Energy bill at risk

The sense of being cut off from the world, which is powerfully reinforced by the New York newspapers' strike, is not without its blessings, one of which is that it helps to relax our sense of guilt. If we are prevented from knowing, we can't be blamed for not caring or not doing anything. And this past week we've been given moral aid and comfort from the President of the United States.

He took a two weeks' holiday. So, if he can check out of the general confusion, surely we can be allowed to go fishing? But Mr Carter's right to do the same did not go unchallenged for long. Of course, it's impossible these days for the president to get away from it all. Ever since the big thunderclap over Hiroshima 30 years ago, or rather, ever since the Russians fired their first nuclear bomb, it's been considered almost criminally irresponsible for the president to be longer than ten seconds away from a Secret Service man carrying a little box which contains the code of the day that could order the shift of a bomber force or launch a missile or – if the worst came to the worst – unlock the red alert that gives the order for total war. 

The code, I ought to explain, originates with the Strategic Air Command which is in touch with all the airborne and underwater forces and the missile silos around the world. Its link with the president is that little box and the code it contains which arrives wherever the president is and arrives by courier every day under armed escort. 

This is so much part of the president’s daily routine that I should think very few Americans think or even know about it. In fact, it has come as an unpleasant shock before now to newly inaugurated presidents. Eisenhower once said that the most disturbing sign of presidential power, and one he'd never thought about, was the fact that every time he went to the bathroom, he was joined by the man with the code who then sat down outside the door. 

So, not much hope of retreating to the Rockies waving goodbye to everybody including the press pack and shooting the rapids and off into the beautiful wilds of Idaho. Just to keep up the pretence that a presidential holiday is a holiday, we saw him doing that on television – wearing a life jacket, thank goodness! But even if there was no call for the man with the little box, the president, like footballers, tennis players and terrorists holding hostages, is today the victim of the long Zoomar lens. 

So, at every big bend in the river, there was a cameraman whose naked eye showed him four or five midgets 200 yards away in a bobbing boat but whose camera lens went zooming in to balloon the midgets into old Jimmy and Rosalynn and little Amy looking more than ever like a comic-strip character in a ski suit and one or two – as they say in photographs of the great – unidentified persons, one of whom you may be sure was that man with the waterproof box. 

However, all this, er... this Star Wars gadgetry apart, you'd say that the president was well outside questioning distance and far from the nagging claims of politics. Not so. Even Jimmy Carter, who you'd think was inured by now to the tendency of somebody to make a political event out of something, even he sinned, not as he used to say about women in his heart, but in his head. He wanted, like the rest of us, to go off and take a holiday like a private citizen, in one of the most spectacularly beautiful stretches of the Rockies. He would ride in the Grand Tetons. He would go off for a day or two to the Salmon River in Idaho and enjoy a spell of what they call 'white water' rafting. 

He arranged to go the big river in the direct and informal way of Jimmy Carter who, you'll remember got out of his Cadillac during the inauguration parade and walked hand-in-hand with his family down Pennsylvania Avenue. Good old Jimmy! Not a prayer! His straightforward decision to dispense with all ceremony, greeting the governor, shaking hands with citizens, a motorcade and the rest, this was immediately taken by the papers of Idaho, unfortunately not on strike, as a studied insult to the people. He was coming to enjoy the wonders of Idaho and ignoring the citizens. Hasty rearrangements were made. When Air Force One hit the runway at Boise, Idaho, there was the governor. There was an ecstatic round of handshaking and the president rode a motorcade into town, waving as usual. 

There's no record of his conversations with the governor but somewhere along the route another fear seized him for his aides. Just how long should he hobnob with the politicians and wave at the people? Not very long they decided. Otherwise Republicans all across the country would start saying that simple Jimmy was too cunning by half. He was using what he'd advertised as a personal holiday, a private jaunt, as a political tour. And that would mean that some congressman would start an enquiry into the cost of the holiday and how much of it was being charged to the Carter's private purse and how much to the long-suffering taxpayers of the United States. 

