Carter steals rivals' thunder

'Quake Rocks City', it says here, which reminds me of the days when we read such wartime headlines as 'London in Flames' and managed to wangle, through channels, a transatlantic telephone call to some beloved friend and say, 'Are you all right?' And the answer usually came back, 'Well, I'm fine but Mary's rheumatism's acting up again.' There'll always be a headline writer until, that is, an earthquake really rocks San Francisco.

I must say, though, that it's a particular feeling not quite like any other form of panic, however mild. We're sitting there in mid-morning, my wife, as usual, sewing briskly on a sweater or a cardigan or earmuff or something for one of the grandchildren, I'm reading. Suddenly, the clack of the needles stops. She looks at me. I say, 'What are you looking at?' And then there's no need to answer. Your chair shivers, the window frames creak a little. The room appears to be very slightly drunk. That's the eerie thing – not noise but the absence of noise in a small perceptible movement of, of all things, the floor. A petal from an azalea plant floats down and that's all.

I suppose it took five seconds, long enough for us to say 'earthquake' and to wonder if this was the beginning or the end. Well, it was the end till the next evening when I was typing and heard what I thought was somebody in the hotel rattling keys against the outer door. I traced it to the bedroom and it was a steady, quiet little rattle of the sliding panel to a closet or cupboard and then it stopped. The seismologists told us that that was part of the same disturbance called 'an aftershock' – the earth is settling down again.

This brief, quiet threat to your own personal safety – and you have time in only five seconds to think of that and many things – was enough to make us forget for an hour or more what was happening everywhere else, Afghanistan, Iran, Iowa, Washington, till the evening news came on the tube and, of course, the first item gravely reported from New York was the earthquake in San Francisco.

Next day we were back in the political world with a vengeance. Across the bay on the Berkeley campus which, during the roaring Sixties was the hotbed, or focal centre, of student protests about university discipline and then about the draft and then about Vietnam. There were, so far as I can hear myself through the roar of the marchers, two separate rallies. One chanting, 'We won't be drafted!' Another demanding that the Shah be sent back to Iran.

This new eruption of protest was prompted by President Carter's State of the Union address to Congress in which he said, about as carefully as anyone could, that he was not going to ask the Congress to reinstitute the draft (conscription) but he would ask it to pass legislation to register young people up to 26 to be on the books, to be on hand if the need arose for what he called 'future mobilisation'.

Now you'll notice I said 'young people' and not 'young men' because since there are now young women doing full training at West Point and in the navy and, even, in the marines, the question at once arose, 'Will or should women be registered too?'

And that has already set off first spasms of protest and a new controversy that could split the women's rights movement in interesting ways. For instance, some women's libbers say that the mere suggestion of registering women for military service is another and sickening sign of machismo, of the male impulse to have women always at their beck and call. But other women's libbers find themselves in a quandary, more accurately in a dilemma, that's to say faced with two choices, neither of which is satisfactory. If they insist on equal rights, have they not an equal responsibility to be drafted if the time comes? On the other hand, if they resist registration, they will be accused of not acting on their principles, of wanting only the more pleasant rights that would make them equal with men? This argument has only just started and will, I have no doubt, go on and on.

The president got the most heavy general applause from the Congress when he appealed for an American boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games. He well knows that this is not going to make the Russians apologise and pack up in Afghanistan but he has set February 20, all the same, as the deadline for a Russian withdrawal. He had sent off personal messages to more than 100 heads of government. He was privately disappointed that, from Europe, the only head of government to come out openly in support of him was Mrs Thatcher, but pretty soon thereafter he was heartened by getting pledges of support from Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, China, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, Israel, Qatar, Djibouti and Fiji. And now, from the Islam conference in Islamabad, 31 nations there voted for it. Well, if they all came through with a boycott they could make quite a dent in the majesty of the Moscow games and a large dent in the Soviet budget.

The president's State of the Union message used to be sent up to Congress as a document and read by a clerk but Franklin Roosevelt, the first president to appreciate the peculiar power of radio, started the custom of going up to Capitol Hill and reciting the message aloud to a joint session of Congress and, since television, there has not been a president who didn't rush to the hill to make the most of the huge captive audience that any presidential appearance on television can guarantee.

But President Carter did something new this time. He split his message into two. One half of it, on domestic policy and what he would like the Congress to do about it, he released to Congress as a 75-page document for them to read and ponder. His dramatic instinct, not to say his political instinct, was sound. The anxieties of the American people are running now towards foreign policy and the impending crisis in the Middle East. Furthermore, his domestic message included one or two suggestions not too palatable to the voters in an election year. He said, or wrote, that so long as inflation went up and up and there was no sign of a recession, he could not, would not, ask for what every politician hopes for in an election year, namely a tax cut. The first thing to tackle on the domestic front, he said, must be the current national deficit.

By the way, when he came to the presidency, he more or less promised no deficit at all. Now, he calmly predicts that the current deficit will be something over 16 billion dollars. He's also asking for a standby petrol rationing plan to be carried out if oil supplies are reduced by 20 per cent and he's asking for another two billion dollars for a federal programme which teaches practical skills to unemployed young people. He ended his written message by frankly saying that he was not expecting Congress to enact much new or important legislation this year.

Now all this, if he'd recited it before the joint session would undoubtedly have produced gasps of astonishment in his audience and he must have figured something between boredom and anger in the national audience. He sensed, quite rightly, that what people would tune in to hear was a firm presidential statement on foreign policy. He may, or he may not, have known that whenever foreign affairs become the main anxiety of the people, a sitting president always gains in prestige and popularity. As a diehard Republican said to me this week when he made the amazing announcement that he thought, after all, he'd most likely vote for Carter, 'Well, he's the only president we've got!'

So, as somebody said, the State of the Union address turned into a state of the world address. It was what people wanted to hear and, in the performance, it revealed a Carter very much in the guise of the president that his presidential rivals have been saying the country needs. The loudest and longest applause of all came for his saying that any Soviet attempt to take control of the Persian Gulf will be repelled by the use of any means necessary, including military force.

It sounded good. It sounded firm and manly. It sounded almost as if the United States had the actual military power to do it. Only in the following days did the armed services committees of Congress and the men in the Pentagon and the national magazines get down to the very unpleasant business of detailing what they already knew as a general fact: that, short of nuclear power, the United States has only an aircraft carrier here, another there, another a thousand miles away, that the Mediterranean fleet is inadequate for any large enterprise, that activating many divisions takes a long time. Most of all, that a war fought against the interior supply lines of the Russians would have to be done by a force whose supply lines stretch over thousands of miles of water.

How is it possible for the United States to stabilise a part of the globe which is so riven with religious and political differences of its own? Yet, in spite of these unstated weaknesses, President Carter seems to have left the impression with most people that he's wakened up to the real world, that he, alone, has the confidential information from around the world and that he means to do something.

Mr Ronald Reagan said rather weakly the other day when he was asked to comment on the State of the Union address that he would know what to do if only he was privy to the intelligence that the president gets and Mr Carter's presidential rivals, the men already in the race and now running hard for the New Hampshire primary, have all had to respond to what the papers already call 'the Carter doctrine'.

Most of them take refuge in saying it was pure rhetoric – sound and fury – but they know and they know we know, that the different things, the downright things they swore they would do if they were in the White House – embargo grain, impose economic sanctions, propose a stiffer military budget, give the CIA a new mandate to gather intelligence – are exactly what the president has now done. He has stolen their rhetoric and for the time being, at any rate, left us with the implication that he, alone, knows how to live up to it.

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

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