California's Proposition 15

It's taken a long time, but I've just realised why journalists who write from a settled base – London, Paris, Washington, New York – have such enviable cool whenever they're asked by visitors about the mood of the country, the nation they're covering.

They can lean back and tell you, mainly because they have a familiar chair to lean back in. They're looking at things from a centre into which all the different currents of the news are drawn and can be seen in an easy, circular motion as in a whirlpool. I believe, long ago, there was a journalist who called his column, 'The Washington Whirlpool' – his title was better than he knew. 

Well, on the contrary, I've been living life very much on the hop these last few weeks and if I tend, during the winter months, to develop typewriter arthritis in my study in New York, I have lately become, as they say of surgical patients with the stitches out, ambulatory. I've been making a couple of television films and I started ambling on the primeval, windblown coast of Scotland. A couple of days later, we were off to balmy days in Greece and then, after a mere six-hour wait in Rome's soulless airport, another two brisk days on the Mediterranean. And then suddenly I was in the bosky depths of New Jersey and then in a vast Victorian house in Connecticut and there followed a weekend in the gorgeous mountain landscape of Vermont. 

And so, off to the Ohio River and down to Six Mile Island on an old steamboat. About 36 hours pause back in New York and, this last week, out here to San Francisco, and into the ruins of the mining towns of Nevada and such historical oddities as Sutro's Tunnel and a town at the foot of a mountain which consists of one saloon with a boardwalk porch and an abandoned Masonic Hall and no people. It is called Genoa. 

So if you ask me what's been going on in America this past week or ten days, I cannot begin to fake my customary sangfroid or, as the French say 'cold blood'. But just to give you a rough idea of what was most on the minds of the Americans I ran into, I should have to say that in New Jersey a few men in white coats would glance first at an automaton and then at a computer and signal the automaton to fire golf balls through a minute circular hole in a plastic screen to try and ensure that a golf ball hit on the level shall not travel farther than 276 yards. 

In Connecticut, a hundred or so people that I sifted among were arguing whether their first woman governor had been a success or a failure because she was a woman or because she was bright or inept. But discussing this was a passing courtesy like remarking on the weather. Their main concern was to plan a campaign to raise money to preserve and maintain the house of one of America's most famous dead writers. 

Vermont. Now that made a startling change. I drove from a small airport only 50 miles or so from the Canadian border, off the federal highway, off the state highway, off the county road and up a gravelled road to an old farmhouse – not perhaps as old as some of you may be listening in at this moment, but 200 years old anyway. I was visiting my daughter and if I'd been alone, I'd have gone right on by. Last winter, it was a mellowed, firehouse-red, clapboarded eighteenth-century farmhouse. It has now turned into an oyster-white, clapboarded eighteenth-century farmhouse. You see it was beginning to rot and it had to be re-sided. And the roof leaked, so my son-in-law got busy and, being very much a do-it-yourself pioneer type, in spite of degrees in music and architecture, he did it himself. 

Incidentally, when he started to insulate the roof, he unpacked the stuffing that had been up there since 1800 and how do you suppose he knew the date? Not from the deed, but because the eaves were still packed with newspapers bearing that date. It was the year of Thomas Jefferson's first campaign for the presidency and the papers were bristling with abuse of him so scurrilous as to make Richard Nixon look like a politician who had the luck to be very gently handled by the press. 

Well, that's by the way. What was deeply on the minds of my daughter and son-in-law? Jimmy Carter came up from time to time and we all agreed that he's a mystery man – a mystery character as well as a mystery politician – so much so that none of us could swear whether he is in the making a second Franklin Roosevelt or a second Nixon. But there were anxieties much closer to home. 

When I arrived, I wandered into an orchard which had been ploughed under and my daughter was on her knees in an acre of soil and manure laying out, as fast as possible, before the rains came and before the baby woke up, 225 strawberry plants that had just arrived. My son-in-law, looking more rural than any sower of seed in the admired paintings of Millais, was driving his tractor. He had taken out of the deceptively green Vermont land several thousand little boulders and had made a pond and was now building an irrigation ditch. To get the strawberries in during the warm spell, that was the main thing. The next concern was whether the baby had bronchitis – which, by the way, he hadn't. 

