Tehran hostage crisis

I ought to say right away that I am not talking from the bottom of a barrel. I'm simply the victim of what a friend of mine calls, 'the most underrated of all human afflictions', the common cold.

A little less than four year ago, I saw a bare-headed American man standing on a street corner in a small town offering his hand very shyly to any passer-by who would take it. He was slim, smallish, had pepper-and-salt bushy hair and a diffident manner. This man was a sort of evangelist and he was pleading for a hearing. He was also out of a job. He was always on a street corner somewhere and, in the evenings, since he couldn't drum up a big, excited audience to listen to him, he eagerly accepted invitations to speak to small town women's clubs, boy scouts' troops and the YMCA. 

Well, he stayed at it and in the end he got the job he wanted – the presidency of the United States. 

Some time in the, I think, the spring of 1976, a national news magazine got out a rundown, a series of profiles of the men running for president who had either an inside or an outside chance of making it. Gerald Ford, as the incumbent, of course led the list. Ronald Reagan was high up there and the big, Democratic threat was young Pat Jerry Brown of California. But there were other impressive names that you will readily, perhaps, recall – Morris Udall, Bob Dole of Kansas, remember? And, of course, such giants as Senator Percy and good, old Lloyd Bentsen. 

If you feel you've lost me at this point, so would 99 Americans in a hundred who could no more list those eight main candidates than they could recall Harry Truman's, or for that matter any other president's, former secretary of the treasury. Ex-secretaries of the treasury are probably the most quickly forgotten men in American history. 

Well, that news magazine's roster of biographies of probable, or possible, presidents did not contain the name of the man on the street corner. For the longest time, newspapers and TV networks assigned only their greenest cub reporters to forlorn little Jimmy Carter. The crack reporters followed the big shots, Ford and Udall and Bentsen and co. So, look what happened. 

I have a memory of Jimmy Carter – I wasn't sure at the time whether he was Jimmy or Johnny Carter – talking to about a score of ladies at a meeting in some small Southern town. I wish I had this picture permanently over my desk because it's a picture that has never faded and it comes sharply to life whenever I hear anybody calling off, as people are doing with increasing dogmatism, the name of the candidate who's going to make it and the ones who are positively not. 

Well, I recall it now as a cautionary note before I talk about two other candidates who have joined the lists, one or the other of whom you may have to get to recognise as the Republican presidential candidate. Or not. Senator Howard Baker is a dapper, handsome – I almost said midget but if he makes it, I imagine that could amount to slander – he is then a small, compact man from Tennessee. His family's been in politics for three generations. He married the daughter of the late Senator Dirksen, an orator who was the supreme basso profundo of the Senate, a man who could teach him any tricks. Baker is now the minority leader in the Senate, that is to say the Republicans' leader there. He's dead against the SALT II treaty and if it were rejected, he would carry the blame, or the credit, more than anybody. 

Otherwise Baker has been busy making himself agreeable, if not irresistible, to his colleagues in Congress. In his so far only appearance on television, when he declared his candidacy, all that I, and no doubt millions of others, can remember is that he swore twice that if he was the Republican nominee and found himself up against Senator Kennedy, he would make a point of never mentioning Chappaquiddick. 

Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California and rated by unprejudiced onlookers as a very good one, the former B-movie star is by now an old and familiar story. This is his third go. He attracts passionate devotion, especially from Western conservatives, from yearners after old American values and he attracts ridicule from all liberals. This is the most interesting thing about him to me because few liberals seem to recall his battling days, his warrior's devotion to Roosevelt and the New Deal and the really impressive, pioneer work he did in organising the Screen Actors Union and giving them a say in their contracts and conditions of work. He was to the whole profession of movie acting what old John L. Lewis was to the miners. 

