Reagan breaks air strike

I can't offhand think of anything recently that is comparable with the American air controllers' strike in having come crashing into the headlines of Europe and America like a bang-up electrical storm and then, as suddenly, retreated to the horizon as a few faint flickers of summer lightning. I suppose the general assumption on both continents is that it's all over.

My own uncomfortable suspicion is that it may be over in the short run but, in the long run – say, by next spring – this whole problem could come lurching up on us again with a newly trained army of controllers and it would then challenge the whole principle of a government worker's pledge never to strike. If that happened, we'd be worse off than ever.

Before we leave it with all those stranded and hungry passengers taking up their beds and flying off from the airports of Rome and Amsterdam and Heathrow and wherever, there are several fascinating things about this strike that make it different from any I can remember.

A long time ago, I did a talk about a man named Theodore Kheel who, since his mid-twenties, and he's now in his sixties, has followed a unique career. He bills himself as a labour mediator. His sole aim was to restore peace, to settle a dispute in a way that both sides would come to admit was the best that could be done. If Kheel had a principle, it was his unshaken belief that the contending parties must sit down at the start convinced that neither of them was going to get what it wanted and I'd been waiting, during this harrowing week, to see if he would be called in. He said publicly he'd never seen anything like it. The only possible outcome was that one side would collapse. He was right.

It soon became clear he was not likely to be called in since, in the controllers' strike, we have a rare case of a strike against the government which the government, in the person of the president, can obliterate by the act of firing all the strikers and starting to recruit a new labour force, just as if the airlines had only recently been invented. If the newspaper headlines tended to echo Othello in crying, 'Chaos is come again', they would better have cried, 'Presidential seizure is come again'.

Thirty-one years ago, President Truman seized the railroads not because railroad workers were federal employees, which they weren't and aren't, the railroads are not nationalised in America. Truman did it because to him they threatened a clear and present danger to the health and safety of the country and on that ground – which is a famous pretext sanctioned by the courts – all the president has to do is to proclaim a national emergency and then he has the constitutional power to take over, which Truman did, bringing in the army and non-striking workers to run the railroads.

Everybody feared then that Mr Truman, the bantam cock quick to anger, had overplayed his hand and that he would relent and order new negotiations. He didn't. He kept the trains running with the help of the army long enough for the railroad men to begin drifting and then running back to work but not for two more years did the president feel that things were sufficiently normal to hand the railroads back to the owners.

Well, in this case, the government, in the person of Mr Drew Lewis, the Secretary of Transportation, is talking about a 20-month stretch before it will have trained about 9,000 new air controllers, 3,000 less than the number on strike. The government believes that with new automated equipment, 9,000 anyway will be able to do the work of 12,000. So, at the moment, the busiest training centre in the United States is the Federal Aviation Authority's centre in Oklahoma City which is now working two shifts a day to train retired controllers, apprentice controllers, traffic supervisors and air force military controllers to take over the control towers throughout the United States.

If you read overseas papers, I mean non-American papers, throughout the crisis, you could easily pick up the notion that the most impressive feature of it was the disruption of transatlantic air travel. What, however, Europeans should consider is something else. The astounding, the totally unexpected upshot of the strike and the mobilising of standby controllers is the fact that about 80 per cent of all the daily American flights were in the air and that is something in a country which has 22,000 daily civil flights and they're the test of President Reagan's determination to be the first successful presidential strike-breaker in 30 years.

I said last week that since the Second War, strike breaking by a company, by hired scabs, by a president, by an army, by anybody, has become a disreputable occupation. Mr Reagan's act in doing what sounded at first like a bit of cavalier bluff may be a sign of the times in the sense that it's another example of his correctly interpreting the conservative mood of the country. You have to remember that air travel in the United States is the most common form of public transportation between cities and, if you live abroad, remember, too, that transatlantic flights amount to no more than a percentage point or two of those daily 22,000 domestic flights.

