Texas heatwave and investigating Clinton - 17 July 1998

If you're in the mood to complain about having a miserable summer by way of inclement weather, give a thought to the poor Texans. And the rich Texans – all the Texans, but especially the poor ones.

A poor Texan is easily defined as somebody who has a broken down air-conditioner or no air-conditioner at all. That strikes me as a definition apt to provoke the sound that Victorian novelists used to put down as "humph", a quiet snort of derision at the assumed overall opulence of Texans, who are, quite possibly, the most misunderstood Americans of the lot. Well, back to the matter in hand.

The south-western states at this time of the year are always hot by tropical standards since they lie mostly in tropical latitudes. And one half of Texas lies east and south of the four northernmost provinces of Mexico. So, in July and August, the average daily temperature is about 94°. For the past two weeks or more, the average has been around or over 100. From north to south, 700 miles. From the east, New Orleans, to the west, El Paso. In Dallas, for the last ten days, daytime highs of 110 and over.

So far, astonishingly, only about 20 people have died. They're among the two groups who in such conditions tend to be most in danger, the very old and toddlers – by the World Health Organisation's definition, namely children under five.

So, here you have a state three times the area of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland in which famished livestock are dying by the hundreds. By now, possibly by the thousands. The entire cotton crop has shrivelled. And the current loss to the economy of the state is put at over $4,000 million, that is $4 billion.

Dallas County, with a population of two millions declared a health emergency and mobilised paramedics and other health officers from all over. An inquiry as to what was the most urgently required help brought forth the reply, "mending broken air-conditioners or handing out free fans to the poor and the aged". The second most necessary service was paying the electricity and water bills of people who'd fallen behind.

The general prayer is one that may be guessed at, but only by people who've had the dreadful experience, pray that the enormous strain of mass air-conditioning by night and day in every office, home, public building, little store, the prayer that there will not happen the most dreaded consequence summed up in the next newspaper headline in two words "power outage".

Some pedants may sniff at the outage usage, I mean the usage "outage", but when it happens, a grammarian is the last helper we need. We have outages, neighbourhood or county or district power failures at least twice every summer at the end of Long Island, not counting the experience in late summer of finding ourselves in the path of a hurricane.

People who've never had one tend to say, "Oh! I can well imagine! It must be awful to have no electricity!" Though I've often heard it said it must be romantic, for an evening or two, to dine by candlelight. Well that would be true, if you could also get water by candlelight.

The earliest trouble is the discovery that the food in the refrigerator is rotting by the hour. Next is the loss of water, and wondering how to flush the toilets. After that, all sorts of inconveniences and hazards – think of hospitals – come to mind that are not to be described or gone on about.

But so far, as I talk, as American commentators say, "Thus far, no power outages of major dimensions have been reported". The item I first mentioned, the need to succour the poor, by mending their air-conditioners or at least giving them a free fan, led to a vivid old association.

When I could no longer bear looking at the rotted horizons of the Texas landscape and the panting poor people, I switched to a hearing of a mightily important Senate committee in Washington DC, the District of Columbia, called by all TV commentators, the nation's capital. Why it was picked as a capital city remained an irritating mystery to Thomas Jefferson who, once the choice was made, deplored the thought of a new nation having its capital in what he called "that Indian swamp in the wilderness".

When I first went there and covered Congress and other capital offences, I remember once asking a southern Senator, "Sir, what is the elevation of Washington?" "Son", he said, "well below sea level". And that used to be the feeling of it. It had, has, a dreadful climate.

So much so that when the British first elevated their representative to an embassy from a ministry and began to recruit a staff, they then, and maybe so far as I know maybe the Foreign Office still does, defined Washington as a hardship post, entitled to all the amenities and compassionate perks you get if you're assigned to a post in Outer Mongolia or some sink in the Persian Gulf.

Well, how times and customs, and things you take for granted, have changed. It's now the end of July. Sixty years ago, by the beginning of July, Washington must have been the deadest capital in the western world, left to the meanderings of tourists. Congress saw to it that it was through its business for that session before the sweating cloud of the summer heat descended.

For, since the spring, all offices in both Houses, all congressional hearing rooms, buzzed with the whirling big airplane propeller fans on the ceiling. Not until the late 1940s, when the war was over, was Washington, like the rest of the country's cities, touched by the blessing of air-conditioning.

But last Wednesday was when I saw a horrible long-shot of a Texas landscape showing a mile or more of land that looked all the way to the horizon like a grave of buried elephants. That's when I switched to the picture of a round-faced, middle-aged, bespectacled lady, explaining herself with great self-possession to a semi-circle of men sitting solemnly, but coolly, round a green-baized, curving desk.

Challenging the lady, the attorney general of the United States, no less, to justify a point in law which could have a fateful, even a devastating, effect on every next President of the United States. The subject, the topic if you like, has become, over the past year, a huge spaghetti plate of legal issues and tissues and arguments, so dense that you can't see the meat for the pasta. To convey the essence of it is hard but I'll try.

First of all, there's a new American institution that has to be defined. It's one presently inhabited by a cheery looking, golf-club secretary type, also with round glasses, named Kenneth Starr. The special prosecutor. Way back there, in the Nixon era, Congress passed a law, long needed, you may think. The problem was this. When the executive branch, the presidency, is under suspicion of something as bad as a crime, then who investigates it?

The system required the attorney general, who is an appointee of the man to be investigated, namely the president. He appoints attorneys general. So, Congress passed an act. There should be a neutral, impartial investigator, the solution the Ancient Romans arrived at when they asked themselves about possible crimes in the imperial household. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall police the policemen?

But the new act also required the president to appoint his own investigator. And that's still the system. And Mr Starr, the special prosecutor, a constitutional lawyer of no mean ability, is riding high and handsome investigating the president for possible high crimes and misdemeanours on a constitutional issue – did he or did he not have sexual relations with a young 22-year-old White House intern? Incidentally, one of about 200 young people who work as sort of secretarial apprentices inside the White House.

Why Mr Starr is there is to find out if the president himself, or through somebody else, asked this young woman to lie and say no, their relationship was platonic. Now this sounds ludicrous, put this simply. But if the prosecutor can prove that the young woman was so persuaded to lie, then the president could be charged with obstruction of justice, subornation of perjury, which are two of the high crimes or misdemeanours the Constitution says can warrant the impeachment of the president.

So, the hearings last week were of the Senate judiciary committee, which is the one that would have to decide any impeachment charge that Mr Starr cared to bring. The hearings were about the wish of the special prosecutor to have the president's secret service men – protectors and bodyguards – testify before a Grand Jury which is looking into this squalid business, of who saw what in the White House relations of the president and the young intern.

The White House maintains that the men who have to live mostly within 10 feet of the president most hours of the day, and who hear talk and intimate discussion of just about everything from foreign policy to family quarrels, ought not to have to testify to anybody on the outside about the president's public or private life.That he would be at the mercy not only of the scrutiny, but of the gossip of the men who live closest to him. Stay tuned.

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