Reagan declares candidacy

It used to be that Britons leaving for a visit to New York were cautioned by kindly friends, 'Now, be careful not to get mugged'. Nowadays, New Yorkers leaving on a trip to London are advised by equally well-meaning friends, 'See that you don't get bombed'.

It reminds me of a highway sign that I used to go by in summer on my way to the end of Long Island. It stands against an interminable fence that encloses what used to be the testing ground for the first Boeing 707s. By this time, scrub pine and weeds have grown up and on both sides of the highway, there were broad, empty fields running to the horizon, but the big sign is still there and it says, 'Warning. Low flying planes'. What you're meant to do, I suppose, is to duck under the steering wheel. 

And the same sense of what you might call 'alert frustration' seems to be afflicting a lot of people whose job it is to handle or comment on international affairs. The six nations that met outside Paris to look over such bogeymen as recession, unemployment and a wobbly money market came out with a brave announcement that one thing they wouldn't put up with was any more inflation, but nobody said how you can fail to put up with it when it's a permanent guest in the house. What they were really saying was, 'Courage, men. We know it's there.' 

Similarly, the six are sworn to resist any further increases in the price of oil but if you need it badly enough and a sheikh says, 'I'm putting the price up by 30 per cent', what do you do to resist him, short of recycling industrial production and transport around the bicycle? 

In much the same way, we all seem to know the trouble spots around world or, at least, where the next crop of trouble is likely to sprout. But there's not much more we can do than point and put up a sign saying, 'Warning. Trouble ahead'. 

Some of the frustration that makes the life of a commentator – or for that matter a president or a prime minister – a hard one these days springs from the recognition that, quite suddenly and all at once, the most powerful dictators in the world are on, or close to, their deathbeds. Maybe not literally but close enough to put an end to their effective power and leave us wondering what's going to happen next. 

Generalissimo Franco, at last, after an astounding life-saving exhibition by 28 doctors, has gone and not even the oldest Spanish hand is going to be caught predicting, for sure, anything, since, as Charles Wheeler said the other day, Spaniards haven't the faintest idea whether their country harbours more Communists than fascists or more socialists than conservatives. The prophets on the Iberian Peninsula have evidently learned something from the death of Salazar in Portugal. 

For 30 years or more, we knew that to breathe a syllable of dissent there could get you in trouble and to publish it lead to instant arrest, exile or liquidation. Most of us would no more have guessed at an effectively organised Communist Party in Portugal than we would now guess that the Soviet Union is rampant with impatient Democrats or conservatives. And yet, within days of the Portuguese dictator's death, Communists came marching out of the woodwork like an army of termites. 

It reminded me of a night that the leg of a grand piano stabbed through the ceiling of a room in the White House. Architects and engineers came in the next morning and said, 'My God, the building is riddled with dry rot! It could collapse in a week or a day. Get the family out!' And Mr and Mrs and Margaret Truman were out next day and installed across the street in an older, but evidently better-built eighteenth-century house. They stayed there for, I seem to remember, about 18 months until the White House was made to be as stable as it looks. 

And, again, Mr Brezhnev was supposed to visit the United States before the end of the year, but it had to be put off and there's not much mystery about the postponement. He's a sick man, sick enough, anyway, to make Washington and perhaps Moscow wonder whether he'll be the top man when the Communist Party holds its congress in the New Year. 

What's going to happen in China is even more of a puzzle and a fascination to us than the fate of Mr Brezhnev. After all sorts of murky rumours, it has finally come out that Zhou Enlai is more or less of a permanent invalid and that the mighty Mao Tse-tung himself is literally incapable of speech and has to write down anything he wants to say. No wonder Dr Kissinger got a very cool reception on his reconnaissance trip to Peking on behalf of President Ford who's going there next month with little hope of settling anything. The Chinese Communists, too, are not going to commit themselves to any positive policy in what is now clearly a period of watching and waiting, any more than a British prime minister can announce bold new policies on the night he loses a General Election. 

