Carter vetoes defence bill

In the present blackout of New York's newspapers, there's no problem about keeping up with the news. You just don't pretend to. Of course eager citizens can drive themselves into delirium – or stupor – by watching the many more hours of coverage that the television networks are giving while the strike's on. And I suppose there are conscientious voters who make a point of it.

But strangely, the strike has not increased television watching in these parts, it has diminished it. People who normally drop in on me around barley wine time and fret about the SALT talks or the Camp David summit or who's thinking of running for president, such well-briefed types now sink quietly into an easy chair, no knitting on their brow, and wonder how your summer's going or the golf swing or have you heard any good stories lately? 

The newspapers' strike is about how many old employees, like linotype operators, shall be laid off now that the papers have gone to what they call 'cold' type and don't need linotype operators any more. It's a real throwback to the machine-smashing days of Ned Ludd. In this situation several small papers have sprung up using workers at other papers not on strike from out of town and plucking willing reporters from the struck papers. I think at the moment we have three going. In the last strike, which lasted four months in 1962-63, we had six maverick newspapers that cantered around for a time and died. 

But this time, since the national wire services, the Associated Press, the United Press are honouring the strike, the news coverage tends to be pretty snippety. Still, some things do percolate through. You have to be blind and deaf not to have heard about the horror of the burnt-out cinema in Iran, the gunshots in Grosvenor Square, the reprisal raids in Lebanon of Israeli fighter jets. In short, the – by now – obscene monotone of terrorism about which none of us, governments or individuals, seems to know what to do. 

It's also difficult not to hear something about the President of the United States whose name is Jimmy Carter because he's been very busy this summer trying to polish up his tarnished image, dashing from county fairs to the navy academy and on back home to Plains, Georgia to be seen on television playing softball – that is rounders – with his brother Billy, just to reinforce our faith in the honest boy from small-town Georgia that we voted for. 

Which reminds me that towards the end of the second year of any president's term of office, jokes about him begin to roam around and take hold and I believe do more than political scientists will ever allow to plant a comic or sinister or otherwise distorted stereotype at the back of the voters' minds, like powerful cartoons. It's odd by the way, isn't it, that historians writing about political campaigns 30, 40, a hundred years ago, regard it almost as a duty to reprint telling newspaper cartoons of the period. 

By now, everybody grants the enormous force in the late summer of 1939 of a cartoon, by David Low, published when even ardent leftists were reeling under the shock of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Low called this 'the bitterest cartoon of my life'. It was captioned 'Rendezvous' and showed Hitler and Stalin bowing genially to each other in the smoking ruins of Poland. Hitler's saying, 'The scum of the earth, I believe? ‘and Stalin is saying, 'The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?'. 

And yet I have never heard a statistician or a political analyst examining the results of an election held yesterday even mention the probable force of some brilliant cartoon or some nationally popular joke, which is why I ought to retell one that's going the rounds and which even disillusioned Democrats are telling, though it may cost them dear in the next presidential election. 

It's about a Democratic politician who's just been to a meeting of county chairmen or whoever, the main item on the agenda being what to do about the sinking popularity of Jimmy Carter. It was a depressing get together as you can imagine and, when it was over, the man got in a cab and tapped the nearest available citizen, namely the cabby, for his opinion. 'What do you think of Carter?' asked the man. 'Carter?' the cabby came back, 'Why, I think he's wonderful. Great. Yes sir, he's my kinda guy!' 'You mean,' said the delighted passenger, 'you mean you don't think he's done anything wrong?' 'No sir!' said the cabby, 'Not put a foot wrong but I tell you, that dopey brother of his in the White House is doing everything wrong!' 

