Political vacations - 25 August 1995

I don't know how it is with your president or prime minister or whatever you call your chief executive – how about furore – but in this country whenever the president follows the Congress by taking a summer holiday away from all his cares and woe, he's no sooner arrived in the remote paradise – indeed, he hasn't even arrived – before the secret service has set-up a telephone network, plugged him into the internet, reconnoitred the surrounding countryside for aggrieved radicals, psychopaths, and other nuts, made living arrangements for the White House press corps, which even 30 years ago consisted of about a dozen reporters and is now closer to 100, and in general thrown an electronic cordon round a large part of the state he's in.

The other day, Mrs Clinton, who has taken to writing a newspaper column, had a piece recounting the shock and the burden to be born of taking a holiday when you're a member of the president's family. This is an emotion few incoming presidents and their families anticipate, though they all come to resent it in different ways.

I remember President Eisenhower saying that the realisation he would never again enjoy any real privacy while he was president came to him the morning after his 1953 inauguration – the shock must have been unforgettable because I recall he specified the date: "I woke in the morning of the 21st of January and went to the bathroom alone with a newspaper. When I came out, there sitting on a chair right outside the door was a secret service agent. I knew they stayed close at all times, but this was too much. However, you have to get used to it." And once the president is made visibly secure in his compound and free to look out on the ocean or the lake or the mountains or wherever he's chosen, he's never sure of being there tomorrow or the day after.

For the past fortnight, we've had quick television shots in the evening of the president hunting – as Americans say, while everybody else says shooting – playing golf, paddling the rapids of the Yellowstone River. He's been up in the Rockies in Wyoming, listening to a forest ranger spout a guided tour bit about Yellowstone National Park or the history of the magnificent range known as the Grand Teton named by French explorers and to be translated only in print not on a family radio programme.

But this past Wednesday, suddenly we saw him in a chapel in Virginia, at an army base across the Potomac River, back in Washington, there he was holding the hands of one of the daughters of Assistant Secretary of State Richard Frasure, one of the three American diplomats who were killed on their way to offer a new peace plan for the Balkans when their car plunged into a ravine near Sarajevo. Of course, the president was condoling with the three families, he's very good at this by the way, gentle, natural having something true and pointed to say.

Then he flew the 2000 miles back to his vacation home in the Rockies and before another nine holes or a bang or two at the wildlife spent a couple of hours looking over the new peace plan, was briefed about what was happening or not happening to the arrested Mr Wu the Chinese American civil rights activist accused by the Chinese of being a spy, and I have no doubt at all, spending some hours tapping every American, and maybe allied source, on the Middle East to seek some solution to the puzzle of Saddam Hussein and his warlike intentions if any. He along with China's nuclear testing comes under the foreign policy heading of 'sinister possibilities', which we're not going into this time.

So we're with the president now finishing off, what from the evidence of the pictures, looks like an ideal carefree holiday doing everything you like to do with your wife and daughter and some things you do only with your buddies like the golf. But even when his holiday is not interrupted by alarms, excursions and accidents by flood and field, he has to remember even in his lightest moments that he is the president, a man whose most casual, most jesting remarks are certain to be quoted across the country, especially if they contain the tiniest seed of controversy or indeed of personal opinion.

Remember poor old President Ford? Why is it we used to refer to poor old President Ford? He was comparatively young and required no condescension from us but we use the term sympathetically as to one who had not of his own free will stepped into larger shoes, in this case, those of Richard M Nixon. Mr Ford indeed did a valiant and successful job of healing the deep wound of Watergate. Poor President Ford once spent an August holiday in the Rockies also, but somehow to the south in Colorado. He was a very active sportsman and he liked, as he said one day to a couple of friends, he liked to fill the days and keep on the hop. In a fatal aside he said, eating and drinking are a waste of time. Whoops, the short sharp sentence was in the papers the next morning and the morning after that, the president of the good food guide and some other food society or magazine set up a communal howl charging that the president had dealt a mortal blow to the quote, "food industry" unquote of the United States. It turned out to be not quite mortal. Every American who had access to a dollar bill or a food stamp went on eating and some drinking. Worse however was to follow.

