Ford boosts defence spending

It's been said over and over again – but the truth of it doesn't begin to hurt a politician until he becomes a president or a prime minister – that the only really effective leadership in a democracy is exerted in time of war, when you can legitimately suspend a great deal of democracy.

Well, both Britain and the United States just now are going through their traditional processes to make a change of leadership. Britain, in its usual way, is doing it in two weeks. America, in its traditional way, is doing it in about 18 months. In other words, the interminable race for the presidency and the lining up of possible starters began last spring when President Ford announced he would run again. 

The wearisome length of the American process is due, of course, to what Americans maintain is their democracy and, when the politicians are out on the hustings, they maintain is their superior democracy. It's a nice argument, never thoroughly debated between, say, Britons and Americans but it is true that, if you throw the choice of a chief executive open to all the voters instead of to the party, it's going to take an awful long time to run the race. 

If America had the closest possible variation on the British system, presumably all the Republicans in Congress would be asked to vote for a leader and, by now, Reagan would have retired or been disqualified and President Ford would be declared their man. And then the Democrats in Congress would be polled and they would have picked Senator Humphrey. The result of such an unofficial poll is already in. Then the two of them would fight it out on election day. 

It's a difficult parallel because at no time in Britain is a party leader chosen by all the people. The moment a General Election is called, you know right away who's going to be prime minister if the Labour Party gets in and who if the Conservatives. The whole, long and rhetorical process of choosing a president is, on the contrary, taken up not with trying to boost the strength of each party through the country – they're doing that too, of course – but with exhausting the list of all the men in the country who have egos sufficiently well-developed to want to be president. In other words, what takes well over a year is the series of popularity contests that begin to peak with the state primaries and ends with the nominating conventions. 

Now for tricky and even vital reasons that we don't have to go into now, it's very doubtful whether a parliamentary system would work in this country with its 50 governments of such enormous separate powers but, every time I turn on the telly and hear the warnings and boastings of the flock of presidential candidates, I guiltily wish that the American system could be drastically shorter. Not because politicians go on for months on end pointing with pride and viewing with alarm, but because – and especially when a sitting president is also a standing candidate – all this campaigning and speechifying and asserting and claiming actually hurts the present leadership of the country. Let me sharpen what I mean! 

It has seemed to me, for some time, that presidential campaigns simply cannot help brewing a special kind of mischief. General Elections, in Britain, are subject to the same kind of mischief but it doesn’t go so far because the electoral debate doesn't go on for so long. It's the mischief of beginning by dramatising the issues and then over-dramatising them and, as often as not, ending up by making the choice of two policies grossly over-simplified or sentimentalised. 

An old secretary of state, long dead, once told me when he was appointed to the office by an incoming president, he was suddenly appalled to discover that he was expected by his party in Congress – and, beyond them, by the majority of voters – he was expected to start acting out the dramatic promises made in the election. Now this new man knew that the choices in foreign policy, before the people who had to run it, were nothing like as clear-cut and distinct as his president had said in electioneering speeches. In fact, this man very soon came to see that the policy of choice, mainly, at that time, the business of trying to restrain the Russians from diving into Europe and the Middle East, was hardly different, if at all, from the policy of his predecessor who, since he was of the opposing party, had been made out, during the presidential campaign, to be practically a traitor. 

Well, the new man took over the state department and he looked at all the papers and cables, to which, up to that time, he had not had access and he said, 'You know the curse of coming in right after an election is that you have to spend the first six months liquidating the campaign rhetoric.' 

It couldn't be better put. But once you're in the White House, nobody is going to throw you out for another four years, so you can liquidate the rhetoric. You can go farther, you can ignore it. You can do what Franklin Roosevelt did in 1932. He spent the whole summer in campaign speeches deploring big government. Nobody, before or since, not even Jimmy Carter, has been more against government from Washington than Roosevelt. 