Well, last week, Mr Carter's old fans and many of his disillusioned supporters perked up a little and began to mutter far and wide that he was at last showing some 'guts', is the usual word. This was about the president's veto of a defence bill passed by Congress. There are two stages to the passage of any money bill, what's called an authorisation bill which authorises the president to spend a lump sum and also says, roughly, how much is to be spent on different parts of it. When that bill's passed, the Senate and the House then get down to the effective bill which is called an appropriations bill and this specifies exactly what is to be spent on what. Of course the two Houses don't always agree and the regular procedure is for the House to work out its bill, then the Senate looks it over, makes changes, and then there's a joint conference of two committees, one from each House. And they hammer out a final bill in committee and that's the one that goes to the floor, first of the House, then of the Senate for a vote. 

In all money bills, the House has the keener concern and the greater authority because members of the House, congressmen, are elected for two years only against the senators' six and their interests are much more topical and local. If your constituency is begging for a new trade mart building or a big bridge or a new stretch of highway, and you don't manage to pry the money out of your fellow congressmen, you can look forward to losing the next election. So though the House of Representatives is called the Lower House, it's 'upper' when it comes to shelling out money for anything. The House controls the purse strings. 

Now ever since Mr Carter got in and the proper committees – military affairs committee, appropriations committee, so on – started to draft a defence budget of their own, after getting the president's estimate of his defence bill, the House has been wedded to one big project more than another. It was not in the president’s bill, but it soon appeared in the House drafts. It is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and it will cost to build $2 billion. 

More accurately, this bill is called a weapons authorisation bill. It is to authorise the money to be spent on new weapons of war and more of the same. The total estimate of the bill is $36 billion. The president vetoed it. Incidentally, a military spending bill is the only money bill the Constitution allows him to veto. Now Mr Carter, he wasn't objecting to the total sum. He'd estimated much the same as the cost of his own bill. What he did object to was the $2 billion nuclear aircraft carrier. Its supporters in the House were many and their public point was that this new carrier would be an impressive symbol of American power and would give the navy the advantage of a mobile, flexible launching pad of enormous range and power. 

Mr Carter's point was that those $2 billion would deprive us of money better spent on conventional weapons, especially on the European front line of the North American Treaty alliance. What neither the House nor the president said outright was, on the House's side, 'Listen! I have promised idle shipyards in my constituency that they will be soon humming again'. And, on the president’s side, 'A huge, new aircraft carrier, nuclear-powered or not, is likely to be a sitting duck for any Russian missile directed at it'. In other words, the president might have said, 'the day of the aircraft carrier is over'. 

Still, the opposition in the House is going to be tough and continuing. Two billion dollars is only the beginning. The carrier would require a new fleet of advanced fighter planes and a permanent escort of cruisers and destroyers. The complete job, the so-called 'carrier task force' will cost in all more than $6 billion, which would be spread around many thousands of workers in many naval districts around the country. 

So, the navy is bitter. The army naturally backs the president. 

It all, inevitably, recalls the peppery, famous figure of General Billy Mitchell, an aviator in the First World War who, when it was over, crusaded for an air force independent of the army and navy. And he was so sure about the coming superiority of air power that he managed to put on two demonstrations in the early 1920s whereby the navy offered him, as targets, captured German ships and obsolete American battleships. 

In the result, he staged an air attack which sank three battleships and a destroyer and a cruiser. 'You see?' he said. His superiors were dazed but unconvinced, whereupon Mitchell appealed to the public through articles and blazing interviews. And he got so out of hand, that he was court-martialled for defiance of his superiors, sentenced to a five-year suspension but resigned instead. 

Well, the great Billy Mitchell furore died down and by 1939 we were all restored to our conviction that the battleship was the mightiest of seagoing weapons. In 1941 the Japanese bombed and sank one battleship and severely damaged seven others – Pearl Harbor. And two months later, the Japanese bombed and sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off Singapore. Twenty years after Billy Mitchell's audacious demonstration, we, too, decided that the day of the battleship was over. 

In 1946, the United States Congress authorised, with no dissenters, a posthumous Medal of Honor for General Billy Mitchell.

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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