Mrs Ford, a graceful and gracious lady at all times, agreed to hold a short press conference on a quiet morning sitting there with a handful of women reporters looking at the towering snowy peaks and just chatting, no mischief taken or intended. One bright interviewer thought up a question that has surely troubled millions of mothers who never made the White House: "Tell me Mrs Ford, how would you feel if your daughter came to you and said, Mother I'm having an affair?" I ought to throw in for anyone under 40 that such a question to the wife of any public man 40 or 50 years ago, would have not only been an outrage, it's impossible to imagine anyone bringing it up. Furthermore, daughters if they were indulging in hanky panky kept it very much on the side and sub rosa between the sheets.

In my time, young people however gamy did not live openly with someone to whom they were not married. However, this question was being put with only a soupçon of guile by a reporter in 1975. And by 1975, the wife of the president of the United States was able and free to say, in fact did say: "Well I wouldn't be surprised, I think she's perfectly normal." Of course this frankly offhand answer was reported everywhere the next day. A Catholic bishop confessed to being stunned, the head of a Protestant denomination cried aloud: "I am aghast, aghast," and across the country back there in Boston, heart and soul and also capital of Irish Catholic politicians, a Republican poll moaned, "Bang goes the Massachusetts vote." It's true that the following year, Mr Ford lost heavily in that state to the Democrat, but then Massachusetts nearly always does go for the Democrat.

And how about George Herbert Walker Bush? Now you'd say, there's a man, a pretty smooth character, a politician sophisticated enough not to speak out of turn even on holiday. Well anyone who remembers it can never forget the day when – and I think it was before one or two reporters – he jokingly recalled the previous evening's dinner, he was served it seems, Mrs Bush served him all the time, broccoli. He let fly from the heart a sentence, which may have lost him some Republican votes but surely gaining him just as many Democrats and independents. I know a man who said, once the dread sentence was reported: "I never before thought of voting for George Bush." This was the memorable sentence: "Damn it I'm president of the United States I don't like broccoli." Oh dear! Of course the next morning, a howl from the incorporated broccoli growers or whatever of America some wag or perhaps an indignant local of the broccoli labourers of America despatched to the White House a truckload of broccoli. Mrs Bush sent it along to, I'm told various hospitals.

I don't remember that Franklin Roosevelt in his 13 years in the White House ever said anything out of turn, anything mean or savage. He said he meant on the Shavian principle: never be rude or cruel except on purpose. But then one vast difference, Roosevelt and his predecessors were not trailed everywhere by reporters. A president's holiday was as private as any other citizens. For Mr Roosevelt fishing off the Florida Quays, the White House would send out a message saying: "The President was fishing yesterday with Mr Vincent Astor, one of the Astors with a yacht to match and caught two red snappers".

I don't know when the nosy parker syndrome took over, when it became compulsory for the press corps to follow him everywhere, in Washington, abroad, at home, on holiday. Even when Roosevelt was down in Georgia at the poliomyelitis clinic, Hot Springs (Warm Springs?) he stayed at, even the day he died, there were with him only a portrait painter and his old mistress – that thunderbolt word was never heard at the time – and his ever having had a mistress was never known outside the family and a few intimates until he was dead 10 years or more. Impossible to conceive of today.

I don't know that we're better off for any of this sleazy knowledge that we are now privy too. I'd like to live long enough to see a president who outside the White House and the daily grind of office does what he pleases without the media and if one of them intrudes and asks what he did, what he thinks, who he was, with replies: "None of your damn business".

Note: Robert Frasure was President Clinton's special envoy to the former Yugoslavia, not Assistant Secretary of State, who was Richard Holbrooke.

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