Health bill and Brown v Board Board of Education - 20 May 1994

So many letters from kind and earnest correspondents asking for the gist of so many American issues, so many dishes on the back burners being suddenly hustled to the front that this letter might come to sound less like a letter and more like a column of answers to correspondents.

I just jotted down as you would for a shopping list, some of the things I'm asked to touch on. I run over it now so that someone who, say, has no interest whatsoever in North Korea on the brink, we're still waiting for the report of the UN inspection team, might be curious to know about the first genetically altered tomato just to prove by the very conservative food and drug administration, a tomato that without any artificial additive will keep it's garden fresh taste indefinitely. Next step, genetically altered humans, believe me!

Then I see here a cryptic note, "Paula Jones query" which genteel listeners may think should interest only the moronic readers of daily tabloids, but it is interesting people in high places not least in the White House. There is the 40th anniversary which is resounding in various voices throughout the land of the historic Supreme Court decision known as Brown v. Board of Education, a ruling as dramatic and socially radical to this country as the abolition of apartheid as been to South Africa.

And now right in front of me, crackling over a hot flame is the issue of medical care. I suppose I better stop fighting the group and join them in calling it healthcare. The president's bill has at last come before two committees of Congress and will shortly be looked into by a third, a trusting lady deep in the heart of Yorkshire says in here direct North Country fashion, "Let's not beat around the bush, tell us exactly what the Clinton health bill is all about". Let me say it once that Aristotle and Henry Kissinger, Plato and Mr Mandela, M Mitterrand and Albert Einstein working in shifts like coal miners could not tell you in less than 500 pages with mathematically equations and diagrams exactly what the president's bill means to do and how it would do it.

In fact, the bill arrives before congress with a weighty liability of about 2lbs, it is 1,312 pages long. The president whenever he's challenged to give us the gist is quite simple and forthright, he says "it's to give every single American sickness insurance". All right, health insurance and medical care through new giant bureaus called "regional alliances", which would overlook the financing of the practice of medicine by teams of doctors, technicians and nurses known from now on as health providers organised into HMOs – Health Maintenance Organisations – but I don't want to go into the mountainous detail or the pros and cons to get more complicated. Mr Clinton's response to the thump of 1,312 pages was to make things easier for us all by putting out a short snappy version of 249 pages. I have it by my side and it will remain there until I can translate it into intelligible English.

What I do want to mention before we leave this steamingly controversial topic is something that appeared on Thursday, which could kill the chances of any Clinton health bill being passed this year or ever. Some of you may recall that I've talked before about the most powerful man in America when it comes to passing bills through the lower house, the House of Representatives, which is the body that handles the federal purse strings. Before any money bill can go to the floor for a vote, it must be scanned and amended and approved by the House Ways and Means Committee. The chairman of that committee is always obviously from the majority party in the House. I once mentioned a time when the sitting chairman of the Ways and Means Committee threw his hat into the presidential ring one year not so long ago. A friend of his was horrified, he went over to the chairman's office and he said "Wilbur, Wilbur what do you think your doing running for president and giving up all that power?" Wilbur decided the man was right, he recovered his hat from the ring.

Well now, to get a slighter let alone a gist of his health bill through congress, the president as always needs the chairman of Ways and Means more than he needs any other single person in the country. Luckily, that man is resoundingly on the president's side, his name is Dan Rostenkowski an old politician from Chicago.

But take a deep breathe, it seems that Mr Rostenkowski is about to be indicted by a sitting grand jury of felony charges that he took thousands of dollars in cash disguised in the records as postage stamp purchases, that he bought furniture for himself disguised as office furniture, that he put people on his payroll who did no work. These charges may amaze politicians in other countries where such amenities are considered perquisites of office, they are familiar practices here, but such is the hungry watchdog role of the party out of power that you'd better not get caught.

Some of you maybe shocked to hear me say, it seems that Mr Rostenkowski is about to be indicted, how would I know? Grand jury proceedings are secret and Mr Rostenkowski like any other defendant before a grand jury properly protests he's innocent and expects to be treated as such until a case goes to a trial and results in a conviction. That's a long way from the unjust rumour or suspicion that perhaps Mr Rostenkowski might be guilty of a felony charge. If you were by the way, two years behind bars would be a normal stretch, but I say "appears" because on Wednesday his lawyers acted as if there were no doubt at all about his imminent indictment, they approached the government prosecutors and asked them to overlook the felony charges and allow their client to plead guilty to some lesser undefined charge.

Now lawyers usually do this in the trial court when they have decided to make the best of their client's guilt. These lawyers, in a phrase, are attempting a plea bargain and what we call in the vernacular "copping a plea". The political point as it affects Mr Rostenkowski's general-ship in battling for the president's health bill, is that he would have to step down from his chairmanship if he was guilty of the main charges he would of course retire from the house on his way to jail.

I must say that as I talk Mr Rostenkowski is bearing up with admirable phlem, if not to say nonchalance, he's busy talking about the bill how they the Democrats are going to get it through before the summer recess. It would be nice to know what his lawyers think of its prospects.

A great deal has been written and said in the past week about the 40th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education a case as memorable in American history as Plessy v. Ferguson or Alger v. United States of America. This Board of Education was in Topeka, Kansas and Brown was a little eight-year-old girl named Linda Brown, whose father brought suit to allow his daughter to go to a white school round the corner instead of having to cross railway lines to go to an all coloured school a mile away.

Eventually, his case was upheld nine to nothing by the United States Supreme Court overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, which in 1896, had laid down that black people were entitled to equal but separate treatment by the law and that meant right up to 1954 in every town in the country, most of all in the South separate theatres, restaurants, lavatories, drinking fountains, schools, churches.

I marvel sometimes to look back and realise how painlessly, how casually we, a stranger like myself, took for granted this strict social separation as, well, simply the custom of the country. It struck me as strange at first, but then I knew that President Franklin Roosevelt was a humane and compassionate man and so were millions of other Americans. Today, even the old photographs of signs outside public toilets and lunch counties, whites only seem bizarre.

Well, much has happened in 40 years and there's no possible denying that the great achievement has been the opening of a broad path for blacks into the American middle class, there's also no denying that in many many places the integration of schools and colleges has not worked. The mushrooming of white neighbourhoods apart from black neighbourhoods has replaced the old legal separation with de facto separation. There are even some black colleges that increasingly resent the admission of white students, the bussing of children out of their neighbourhoods to achieve school integration over the whole span of a city proved on the whole a failure. Most menacingly, I think the rise of two generations that never knew a segregated America has produced a new sort of rage in poor young blacks who do not see the equality they were told they'd achieved.

And I'm sorry to say for reasons nobody has satisfactorily isolated, overriding the triumphs of integration, there's a rising wave of suspicion between blacks and whites that is not I believe as some say worst than it was 40 years ago, we have no way of knowing that, because the general subjection of the blacks, their assumption that they were then and for ever second-rate serving citizens disguised their feelings from us. Today, they can express them.

There are very few conclusions or objects of blame that you can leap too after 40 years. I believe if I may say so that a comment I made 20 years ago still stands, I suspect that the blacks will not get more than Lincoln's mass of whites is willing to give them. The best hope is that the blacks whether inside or outside white society can become an equal race separately respected.

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