In those fighting times, the Democratic party was not quite left or liberal enough for Reagan. He formed a powerful, national, not a party so much as a college of liberal cardinals who handed down the true liberal doctrine and put out score cards after every session of Congress giving every congressman and every senator a percentage mark for his or her adherence to, or lapse from, the liberal faith. It's, at the very least, fascinating to recall that this party, college, board of examiners or whatever you want to call it, the ADA – Americans for Democratic Action – had two co-founders, Ronald Reagan and John Kenneth Galbraith. 

Well, Reagan appears to have gone half circle. The more he got into state politics and then national politics, most of all when he became governor of California, he found that the old Roosevelt liberal doctrine, especially the recipe for soaking the rich and spending and spending public money for the public good, the result of this appeared to have landed California with a permanent deficit while thousands and thousands of Americans poured into the state, from near and far, having heard about California's willingness to put you on welfare within a week or two of your arrival in the state. 

Well, Reagan put a stop to that. A reformed liberal is almost as interesting as a conservative who grows radical with old age and in his first two tries for the presidency, Reagan orated with all the bitter fervour of an idealist who's been burned in the fires of actual government. He was, incidentally, easily the best orator of the past two campaigns. He's one of the very few American politicians who talks straight, gutsy English and is at his best on his feet fielding impromptu questions. 

But something has happened to him. His first campaign speech this time, the television exposure cost him about $400,000, must have puzzled or disappointed his hot disciples for he has cooled considerably. His advisers have told him what all fiery candidates are told sooner or later, that no candidate positively on the right or positively on the left ever gets to be president. However bubbly the early rhetoric of a campaign, however flaming the speeches, they simmer and cool as the conventions draw near. 

The American people, this century anyway, have an absolutely dependable distrust of rightists and leftists, however bracing or downright they might be in their early campaigns. So – and it's happening earlier than usual this time – the candidates begin to move from one extreme or the other towards the centre. Reagan now seems to be trying to shake or expunge the old image of himself as Wyatt Earp or Gary Cooper returned to hand out punishment to the bad guys and justice and mercy to all widows. 

On the positive side, he says that he is most worried about three things which are certainly the three things that most worry America's military allies and trading partners. First, the deterioration of American military strength, second, the declining productivity of American workers and third, the declining reputation of the dollar as a stable measure of value. 

The big mark against Reagan, as he hates to be reminded, is his age. Now in his 69th year, he would be not only the oldest man who'd ever gone into the White House, he'd be, going in, almost as old as the oldest president who ever left it. Gerald Ford, standing patiently back there on the sidelines, or should I say the fairways of Palm Springs, once said that Reagan was the only man he'd ever known who, as he got older, grew naturally orange hair and these gibes and cracks at Reagan's furiously glossy appearance and bracing step, will not die down, but if he can withstand the murderous ordeal of a campaign, maybe age will not seem to wither him. 

He has two main problems ahead of him. The new, downright, forceful conservative he has to beat is Senator Connally of Texas. The other problem would follow on the first – the possibility of a stand-off in the Republican convention between Reagan and Connally and, in that case, it now appears that the man who would move in and inherit the centre would be none other than the California amateur golfer and ex-president, Gerald Ford. 

Now before Iran seized the American hostages, a reliable poll showed that the man who was closest to the centre and the most acceptable to most Americans was not Jimmy Carter but Gerald Ford and that, today, Gerald Ford could beat Jimmy Carter. Or rather, yesterday – not now. Since President Carter has refused to turn in the Shah, since he froze Iran’s official deposits in American banks and their overseas branches, not one presidential candidate has abused him. They all – Kennedy, Baker, Connally, Bush, Reagan – have praised his name. Nobody has suggested sending in the marines, an impossible, old-time bit of gunboat diplomacy which, after all, President Eisenhower did in Lebanon as late as 20 years ago. 

But faced with the enormous complexity of the Iranian situation, stumped by the insoluble problem of terrorism – that is, the success of violence – all the presidential hopefuls have retreated into murmuring that Jimmy Carter is behaving like a statesman and, what's worse, a leader. Not to be too cynical about the political consequences, it could be the best thing that's happened to President Carter since the Arab/Israeli peace treaty.

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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