Shevchenko's affairs

The fall is, in most parts of America but in New England and the north-eastern states especially, the most beautiful time of year and, normally, the most tranquil. I don't quite know what I mean by 'normally'.

Maybe I'm thinking of the time when Washington shut up shop by 4 July, when the intolerable summer heat came on and the congressmen went home to sweat on the prairie or in the mangrove swamps of the Deep South and came back in the fall as dressy and refreshed as children returned for a new school year, with no bad marks against them, taking a lively interest in the prospects of the football team, being relieved to find that some crotchety old teacher had retired and noticing, with pleasure, that there was a new housemaster with a smashing wife. 

But America got what it had always wanted, to be top dog, to become a superpower, just when air-conditioning became universal. So, ever since the Second War, the senators and congressmen have taken the shortest break around 4 July and then stayed behind closed doors arguing and investigating and law-making throughout the summer. 

On a sticky day last week, when the papers – in the cities that have papers – were full of the comings and goings of the Israeli and Egyptian foreign ministers and the president was threatening to veto the tax bill the Senate was debating and there was a lurid, but plausible, tale of the CIA's financing the love life of Mr Shevchenko, the defecting Russian member – former member – of the United Nations Secretariat. I guess I can't just mention that and pass on. We'll be back to it a little later. 

Anyway, the telly and the papers were in full hue and cry, just like winter or spring and maybe it was the Russian and his $500-a-night girl that made me think back to the old Washington summers when half the big houses had their shades drawn and their inmates had fled to the shore or the mountains. Oddly enough, if you read the memoirs, you'll discover that the top people, the diplomatic corps, did not flee anywhere. They accepted the dog days and rancid heat the way babies accept wet nappies, as part of life. They stayed on. I shall now hope to crystallise that 'gone' era in a story, the identity of whose heroine I am going to have a tough time trying to disguise. 

Let me simply say that she was the daughter of the president, was 19 years of age, a saucy and piquant figure whose independence of mind and habits – she smoked a pipe from time to time – caused the president many a hand-wringing night. 

At one time, during the dog days, the ambassador of one of the great powers of Europe took an enormous shine to this young lady. Now those were the days – we're talking about the turn of the century – when the telephone was used for affairs of state, when nobody called on anybody without first leaving a card heralding a formal call later in the day. This ambassador got into the lovelorn habit of leaving his calling card at the White House in the mornings to announce his intentions of visiting the 19-year-old at, shall we say, five in the afternoon. 

The young lady did not, alas, reciprocate his passion and the time came to put him in his place, which was behind his own shades in his own embassy. He'd been leaving his card in the mornings for weeks and receiving no hint that he would be received later on. One day though, the word came through that he was acceptable. He arrived on an infernal afternoon at precisely five o'clock. He was shown in to the apartment of the young lady. He kissed the hand, she nodded. He expressed his inexpressible pleasure at being allowed to call on her. 'But, monsieur l'ambassadeur,' she said, 'it is five o'clock – an impossible time to call!' 'How so?' 

'Do you not know, monsieur l'ambassadeur,' she said, 'that between five and seven o'clock in the evening in summer, every woman in Washington is either making pillowcases or making love.' He backed away, spilling apologies and never appeared again. 

This sounds like a tale from the Courts of Love, though the 19-year-old girl is still alive behind drawn shades in Washington and I had the story from her own lips. I imagine her there these days, a very frail, but spunky lady still, sitting on a sofa against a cushion whose slipcase she embroidered herself. It says on it, 'If you must speak ill of somebody, come and sit with me'. 

Well, the result of America's being top dog is that the American fall, for the past 30 years or more, has been not at all like the old Saturday Evening Post covers by Norman Rockwell – the last boys in the swimming hole, the clam bakes on the shore, the aged countryman sweeping up the scarlet maple leaves as they turn to russet. 

