The waiting game

There was a phrase familiar to everybody who ever went to an old music hall and I hope it's not too archaic to have been buried in the dictionaries. The phrase is 'vamping till ready'. It provided for a comedian, especially, a teasing introduction to a song during which he could get off a series of well-rehearsed ad libs. He'd come on and the band, or the piano, would play softly 'um tum, tum tum, um tum, um tum,' till he was ready to launch into his song.

Well, the curtain has fallen on Jimmy Carter and his Georgia gang. The lights have dimmed again and the orchestra is vamping till ready for the imminent appearance of Ronald Reagan and his sunny Californians. It is pointless now to criticise the last act and it ought to be pointless to guess and speculate about the next act, but newspapers have to live and television has to offer nightly surveys of the news and it's with a kind of uncomfortable eagerness that they concentrate on the Italian earthquake, the damaging brush fires in California, the Las Vegas hotel fire and other natural and accidental disasters that are independent of governments and policy.

But, after such a jolting shake-up in the government of the United States, people are naturally anxious to know what it is going to mean to them, to their homes, their jobs, their wages, their schooling, taxes, every part of their life in which the government has a hand. The fact is nobody knows and it would be wonderful, though quite inhuman, if we could suspend all comment until 20 January.

But history marches, or lurches, on and not the least of the frustrations of this long vamping till ready interval between the outgoing and the incoming administrations is that President Carter has to go on conducting policies and even announcing policies which will have no authority six weeks from now.

You might think that this would lead to a poverty of comment. On the contrary, since we are not privy to the intense discussions and arguments that are going on in the dozen or more transition teams that are advising Mr Reagan, we have to fall back on what he said he would do in his campaign speeches, even though we all know that campaign speeches are pure ideology. They paint a picture after what the heart desires, not the much duller picture now being painted of what the head discovers is possible.

So, what we have now are reams of articles and television commentaries, some of them persuasive, some of them very intelligent, about what we can hope for and what we have to fear. Conservative columnists are rollicking in the prospect of a free market, of a tax cut, of a return to capital punishment, of abolishing abortion on demand, of returning tax revenues to the states, of leaving education to the states, of the triumph of Dr Milton Friedman and free enterprise.

The liberal columnists fall back on fears that the United States will soft-pedal Mr Carter's concern with human rights in relations with foreign countries, that hospitals will go short-handed, that the military will run amok, that the central cities will rot and the blacks will lapse back into servitude. I must say that some of these fears are as unrealistic as some of these hopes and that Mr Reagan, closeted with his teams in California or with his congressional leaders in Washington, is learning fast about the unreality of those splendid speeches he got off during the summer and fall.

It was an old, long-dead secretary of state to a Republican administration which came in after just as drastic a repudiation of the Democrats who sighed during the transition, 'The curse of the long presidential campaign is the over-dramatising of our differences. When you get in power, you have to spend the first six months liquidating your campaign rhetoric as you find that the options open to you are really not very different from what they were a year ago.'

This is a remark it's very necessary to recall now because the newspapers, the columnists, the editorial writers, not knowing what Mr Reagan as President Reagan intends to do prolong the evangelism of the campaign by pointing out the glory of doing this or the horror of doing that which was promised during the summer speeches. For instance, candidate Reagan said the federal government should cut off all money aid to cities that maintain rent control. The mayor of San Diego, California, who faces an almost total slump in investment for new urban housing is now urging Mr Reagan to stay with this promise. On the other hand, Mayor Koch of New York, who has to face about half a million New Yorkers who'd be out of house and home if their rents were decontrolled, says that it's a wild promise and one impossible to fulfil.

Another time, candidate Reagan said he'd urge Congress to lower the minimum wage for teenagers and some conservative columnists said, 'And a good thing too! Since it's fundamentally unfair for beginning workers to earn the same as old, experienced workers'. Liberal columnists exploded in disgust saying Mr Reagan would be visiting cruel and unusual punishment on teenagers eager to work. Neither of these arguments touched Mr Reagan's point, which was to give teenagers a better chance in the job market. He was acting on the perception of labour economists who have calculated that every ten per cent increase in the minimum wage cuts the jobs available to the unskilled, and hence to teenagers, by seven per cent.