But then a big jump into the brilliant, silver light of San Francisco and here you're back to a metropolis and the sort of metropolitan coverage of the news in the papers and on the telly that you get in New York and Boston and Chicago. Not though in Washington. Washington's television is curiously provincial in its blind obedience to networks' soap operas and local commercials. But that's another topic for another day. 

San Francisco was saddened for a day or two – and how can it be longer for a whole city population – by a bus accident in which 28 persons, most of them members of a high-school choir off to a recital, had died. But San Francisco did have a political preoccupation that seemed to muffle the crackling debate over whether the Democrats or the Republicans are proving themselves more adept at preparing to lose the election through fratricide. I saw it first on a motor car – a bumper sticker which said simply, 'Yes to Prop 15!' Pretty soon another car whisked by carrying, 'Vote no on Prop 15!' 

I think it was California that started bumper stickers long ago. The memorable ones carried no political import. I remember with relish one that came out after the wild, brief success of a book called 'The Greening of America' and the sticker said, 'Keep California green! Bring your own money!'. 

But what was Prop 15? Well, an election in California is never the simple matter of voting this man in and that man out. The ballots that the voters face tend to look like a page of the stock market report. California law provides not only for voting for people, but for regular referendums, or referenda, on burning issues and even allows – on the petition of so many thousand signatures – for recalling the governor from office. They tried it once with Reagan and failed. Lord Bryce said, nearly a hundred years ago, that in the democratic world there were roughly four systems of government – the British parliamentary system, the American federal system, the French assembly system and California politics. And of these the most complicated was the California system. 

Well, just now, Californians are going to the polls – they're going to go to the polls – and among a raft of public issues printed out on the ballot form with all the crispness and clarity of a title deed is one called Proposition 15. It is, as you'd guess, one of 15 propositions that the people will vote for or against on their presidential primary election ballot on 8 June. Now for the rest of the country, June 8 is the date when California will give an immense boost to the candidacies of Ronald Reagan and Governor Edmund Brown. Or perhaps not. 

But, here, in California, a banner newspaper headline spoke nothing less than the truth when it said, 'Prop 15 May Eclipse Carter Brown'. The presidential rivalry of Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown may be simmering on one burner, as Ronald Reagan and Jerry Ford on the other, but the boiling issue is over this proposition which asks the voters, whether informed or illiterate, to decide pretty much the fate of the American nuclear energy industry, since California houses about 45 per cent of it. 

The text which the people in the polling booth are supposed to have scrutinised is impossible to translate into simple English but, very roughly, it requires Congress to set no limit to the monies that can be paid out as compensation in a nuclear plant accident. The present statutory limit is $560 million. It requires only a two-thirds vote in the state legislature to force utilities companies to prove, and to do it all the time, that their reactor systems are safer than they are now, though there's been no serious accident, before any new plants can be built or the present ones continue to run. 

The people who'll vote yes say it will bring the whole question of nuclear energy, its usefulness and its safety, to everybody's attention. And the people who'll vote no say it will virtually shut down the plants that increasingly provide extra electricity, it will cancel plans for more reactors, it will cause wide unemployment and it will arrest the national effort to develop another source of energy. 

Edward Teller, the so-called father of the hydrogen bomb, goes further. He says if Proposition 15 is passed, America will have virtually abandoned the vital need to find other sources of energy than oil and that if the Arabs raise the price again or, and when, the world's oil gives out – as it's surely going to – America and the Western world will scramble to pay any price for it and so deny the minimum needs of the impoverished third of mankind and that these poor nations will then move from poverty into massive famine. 

At any rate, you can see why the fate of many more of us than Carter, Reagan, Brown and Ford could be in the hands of the California voters on 8 June.

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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