In fact, if you'd been away from this country as several of my friends have, you'd look at the breathless stories in the papers and think you were living through a television season written alternately by Harold Robbins, Rachel Crothers, Woodward and Bernstein and punctuate with occasional movies by Hammer Productions. 

Consider. A congressman has just been convicted in a federal court on 11 counts of mail fraud and 18 counts of falsifying his congressional payroll forms. He is the senior black member of Congress and he's running for re-election next month. 

In Michigan, four years ago, several hundred pounds of chemicals were accidentally deposited in cattle feed. It didn't come out till much later, when people began to develop pathological symptoms, that very probably it had contaminated the meat and milk supply of the entire state. A medical investigation was ordered. It has just come out with its report and has announced that of the 9.1 million residents of Michigan, eight million are carrying in their bodies a specific toxic chemical due to that accident with the cattle feed. 

And the health authorities in Pennsylvania, which is the fourth largest state in the Union, have reported an increasing number of diseases that are attributed to contaminated drinking water. In fact the government, the federal government, is collecting reports of water-borne disease throughout the states and is worried about a general decline in the quality of the water that we drink. 

It's become so bad that the federal government recently started its own form of control over what has always been regulated by each state. But they found that the state rules and laws that set the standards for drinking water vary, that water comes to the citizen from both public and private sources, that there still exist thousands of small water companies that haven't got the money to maintain safe treatment plants and filtering systems. And, of course, many, many systems are now at the mercy of a tidal wave of chemical pollution. 

So the federal government is setting new standards but it's still up to the states to enforce them and the main opponents of enforcement are people who see a great future in water bottling companies. And while this is something as a national problem you only read about, the effect of water-borne rumours, outbreaks of dysentery, infectious hepatitis in New Mexico, Pennsylvania, other places, has already begun to change our habits. In the past couple of years, for the first time in my memory, it has become chic in some households, and routine in others, in Pennsylvania especially, to offer you at the dinner table bottled water, plastered with pretty labels that go into ecstasy about the purity and mountain spring freshness of their product and promise you, practically, the fountain of youth. 

And then, if we should grow philosophical about what people vaguely call the 'quality of life at home', we were jolted the other evening with the news that the Soviet Union was evacuating all Russians from Beirut, including the staff and workers at its embassy as a precaution against an all-out Syrian attack on the Lebanese Christians. 

And to ginger up this bulletin with a little dynamite, the despatch mentioned darkly that the last time the Soviets made such a move was five years ago, when Russian civilians were ordered out of Cairo on the eve of the Yom Kippur War. The implication, of course, is that we are on the verge of a similar upheaval, something that, by the time you hear these words, may be seen to be true or false. 

Which brings us to where we came in. The juicy story of Arkady Shevchenko and his light of love. I would not make light of it if, among others, the President of the United States had not done likewise. As you probably remember, Mr Shevchenko caused a big stir last April when he quit the United Nations and was widely described as the highest ranking Soviet official ever to defect to the West and, for a day or two, we lost track of him. And the woods and motels of the north-east were thick with running journalists hoping to pick up a quick reputation as investigative reporters. 

Then, after a flight into privacy and meditation, he came to light again and wanted, quite understandably, to be left alone. Now comes one Judy Chavez, a dark-haired, dark-eyed young lady saying that since then she has been solacing Mr Shevchenko and receiving presents from him in the form of cash, gifts and holidays amounting to about $40,000 – paid for with CIA funds. At first, she charged him $500 a night and when the connection became, as she puts it, 'regular' he paid her $5,000 a month. 'The CIA pays him', she said, 'and he in turn gives the money to me.' 

Naturally, this produced yet another public outcry against the CIA which is, these days, the principal outlet for righteous indignation. The CIA says it pays him a regular living allowance but the 'high life’ Miss Chavez pays tribute to must be financed by his United Nations pension and private investments. 

President Carter backed that up and he remarked at his press conference, with a surprising outburst of humour, ‘that if the going price for Miss Chavez's services was as high as she says, that,' he said, 'would be rather inflationary.'

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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