And now I'm looking at a headline in the New York Times which, at first glance, fulfils the gloomiest fears of the liberals and it's the mischievous power of headlines to implant an idea, a prejudice which the story underneath has a hard time uprooting. It says, 'Reagan's State Department Latin Team Asks Curbs on Social Reformers'. The lead sentence of the story reinforces the headline fear, 'A report prepared,' it says, 'by president-elect Ronald Reagan's State Department transition team has proposed basic changes designed to reduce the influence of human rights' advocates in the bureau which deals mainly with Latin America and the Caribbean.'

Well, this sounds, if you read no further, as if the United States were going to strengthen its support for cruel dictators who torture and imprison leftists, but what the report goes on to condemn, and it names names, is any ambassador who, for example, supports the redistribution of land and the nationalising of banks by a junta (half-military, half-civilian) that is fighting an extreme left-wing opposition. The report says that this conflict – not to be mysterious about it, it's going on in El Salvador – this conflict is something that an American ambassador should leave to the contending forces. He should report and not meddle.

What, in detail, the report is advocating, is a return to the oldest American diplomatic doctrine stated by George Washington in his farewell address in 1796 – it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign field.

Mention of the foreign field brings us to a couple of pounding headaches which Mr Reagan may well be praying will go away before 20 January. One is the, I suppose you can almost begin to say the perennial, problem of the American hostages in Iran. When they were first seized, Mr Reagan said with becoming dignity that this was nothing to criticise, what the president needed was our support and our prayers. But in the fever of the campaign, Mr Reagan got used to saying how ashamed, how humiliated he was to see that, after almost a year, the Carter administration had not brought the hostages home.

He did respond to the Iranian conditions, finding almost all of them agreeable except the automatic and unconditional unfreezing of Iranian assets in the United States and the return of the Shah's wealth. These were matters, he said correctly, over which the administration, any administration, had no overriding authority. They would have to go through the courts. Well, the Carter administration, in its dying days, is saying exactly the same thing and, so far, neither side seems willing to yield. The nasty problem remains and it looks as if it would land unsolved in President Reagan's lap.

The other, and graver, issue is the growing conflict between the Polish Communist party and the new independent trade union Solidarity. I don't know how it is elsewhere but I think it's true to say that nothing that has happened in the Communist world since the Hungarian revolution, has stirred Americans so much, as the emergence and the stamina of a workers' movement in a Communist country demanding a say in its contract, wages, working conditions, demanding – in a word – freedoms that are automatically snuffed out in totalitarian countries.

For the first week or two of Solidarity's resistance, the tributes to its leaders resounded around this country from the press, from politicians and from legions of ordinary people who were interviewed and responded with admiration verging on veneration for Mr Walesa. One famous commentator said that if Time, the magazine, were still picking and choosing among the bravest and the best for its annual nomination of Man of the Year, it need go no further. 'Walesa is the man.'

The Reagan camp, from all reports, exalted in this first sign of a crumbling at the base of a Communist regime. Then came the puzzling purge of conservatives in the Polish politburo who had resisted all cooperation with Solidarity and on Wednesday what was taken here to be the ominous summoning of the military council. Taken with reports of what President Carter called 'an unprecedented build-up' of Soviet forces along the Polish border, Mr Reagan gave his foreign affairs advisers a warning not to announce any policy attitudes, but he did convey to Moscow a message of concern identical with that of President Carter.

The brutal recognition shared by both the outgoing and the incoming administrations is that, in the event of a Soviet invasion, the United States could wring her hands, proclaim a trade embargo perhaps, lament the end of détente and the SALT treaty, but apart from that could do little else but deplore.

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.