So, he was elected on the promise to give states more powers and what did he do? He centralised the government in Washington and took more powers for it than any president in history. Once the election is over, people don't seem to notice and it's a rueful thing in American politics that once a man gets in the White House, no document in American history is deader than the party platform on which the winners ran. 

But, when you're in the White House and, also, panting to get there again, another sort of mischief is bred. And this is a kind which a president who is also a candidate is almost powerless to resist. It's the mischief of actually changing your own working policies according to what the polls say the people seem to want. You might call it an actual abdication of leadership since the aim of the presidency then becomes not to lead the people, but to follow them in the ways they appear to find most agreeable. 

Well, I've talked long enough in abstractions. Let me illustrate what seems to me to have happened to President Ford and it's not because he's Ford, it's because he's a sitting president who wants to be president again. 

President Ford, ever since he took over from Nixon, has pledged to uphold and develop the policy of détente. Let me say right away that he may... he may well have had cause to be deeply disillusioned by Russian behaviour after the honeymoon at Helsinki, but he doesn't say that. He's given us no hint, on his own, why détente has become a dirty word. I say 'on his own' because he's been goaded into this stand by the fire and smoke of Ronald Reagan's speeches. Reagan has been asking for a tougher stand against the Russians and pointing with alarm to the, certainly, alarming strength of their navy, the proliferation of their nuclear missiles, not to mention their successful inroads, as a protector if you like, into Africa. 

If Mr Reagan had gone on losing every primary in sight, I doubt that Mr Ford would have acted differently from the way he's acted since August 1974. But the great danger for a president running again is that he begins not to act but to react. And President Ford has started reacting dramatically to the fee-fo-fum warnings of Mr Reagan. 

I'm not saying Mr Reagan is wrong. Maybe détente has become a one-way street. Maybe the Russians are chuckling all the way to the missile silos. But Mr Ford has not given us any sound proof of it. He sees that Reagan has been taking, even in the states where he lost the primaries, not far from half of the Republican vote and, in the country at large, the Republicans are very much the minority party. 

So, if you take that into account and decide to try and capture the vote of the conservative Republicans and pre-empt Mr Reagan's candidacy, that's politics, isn't it? So it is. But the question is, is it also government? Is it responsible leadership? Nobody, certainly not Mr Ford, has told us what is a wise alternative to détente. 

And the first question that crosses the mind of the average, sensible person is, surely, 'Well, how ought we to behave to the Russians?' Are we to stiffen again into another Cold War? Are we to work as closely as possible with the Russians but when they demand, what seem to us to be dangerous unilateral privileges, are we, as Solzhenitsyn put it, 'to solidify into granite'? 

At last, the BBC's interview with Solzhenitsyn has been played on American television and such was the response to it that it was played again a week later. Now Mr Solzhenitsyn was, to put it mildly, speaking for nobody but himself and yet he's given tremendous aid and comfort to the right wing of the Republicans and other more disreputable right wingers. And he's plainly impressed people in the middle who are not in the least disposed to trust the Russians excessively but who also see nothing but insanity in provoking a nuclear war. 

Mr Solzhenitsyn has said that the Russians don't need to depend on their nuclear strength, that their strength in conventional arms is so overwhelming that they could take over the West in a weekend. This, by the way, doesn't allow for the near certainty that any such attempt would be met by the American use of tactical nuclear weapons. Mr Solzhenitsyn may have given us all a salutary warning but, as far as Mr Ford's concerned, he's decided that by echoing Solzhenitsyn and Reagan, he can take over the whole Republican vote and the more hawkish Democratic vote. 

The president now boasts that he has submitted the two biggest defence budgets in peacetime history and he's preparing a third. And he will veto, he says, any congressional defence budget that, and I quote him, 'short changes the future safety of the American people'. His answer to the strains and stresses that threaten American from the inside is a bigger bang for a buck and on with the arms race. 

It seems to me a tragic fact, though it has nothing to do with Mr Solzhenitsyn’s aims or his philosophy, that if Mr Solzhenitsyn were to come to Washington again, this time they'd run a red carpet for him all the way to the airport.

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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