Reagan vetoes budget

Of all the people who work at the trade of journalism, I imagine that headline writers are the ones who can least expect immortality – though in the tabloids, anyway, it's not for want of trying. But from all the years of following American history on the wing, I can recall only three memorable headlines and nothing comes to mind from the serious news.

What does bring a chuckle is the memory of a prosperous New York businessman, and it must be 30 years ago, who was being sued for divorce. He was a brassiere manufacturer and the paper proclaimed the news on an inside page with the headline, 'Bra-maker's marriage a bust!'.

The second one streamed across the entire centrefold of the news because, on a Monday morning, I should guess about 40 years ago, the centrefold proudly spread out the first photograph to be sent by radio from coast to coast. It was a rather blurry picture of the old Spanish mission in Santa Barbara, California and emerging from the mission was a wedding party – a priest or two, then a file of friends and a couple, the man in a dark suit, the slip of a girl in white. The slip of a girl was Gloria Vanderbilt and what was being celebrated with this two-page picture was her marriage on that sunny Sunday. The banner headline read, 'Sic Transit Gloria Sunday'.

But looking back over all the national triumphs and catastrophes of half a century or more, I think there's only one headline that has gone into the history books. It's the headline on the front page of Variety, the show business weekly, in the issue published after the historic, the unprecedented financial crash of October 1929. It said simply, 'Wall Street Lays an Egg'.

Well, last Monday, something happened in Washington that has never happened before in American history and when it became known, after an all-night Sunday session in the Senate – another novelty – the afternoon papers said it all in four words, 'Uncle Sam Goes Bust'. This has the beauty of terseness and is technically correct. Put it at greater length and say that Congress – working frantically as usual up to the last minute before a recess, they were all impatient to go home for the Thanksgiving holiday on the Thursday – Congress had failed to provide the money to pay the hundreds of thousands of people who work directly for the government. The axe fell when President Reagan, finding the budget that Congress was about to vote too large, exercised, for the first time, his right of veto, so the funds included in a previous budget that pay the wages of all government workers had given out.

Up to now, however fractious a congressional debate may be on other sections of the budget as for defence or welfare or taxes or whatever, there had never been any quarrel about voting what are called 'continuing appropriations' and obviously nothing is more vital to running the day-to-day business of the government than the continuous dispensing of wages to its workers.

Well this time the continuing appropriations were included in the whole lump sum and that lump sum was $428 billion. It was about six billions too much for the president. So he vetoed the final bill that the two Houses were ready to agree on.

I ought to say that some Republicans in the Senate voted for the bill not because they believed in it, but because they thought too much had been cut from the military appropriations and they wanted to see the bill pass so that the president could veto it. The imagination reels to picture what happened to whom and where.

Promptly barricades went up at the entrances to some of the national parks, whether in the swamps of Florida or the deep snows of the California Sierra. The mint stopped minting commemorative coins. A long line of aliens, standing in a downtown lobby here to register with the immigration and naturalisation service, was told over a loudspeaker that the building was about to close down. Across 3,000 miles of the country, inspectors who go out to test rivers for industrial pollution or scan forests for insect infestation, a lot of people who work for the government's environmental protection agency, went home. The guides at the Statue of Liberty and at hundreds of other national monuments ceased their instructive talks.

I could wring your withers with a melancholy report on all the workers who worked no more. In and around this city alone there are 40,000 federal workers of whom 8,000 had been, as the order said, 'furloughed' by Monday evening. The order did not, however, apply to those dedicated labourers in the state department, the Pentagon, public health service, the social security offices, in everything to do with national security, air traffic control, tax collection, customs, prisons, crime prevention, federal medical care and so on.

It did, surprisingly, apply to the White House, which furloughed 220 of its 360 working staff. Thomas Jefferson had a cook, two maids, a secretary and a courier.

However, let your withers go un-wrung. As so often happens with these operatic interludes in American politics, the overture is good deal more melodramatic than the play that follows. 'This,' said the president to his Cabinet, 'this is not theatrics, it's for real.' Very soon afterwards, Congress, dead on its feet after two all-night sessions but still aware of the limits of real theatrics, quickly passed an emergency bill extending the current government wage bill for another three weeks. The president signed it. The happy anti-climax to this huffing and puffing was the return to normal next morning.

So, President and Mrs Reagan waved cheerfully at the photographers as they boarded Air Force One, the presidential plane and took off for a long Thanksgiving Day weekend at their ranch in the mountains behind Santa Barbara. The president could eat his turkey with, I suppose, an easier conscience since about a million furloughed government workers would have the money to do the same.

Come to think of it though, a lot of them, along with the rest of the 107 millions of employed Americans, may have chosen this year not to provide their families with the traditional turkey for the traditional feast. This is because of an unexplained change of taste not in the turkey, but in the people. Maybe in both. Maybe it's the pumping of antibiotics into turkeys that puts people off. In any case, the market for turkeys is way down this year and the piece in the business magazine that reported it says that a lot of quite patriotic Americans are switching to goose and chicken.

The wild American turkey was the strangest and the biggest and most succulent animal that the Pilgrims came on when they arrived on the barren coast of Cape Cod. I ought to remind you that they hadn't intended to land in Massachusetts. They were headed for Virginia, where the English promotional literature – written incidentally by one Michael Drayton who'd never been there – promised 'fowl, venison and fish and the fruitfullest soil without your toil'.

But the crew of the Mayflower missed the coast of Virginia, tried to follow Henry Hudson's course and make for New York, were blown 200 miles north by ferocious winds, spotted their error a little late in the day, turned south again, ran into worse squalls, said 'The heck with it! Hove to!' off Cape Cod and found themselves on a bare, sandy coastline, what an honest Yorkshireman in his diary described as ' a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men'.

However, the tamest beast running around in huge flocks was the turkey and the most fruitful thing that grew in the windswept bushes was the cranberry. So, after the first appalling winter and when they came to gather their first harvest, they were able to celebrate their survival with a dinner of turkey, cranberry sauce and a pudding that the Indians taught them to make from the staple crop – the staple known in England as maize and everywhere in this land as corn.

It struck me, by the way, as interesting and odd that when the first dry cereal was exported from this country to England, in this century, nobody thought to change the name to maize-flakes. I was once told that some anonymous, sharp American salesman said, 'Just don't bring the matter up with the English. Let them go on thinking they're eating wheat flakes'.

Well, to this day, the last Thursday in November sees more turkeys, more cranberry sauce, more corn pudding and corn fritters being eaten in this country than in the rest of the world but, as I say, taste changes with the times. A national news magazine has put out a survey of the change in drinking habits, or rather in the liquor of choice among Americans, during the past 50 years – Americans who drink spirits, that is. Overwhelmingly these days, the young drink white wine. The figures come from the United States Department of Commerce, checked with the National Retailers' Association.

It used to be a fact – and it remains a convention in the movies – that the favourite American spirits were rye in the north and bourbon in the south. Certainly, that was so in the early 1930s. The Second War produced some drastic changes. Only the dry Martini holds its sway today over people who feel,perhaps, with H. L. Mencken that it is an American invention as notable as the invention of the sonnet. But, today, south and north, there are two overwhelmingly popular hard liquors or spirits – vodka and Scotch whisky.

Even in the south, Scotch has surpassed the sale and consumption of bourbon – news that should make Scotland, too, this week echo the Pilgrims' prayer of thanksgiving.

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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