So, even a by now veteran politician like Jimmy Carter can, on occasion, forget the most constant bane of the politician's life, 'Damned if you do, damned if you don't'. 

No wonder we suddenly heard that the president was cutting short his brief holiday because duty called. It was the front page headline of the Christian Science Monitor, 'Carter hurries back to crucial fight on Hill.' The hill, I hasten to explain, was not in Idaho. It is Capitol Hill in Washington. He'd heard, we were told, that his energy bill which was going to be, when he first came into the White House, the first big bill of his presidency, his energy bill is threatened by a belligerent Congress which will get to work, or to war, next week once the Labor Day recess is over. 

Now what difference would a couple of days of rafting and fishing make to the passage of a bill which has been stalled anyway for the past 16 months? Well, I hazard a guess that, apart from the man with the little box, there was another Huck Finn on the raft who carried a radio telephone or some other instant communication device, to the Treasury Department and to the Department of Energy. Somewhere en route the wild waves told the president that the dollar was taking another beating in Europe and, so far as the Secretary of Energy is concerned, the dollar is being battered by the floundering energy bill. If I seem to talk in riddles, let me try and explain what the latest version of the president's energy bill is about. 

Simply, the president promised the assembled presidents and prime ministers of Western Europe, when they met in Bonn, that the United States would reduce its imports of oil by two and a half billion barrels a day by 1985. And if there's one sentence spoken by a European which Mr Carter has memorised, it's Chancellor Schmidt's recent remark. It sounds humdrum but it is pregnant with meaning for Mr Carter. 'These American pledges', said Mr Schmidt, 'are contributions towards the stabilisation of world monetary relations which I rate very highly, especially since they will help avoid dangers that might otherwise arise.' 

Translated into a hurricane alert, this is meant to say if speculators and fiscal manipulators abroad come to believe that the United States is not going to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, then they could wreck the dollar and produce an upheaval in Europe. 

So, Mr Carter is back in Washington and having his fears confirmed, especially about the natural gas part of his bill. His energy bill has four parts. A conservation programme, a programme of converting to coal, a programme of reforming utility rates – what we pay for electricity, gas, power in general – and the fourth part, which is coming up for debate and passage, or strangulation, first. And this is a natural gas bill which proposed reducing imports of foreign oil by one million barrels a day. The president has heard correctly that he doesn’t have the votes to pass it and, if he doesn’t, bang goes almost half of his promise to Western Europe. 

Now, it may be unfair, it may be even wrong to attribute foreign confidence, or lack of it, to the president’s promise to cut down on foreign oil. There are financial men, economists, certainly there are oil companies here, who dispute very vigorously this equation, but even they cannot dispute that the governments of Western Europe believe that the connection between a weak dollar and America's reliance on foreign oil is demonstrable. 

All technical complications aside, the president believes that the stubborn, or unwilling, Congress is reflecting public indifference, or public reluctance, to forego the cornucopia of oil it lives on. And yet, after one more price hike from the Arabs, there would be no more deluge of oil. 

I talked to one very knowledgeable man about the complications of this problem. He's against the president. He says that his calculations of how much we'll save are wrong. The man says, 'Give it to the computers! They'll prove him wrong.' I must say I am unconvinced. 

The other day, my wife got from the bank a transaction certificate notifying her that her government bonds had been rolled over for 90 days. She was amazed. She doesn't have any government bonds. They belong to me. 'Put it down,' the bank manager crooned, 'to computer error!' 'Put it down,' I roared, 'to my account!' 

The only good thing I ever heard about a computer happened to the widow of a small Kansas farmer, several years ago. It was a modest farm and she paid, let’s say about $4,000 in income tax. One day she got a letter from the Internal Revenue Service. It said, 'We find that you have overpaid your income tax by $120,000. Please find cheque enclosed.' 

Marvelling at the mysterious ways of God, she banked it. And then the hassle started. As I recall, the government's moving finger had writ and all the computers could not lure it back to cancel half a line. But it did cancel half the cheque. She kept $60,000.

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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