I am a Jelly Doughnut - 3 October 2003

Have you ever heard of Lochner, Butterfield and Lansing? - the most prestigious law firm, Lochner, Butterfield and Lansing.

But it's not - and I doubt any of the three knew either of the others.

This is how the thought of that swinging trio came to mind.

An obituary in the New York Times of a man I'd never heard of, a four-column headline for his obituary.

And then it struck me that if it had not been for one single mistake in his professional career we still wouldn't have heard of him.

Down the past 10 years or so I have, from time to time, thought of doing a book about people, about individuals, totally obscure or likely to die unknown were it not for one incident, one remark, one passing thought, one tiny intrusion into history which then guaranteed that they would be for all time an essential footnote to their period.

I'm being too abstract. All abstractions are better understood through examples.

How wonderful if all United States senators, British MPs, especially all delegates to the United Nations, were made to memorise that sentence - all abstractions are better understood through examples.

Alright here's what I'm talking about.

Let's begin with the first member of this trio of unknown immortals. Robert Lochner - l o c h n e r.

He was an American boy taken to Germany when he was five, because that's when his father was appointed the Associated Press correspondent in Berlin, and stayed there for nearly 20 years.

After the Second World War the son, Robert, thanks to his knowledge of German, became the chief interpreter for the American occupying forces in their zone in Western Germany.

Well, fine, that would certainly have earned him a single column headline - but four!

It so happened that young Lochner was called on to serve - for maybe five minutes - as German teacher to President Kennedy on his one and only - but triumphant - visit to Berlin, which some of you may remember as a very stirring moment in the history of the Cold War and a marvellous moment on television.

The time was the spring of 1963. The Soviets had failed to get the British, Americans and French to withdraw from their occupying zones of Berlin.

So the Soviets blocked off their zone with a wall, hoping that East Berlin would in time become the nucleus of a wholly communist Germany.

Only two years after the wall was built, in 1963, President Kennedy decided to make plain to the Soviets that West Germany was a rampart of freedom America would defend.

He went to Berlin and before 100,000 elated Germans he said so.

He ended the speech with a single short sentence that has remained as memorable as anything he ever said.

If any aggressor ever approached West Germany it would be threatening America. It would learn - as he put it - "I am a Berliner".

He'd been coached to say this in German by young Robert Lochner, the soldier interpreter.

Kennedy had trouble saying "Ich" and eventually did no better than copy the Bavarian "eesh". But he proclaimed it with his head high as a clarion call.

I watched this immensely moving scene on television and was, like millions more I imagine, startled by the strange noise that came up from the crowd.

It was an immediate, huge peal of laughter, modulating in about two seconds, into a roaring ocean of applause.

The world "Berliner" is familiar to Germans in a quite different sense from that of meaning a Berlin citizen.

This was evidently unknown to the White House and a very strange lapse on Lochner's part.

And that sense was the one that first shocked delighted, puzzled, tickled the hundred thousand.

What John F Kennedy had proclaimed with such courage and determination was: "I am a jelly doughnut - Ich bin ein Berliner"!

Hence the four columns and the permanent imprint on the Kennedy record of the name of Robert H. Lochner.

We move on exactly 10 years to Washington DC. The summer of 1973 - as dramatic a summer as Washington has known in our time.

A first class political scandal involving, as its central figure, the President of the United States no less, which began as a sort of Boulting Brothers farce in which you expect at any moment to see Alec Guinness impersonate a safe cracker and a cop.

It began in a large but elegant apartment house - block of flats - that overlooks the Potomac River and is known to this day as the Watergate.

By chance the Democratic Party happened to have its headquarters there.

At 2.30 in the morning on a June day in 1972 five men crept into the darkened Democrats' suite and were busy implanting bugging devices for obvious purposes.

They were caught by a patrolling night watchman.

They were all, it was said, Cubans or close to Cubans who hated the Castro regime, and the papers at first said they believed that if a Democrat were elected in the forthcoming presidential election it might lead to "Communism, Socialism or whatever you want to call it".

This bizarre episode in the comical bungling of it evoked a collective chuckle from media fans everywhere and was immediately dubbed "The Watergate Caper".

Not for long.

Two Washington reporters who thought there might be more to it than a caper looked into the events of that June night and discovered, first, that the leader of the bugging expedition was a former officer of the Central Intelligence Agency.

And then that the escapade had been paid for by members of the National Republican Party.

After a year or more probing suspicions, the trail led ominously to several White House aides.

But in November Mr Nixon was re-elected by a massive landslide and it was, as he said: "Time to move on."

But the two Washington reporters and one senator were much more ready to move on into the White House.

A senate investigating committee was set up, named the Ervin Committee, after the chairman Sam Ervin - the rotund, bright-eyed old Southerner with a folksy air, just a hometown boy. But also a Harvard Law School graduate and the Senate's expert on constitutional law.

Senator Ervin at first made a list of White House aides he wanted to testify. But President Nixon haughtily replied that they, like the president himself, never need respond to a congressional subpoena.

He claimed, what he called "presidential executive privilege". Senator Ervin called the President's executive privilege, "executive poppycock".

Several top White House aides resigned. But there was no proof to substantiate the now widespread rumour that the president himself had known about it.

None. Until one morning a very minor White House aide testified very briefly and on a question put to him from Senator Ervin of "How do you know that?" This Alexander Butterfield said: "Well, I suppose it'll be on the tapes."

"On the tapes? The tapes? Well, what tapes?"

Then Mr Butterfield explained as artlessly as if he were explaining how you look up a word in a dictionary that Mr Nixon had secretly taped all conversations in his White House office. Nixon said later he'd done it for history's sake.

That for the committee was the triumphant turning point.

After a skirmish of legal battles over Mr Nixon's right to keep the tapes to himself, the Supreme Court ruled he had to release the whole library of them to the committee.

And there, only days after the break in, was Mr Nixon telling the CIA to stop any investigation and cover up the whole episode.

The House of Representatives promptly drew up articles of impeachment and sent them on to the Senate for the trial of the president.

In the absolute certainty that he would be impeached, Mr Nixon prudently, but with a smiling face and a strange lecture on doing right in the face of public scorn, became the first president to resign. He went into exile at his home in California.

On the August day in 1974 that he abdicated I thought of an old Frank Capra movie. Does anyone remember the delightful Broadway Bill, name of the horse running the Kentucky Derby, as it's called, against great odds?

It had been bred and trained and idolised by two young people who were encouraged at all times by an old, bumbling, affectionate Southerner known as the Colonel.

He swore time and again with tears in his eyes that he would put his last cent on Broadway Bill. But on the day of the race he sneakily went off and bet on the more likely winner.

Broadway Bill won and as the Colonel watched his own shrewd choice come limping in last he exclaimed: "Duped by my own chicanery!"

If Mr Nixon had quickly destroyed the tapes and not been duped by his own chicanery he would have lived out his term and retired as an elder statesman into a revered old age.

But now how about the third partner - Lansing? Too serious and absorbing for a quick mention. Next time.

Meanwhile, as an Englishman who made a fortune on American radio between the wars used to say: "I fear my time is up, so I say to you all, cheerio."

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