Candidates claim victory in TV debate

In San Francisco, and on the west coast generally, it's common in Chinese and Polynesian restaurants to end the meal dipping into a little bowl of what looked like seashells, heart-shaped seashells. I hasten to add that that's their shape. They taste like crackly sweet biscuits, which is what they are. I hope that strangers to Chinese restaurants now have a vivid picture of these heart-shaped cookies. You break them and embedded in the middle is a thin strip of paper on which is printed your fortune or some deep and wise oriental saying. Hence, these tasty objects are known as fortune cookies.

Sometimes the oriental saying is too deep, for me anyway. Some such profundities I remember as, 'Hastening is not to be recommended. The hills are calm' or, 'Love means preparation'. Maybe Confucius uttered these wise thoughts. If so, I must say they're not more baffling than some of the thoughts of Chairman Mao, a father figure – indeed for many decades a god-like figure – who's now being shunted into oblivion in China as quickly as the Russians decided, a decade or so ago, to forget the father figure of Stalin, for 40 years a hero and then suddenly reassessed as a villain. At least with our heroes, we don't de-canonise them, we just forget them, except when their 100th birthday comes up when we celebrate them. Even the government celebrates them by issuing a postage stamp.

Last week, we were celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of two American comics. One was the American master craftsman of journalism in this century, H. L. Mencken, about whom very few listeners to these talks need to be told much, since his wise words crop up here from time to time. The other centenarian is, or would have been if he'd been able to withstand the ravages of time and the bottle, W. C. Fields, like many another American comic – like Bob Hope, Stan Laurel, Westbrook Pegler, Chaplin – a man of English origin. His father was a Cockney immigrant, one Mr Dukenfield.

Fields, for those unfortunates too young to have seen and memorised his movies, is remembered now by most Americans for only one or two of his philosophic asides. He it was who brought balm to many a fretful parent by saying that a man who hates dogs and children can't be all bad. When he was making a movie on location, he was notorious for lacing the studio's free fruit juice from a private flask of gin and there came a famous day when a tense scene was being shot and it was ruined by Fields bellowing from the sidelines, 'Somebody's been putting pineapple juice in my pineapple juice!'.

Hollywood comics were a touchy lot when it came to the mention of other Hollywood comics. Fields was especially hypersensitive to the art and reputation of Charlie Chaplin. He made a point of ignoring him till, one time, he was persuaded by a friend to go and see 'Easy Street' and at the moment when Chaplin suffocated the 300-pound villain by pulling a gas street lamp down over his head, Fields muttered to his friend, 'Getting very hot in here' and he left the theatre to wait in his car. When the friend eventually climbed in beside him, he said, 'Chaplin's a pretty funny man, don't you think?' Said Fields, 'He's the best damn ballet dancer that ever lived. If I got the chance, I'd kill him with my bare hands.'

Mencken was always saying things about America in the 1920s that are as relevant today as then and one forlorn observation of his occurs to me that can be easily adapted to the current presidential campaign. It must've been in 1924 that Mencken wrote: 'Democracy is a system whereby a 120 million people, some of them beautiful and many of them intelligent, choose Calvin Coolidge for President'.

Today, many an American is unconsciously amending this to read, 'Democracy is a system whereby 220 million people, some of them beautiful and many of them intelligent, narrow the presidential choice to Carter or Reagan.' And mention of Reagan brings me back, you'll be relieved to hear, to San Francisco and the fortune cookies.

In the early spring, I was out there and one evening dropped in on an old friend and we fell to speculating and then to betting on the outcome of the approaching party conventions. It occurs to me, only now, that this whole incident seeped up from my unconscious because this San Francisco friend is, in the flesh, an uncanny, physical combination in looks and gesture and movement of Chaplin and Fields, though his philosophy inclines more to the irascible than the sentimental.

Anyway, we began to cook up what were then thought of as ingenious plots for the Democrats and the Republicans. My friend is one of those rare amateurs of politics who can separate his own enthusiasms from his judgement. I mean, just tap a gathering of American friends and 99 times in a hundred, they will pick as the next president, the man they openly or secretly want to be president. I doubt that my friend ever succumbed for long to the magic of Ronald Reagan. He lived in California throughout Reagan's whole political or, for that matter, movie, career.