And Washington itself is not immune from this feeling that one regime is fading out and another – we don't know what or whose – is about to fade in. The Democrats, who would give their eye teeth to find a new, preferably young, leader have nine candidates, all of them middle-aged and some tottering off into the twilight, nine candidates for the presidency. And now the Republicans have two – two declared, not to mention Mr Rockefeller waiting in the wings in case one of the two faints or forgets his lines. 

The new, the second, candidate who's just come prancing into the joust like Gary Cooper about to clean out the baddies of Tombstone is, of course, Mr Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California and the most downright of conservative Republicans. Mr Reagan, at least, is one man who in this hesitant, tentative time has few misgivings on what we ought to do on anything you care to mention. He declared in the speech in which he announced he was going to run that America is the land that always lived by the impossible dream of doing what could not be done and then doing it. Government, he swears, is the servant of the people and not vice versa. He sounded like a 1936 Republican screaming at the galloping liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt. 

Mr Reagan, by the way, was in his Hollywood days the most galloping liberal in sight. He was, if anything, to the left of the New Deal but he has seen the error of his ways and he's now for manly men, free enterprise and an end to centralism and creeping socialism. 

I've summarised him maybe in a slapdash, unfair way. He promises to go into the details of this Utopia later but I must say that this cry for 'a pox on Washington' and big government could have the most heartfelt appeal to millions of Americans, if only the appeal of nostalgia. 

I mentioned the word 'young' just now and how the Democrats, at least, are yearning for a youngster. By 'young' I don't mean somebody in his thirties or forties. They would whoop and holler if they could see anybody on the horizon as young as Franklin Roosevelt when he first ran in 1932. He was then 50. Adlai Stevenson in his first try was 52. But how about the men who, just now, are the most serious contenders? 

Mr Ford is the youngster of them all – early sixties. Ronald Reagan is 66. Nelson Rockefeller, if he made it, would be easily the oldest man who ever staggered into the White House. By January 1977 when he'd start his first term, he'll be 68. Hubert Humphrey, still the likeliest nominee of the nine Democratic hopefuls, is 66. 

A stranger to the United States, whether he'd read any American history or not, might well say, 'What's going on here? I thought America was the country of youth?' Where are all the modern counterparts of those brave and brilliant young men – Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, all in their thirties – who founded the republic and go under the misleadingly grey-beard title of the founding fathers. 

Well, nothing is ever predictable in a race for the presidency and I learned, long ago, that there's only one certain way to win money on an American presidential election, which is never to bet on anybody getting the nomination of either party, but to take on all comers who are prepared to predict the man. In other words, I usually find six or seven people ready to bet on six or seven different candidates. I already have, I think, eight bets this time. I'm taking the negative. I'm betting their man won't make it which means, which has always meant, in the past, that I've lost one bet and won the other six or seven. 

Even so, after the student rebellions of the 1960s, the turmoil that seemed to be going to make America over, one thing did seem certain and I recall my oldest friend in the newspaper game – we were both nippers during the Second War – we sat down one day in Washington in, oh, it must have been 1969 after the black and dreadful year of '68, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the petrified armed camp Republican convention in Miami and the ghastly Democratic convention in Chicago with the police, as well as the young radicals, on the rampage. 

Well, we sat down, the next year, sometime and agreed that in five or six years from then, one thing was certain. There'd be no more liberal Democrats for president and, heaven knows, no more conservative Republicans. The mention of Ronald Reagan then, the B-film cowboy aspiring for the governorship of California, that would have been the sort of extended joke that Art Buchwald writes up so wonderfully in his column. Why, wasn't it in 1968 that a prominent, young radical had coined an immortal maxim when some oldster got up to argue with him? 'A man of 60,' he said, 'what do you do with a man of 60? You ask him whether he'd like his wheelchair turned into the sun or the shade.' 

Well, this year's seven years after that violent upheaval. There are five or six old gaffers who want their wheelchairs wheeled into the White House. In this dicey period, I suspect the safest kind of prophecy is prophecy by hindsight. Like the wise answer given by the all-wise Mao Tse-tung to a British politician who asked him, 'What would have happened if Khrushchev had been assassinated instead of Kennedy?' 

The inscrutable Lord and Master of all China pondered deeply for a minute or two and replied, 'The answer to your question is that Mr Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs Khrushchev.'

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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