of the President of the United States. He has sent a plan to Congress which sets up a new agency called the Federal Emergency Management Agency to direct and strengthen the civil defence. A rather startled press conference asked him if he was 'now' a strong believer in civil defence and he replied, 'Now and before'. Well, we certainly heard nothing about it during the last presidential campaign. I'm pretty certain that if either candidate had said that we need more and better bomb shelters and we must set up a new federal agency to build them, that candidate would have guaranteed his political suicide. 

And even here, in this surprising offshoot of the debate over Russian policy, there is no agreed policy as between the White House and the Pentagon. Under the president's new plan, civil defence would be taken out of the hands of the secretary of defence and out of the hands, also, of the president’s chief disarmament negotiator. 

Both these men are upset – not at losing power, they're upset at the new emphasis on civil defence. The disarmament chief, Mr Paul Warnke, believes that civil defence against nuclear war is futile and both he and the secretary of defence are disturbed by the thought that once you get people to accept the idea that a nuclear war could be won, then we are well on our way to tempting somebody to try it. At the least, we would be coaxing people into the idea that a nuclear war would not be the end of everything. 

It now comes out, for instance, that last autumn, Mr Carter ordered a study to be made of the likely casualties from a nuclear war. He concluded when the study was over that 140 million Americans would be killed but 80 million would survive. We are back it seems in the fearful climate of the early 1950s. Or is it, as some people say, that we are rousing ourselves to throw off the lassitude and self-indulgent materialism which Mr Solzhenitsyn says has softened America and left her perilously vulnerable to the Soviet Union. 

Now these are thoughts that didn't come up, even a week ago, and since nobody in the White House or in the Congress is yet sure what American policy toward the Soviet Union really is, it's not possible this week or next week maybe to do what I meant to do – to report the two sides of an argument that still rages. When you get into a flow of talk and promise it will flow on next week, there can appear, in the meantime, a snag in the river. A snag, as we may have forgotten, being a jagged, projecting point, a piece of rough timber or rock embedded in a river bottom which impedes navigation. 

Well, between last week and this there appeared a mighty, jagged point, a large craggy rock embedded in the river bottom and the name of the snag is Howard Jarvis, a 75-year-old Californian who was born in the mining country of Utah and knows all about snags. He doesn't describe himself as a large, craggy rock, though he looks like one, he calls himself a rugged bastard who's had his head kicked in a thousand times by the government. 

If his name is new to you, so it is to about 200 million Americans. But this week he went to Washington and was fawned over by senators and congressmen like a Roman emperor returning from a provincial conquest, which is what he has just achieved. He is the man who fought for, and put on the California ballot, the now- famous Proposition 13 which the voters passed by better than two to one and which has slashed all property taxes (rates) in that state by 57 per cent. 

The so-called 'taxpayers' revolt' has spread faster than a prairie fire. One magazine called California the epicentre of the tax quake. Ohio has turned down a rise in property taxes. Oregon has got out its own Jarvis amendment and is canvassing signatures to put it on the ballot in November. Colorado is petitioning for a variation which would restrict all increases in state and local government costs to a cost of living index. Arizona has summoned a special session of its legislature to revise its tax system. Michigan is proposing a referendum which would put a firm limit on all state and local taxes. Massachusetts – which has probably the highest property taxes in the country – has suddenly sprouted a flock of proposals to overhaul its entire taxing system. And so on, and on. 

Howard Jarvis is no fly-by-night messiah, he's been howling in the wilderness for at least 16 years. When the country had other preoccupations, he went up and down California swatting away at government spending and high taxes. He seemed then so much a stereotype of an old-fashioned rich Republican still reacting against Roosevelt and the New Deal, that he had a hard time finding large or attentive audiences. He spoke in high schools, at lunches, at women's clubs. He hired auditoriums seating 5,000 people and a hundred people showed up. 

About six or seven years ago, he zeroed in on property taxes. People sighed and agreed with him but thought a property tax was like death or poverty, a settled fact of life. Now, along the way of his move from Utah to California, this grizzled, irascible old man who looks like a retired heavyweight champion still in rude health, acquired a fortune in chemicals and home appliances. 

What changed him from a rich scold into a tribune of the people, I think, was the fact that he lives simply, has a two-bedroom house which any retired plumber might own, and gave all this time to figuring and advertising, at his own expense, such Parkinsonian horrors as that a single loaf of bread, when you start with the farmer and tot up the take of the middle men, all the way to your mouth, a single loaf of bread levies 116 different taxes. 'And this', he said, 'in effect, is why the taxes on your house keep going up and up and up.' 

Well, 40 states have now invited him to come and bring the message. Powerful senators, who'd never heard of him a month ago, coolly reflect that whether they're for him or against him, he is a national force they will have to contend with in their run for re-election in November. 'Where all this will end', as a parodist of Time magazine once wrote, 'knows God'. But none of the medicine men of the 1930s, the Upton Sinclairs and Huey Longs and Gerald K. Smiths, was ever taken so seriously. 

Howard Jarvis has touched the nerve of an anxiety that is felt by every family. He has pointed the way, some people say, to healthy reform, other say to civic chaos. We shall see, but not next week, or the week after.

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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