Finally, in all the concern about the bruised logistics of intercontinental flying, the immense losses of the airlines, my business and your holidays, you may have noticed that surprisingly little has been said or printed about the controllers' grievances and demands whose rejection brought on the strike. Mainly we've been told it was about money. Their refusal to accept an 11 per cent increase in their $33,000 (£17,000) annual pay.

At one point, a government spokesman said that their counterclaim was ridiculous in that it demanded 17 times what the government offered. I have spent this week digging and scouring to find out where he got that figure and what it means. I've failed. I doubt that the controllers wanted an increase of $187,000 each a year but what's more important than pay – and what very little has been written about – is the controllers' main grievance that their equipment is out of date, becomes increasingly hazardous to run, that the hours or rather the shifts are too long and that the strain, after a few years, becomes intolerable.

This is understandable when you reflect that an air traffic controller cannot, like most of us, do his job at 80 or even 90 per cent of efficiency. He has to be 100 per cent efficient or planes will start to fall out of the sky.

Well, in my hopeless search for that 17 times figure, I did // the prospect of a worse crisis in the long run. It's a letter from President Reagan to the head of the controllers' union, but written a year or so ago when the president was Mr Reagan wanting very much to become president and this is what he had to say: 'I have been thoroughly briefed by members of my staff as to the deplorable state of our nation's air traffic control system. They have told me that too few people working unreasonable hours with obsolete equipment has placed the nation's air travellers in unwarranted danger.'

He promised that if he were elected, he would take all necessary steps to modernise equipment, to train more controllers and to improve working hours. It's because these things have not been done that the controllers struck.

When this letter was released last week by the union, the Secretary of Transportation hastened to say that the president intends to spend $10 billion in the next ten years to keep his promise. He had better, and much of it had better be spent soon because if, at the end of the 20 months which the administration figures will be long enough to train an entirely new team of controllers, if the system and the equipment and the working hours are no better, then we we could have a much graver strike since the last pool of available labour for running American civil aviation would have been used up.

Well, while we had to go into these and other heavy matters, I found myself not able to pay a passing tribute or two to a famous American who has died and to one American who has just been elected to a national hall of fame.

The neglected obituary is that of 80-year-old Melvyn Douglas, the movie star, who started out in the 1930s as a dapper, quipping sophisticate playing opposite such as Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert and Garbo, no less, and wound up in the 1960s and Seventies as a character actor hewn out of rock. He picked up several awards for these late, grizzled roles and, in acknowledging one of them, he got off a memorable remark.

How come, somebody asked, he was able to transform himself from an amusing playboy into a fine character actor? He said, 'I got better. All good acting is character acting.'

He was the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant and his true name was Hesselberg. I think of this now because he was married to a famous and beautiful actress, Helen Gahagan, who transformed herself into a first-rate congresswoman and a tough, political liberal when it was dangerous to be one in the McCarthy years. I covered her unsuccessful run for the Senate against an ambitious young congressman, Richard M. Nixon. He beat her by dubious tactics. Throughout the Central Valley of California, in front of farmers and well away from the cities, Mr Nixon used to refer to her as 'my opponent, Mrs Hesselberg, I mean, er... (chuckle) Mrs Douglas'. They got the mean message and he won.

By the way, an English paper quoted a famous American journalist, Heywood Broun, as having said of Helen Douglas that she was one of the ten most beautiful women in America. He didn't say that. What he said was better. He said, 'Helen Gahagan Douglas is the ten most beautiful women in America.'

Rudolf Walter Wanderone has been elected to the American pool hall of fame. Pool being the American form of billiards and Rudolf Wanderone, an immense hulk of a man better known as Minnesota Fats being the best pool player of his time, or perhaps, as he says, 'of all time'. When he received this honour, he spurned the flattery of the introducer who went on about Minnesota Fats' great love of the game. 'There's nothing I love about the game,' he said, 'I played for cash. From the age of 13, I broke everybody in Minnesota.'

When somebody suggested that modesty had little to do with his success, he swivelled his great bulk and delivered himself of a line we should all ponder:

'Modesty', said Fats, 'is for suckers.'

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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