Reagan's boast of being the great tax cutter does not jibe with the record that most California taxpayers remember but my friend swore, at the end of last March, that Reagan would be the nominee. I dismissed this as a bit of political hysteria. My own prophecy was more subtle. I saw Gerald Ford sitting backstage and patiently biding his time. I saw the polls, come July, showing Reagan and Carter to be in a dead heat. I then saw the Republican convention going into panic, at which moment, Ford would emerge from the wings, walk into a blinding spotlight and announce that he was ready and willing to come to the aid of the party and they would embrace him. I bet my friend three to one there would be no Reagan nomination and, on that note, we lifted a glass, we shook hands and I was on my way.

Well, as with most such bets, the loser promptly forgets. Only a month ago, I got a typical Fields note from my friend. 'Your friend and my friend, Bob Cameron,' he wrote, 'once said the sun never sets on a gambler's debt. I find in my diary for March 29, "Cooke here to lap up my sauce. Cooke bets three to one, no Reagan nomination". Since when,' the note went on, 'I have collected handsomely from every stumble-bum in town but from the pundit, nothing. PS – your fortune cookie says, "Put cheque in mail and sustain warm regard".'

Well, yesterday, I finally and reluctantly sent him his money. I will take no more bets with him. I have the horrible, deep suspicion that he's now betting on a Reagan presidency and when I look over the present standing of Carter in the nine big states he must win for re-election, my friend may be right. Carter, at this point, is leading in only one of them and Reagan, for certain, in five.

The, er... the great debate, as you must have heard by now, was a stand-off. Mr Anderson's men, who feared their candidate might be dull, were relieved to see that he wasn't, so they announced that Anderson had won. The Reagan team was terrified that their man would again by afflicted with foot-in-mouth disease but he never made a gaffe and, though his answers were an affable and easy recital of arguments he's made in the identical language all over the country, only a fraction of the 70 or 80 millions watching could know that. So the Reagan team announced that Reagan had won.

It may take a week or two for the polls to tell us who lost and whether or not – which is a fascinating question – whether or not Carter was the loser.

In the meantime, and leaving Mr Carter and Mr Reagan to find themselves appalled every other day at the tastelessness of each other, we have more personal troubles on our minds. The north-east is still in the longest drought in 30 years, the grass is burnt brown, stretches of the countryside look like the Sahara and old pine trees look as if they've been blow-torched, thanks to the invasion on a wide front of the Gypsy Moth. If the Gypsy Moth doesn't get us, there is a small and murderous wasp which is going for this and other species. The water table on Long Island sinks and sinks, so that our water, though still healthy, begins to look a little brown, a little earthy. In New Jersey, the governor has already put a ban on washing cars and sprinkling lawns. The summer lettuce crop was killed by the heat.

In our village at the end of the island for 300 years the names on the shopfronts and the gravestones in the old burying ground have remained English names, most of them in the middle of the seventeenth century from Suffolk, not by accident is ours, one of the two counties on Long Island, called Suffolk county. At the turn of the century, immigrant Poles moved in and, until last year, you did business either with people called Jewell or Tuthill or Billard or Polaski, Deroski or Winowski.

Suddenly, in this tiny town founded 1640, there was a Vietnamese restaurant. They have appeared all over America in the remotest and unlikeliest places. Now, in the past month or two, we've seen our first Cubans and even a Haitian or two. They came one day and on a later day they left. The old American dream to which President Carter responded by taking in all the Cubans that Fidel Castro chose to let go, turned, as you know, into a nightmare when we discovered that Castro had shrewdly unlocked prisons and psychiatric wards to unloose on the United States not only genuine malcontents, but a flood of criminals and psychopaths.

Even the most idealistic refugees have found themselves in huge tent camps in hot and unpleasant places where neither the locals nor the army can cope. Naturally, thousands of these dreamers have been brutally disillusioned with the reality of a country in which the only freedom is the freedom to go unemployed.

So, the government has decided to ship thousands of them to Puerto Rico. They don't like it. Castro won't take them back and with the Puerto Rican unemployment rate at 17 per cent, the Puerto Ricans are howling that Mr Carter is turning their country into the garbage dump of the Caribbean. We shall hear much more of this bungled experiment in disillusion.

I've said nothing about the Iranian/Iraqi war because, by the time some of you hear these words, the Gulf may be closed, we may be lining up again for petrol, we may, in some places by saddling up the old horse and buggy.

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.