Charles Wick's secret tapes

Before the war – I suppose I'd better identify the war as the Second World War – among the most popular American radio commentators (this was before television) who gave us the news on a national network every night was an Englishman, very little known I think in England, but here he was both a household name and very much a household voice – rapid, clipped, invincibly British, indestructibly cheerful, though most of the time the news was then, as now, horrendous.

His name was Boake Carter and his extraordinary aplomb, while acquainting us with grief in a dozen countries, moved one of the great journalists of our time, the inimitable E. B. White of the New Yorker, to write a little poem about him. I can give you the gist of it in the first 15 lines:

'It pleasures me, At end of day, To hear Boake Carter's baleful lay, The lullaby of world decay, When Boake has spoke. I like to hear him summon us, With all things ominous, Munition makers plotting gain, Asylums bulging with insane, Cancers that give no hint of pain, Insurgency in northern Spain, And rivers swollen with the rain. For Boake, Has spoke, And it's no joke.'

This hits off a curious, if not a reassuring truth which is that normally healthy people, though they don't care to admit it, get a small, guilty glow from disasters. Many a newspaper tycoon, what they used to call a press baron, not only knows this but shamelessly exploits it by printing little else but violence, scandal, sex and disaster and thereby making a pretty packet in many cities of the globe.

We who listened to Boake Carter saw nothing bizarre or offensive in the fact that, every evening, however appalling the news, he always wound up the same way. He would make a studied pause and say, 'But I see my time is up and so I say to you, cheerio!' Those were the days when 'cheerio' was an exclusively English greeting or farewell. Come to think of it, it still is and it restored the listeners to the hearth and home and the feeling that however much the world seemed to be falling apart, old Boake had it under control.

I was reminded of E. B. White and Boake Carter when I came to look over the week's news and saw that, with or without a gift for rhyming, you could make a similarly depressing list. The Kissinger commission on Central America has finished its work, found a Soviet-Cuban challenge there and suggested more military aid than the Congress is ever going to grant. The first American casualty, a helicopter pilot, is reported in Honduras. The American marines are stuck in Lebanon unable to be a peacekeeping force without also becoming a combatant. The Chinese prime minister has come and gone and while he was cheerful about a new trade deal, he made it plain that China will never be a true friend until the United States does something which no president dares to do, namely, to abandon the old ally, Taiwan, to mainland China.

It now come out that it's possible for innocent people to get the dread disease AIDS from a blood transfusion and New York's majestic Metropolitan Museum of Art has admitted that 45 of its priceless items of Renaissance jewellery, including Benvenuto Cellini's famous Rospiglioso Cup, are fakes done in the late nineteenth century by a German goldsmith.

Well, there's really not much point in talking now about the very serious questions of whether the American military should get out of Lebanon and whether it should get deeper into Central America until the Congress starts its new term, which it will do in another two weeks, because it's so easy to forget – headline writers on both sides of the Atlantic forget all the time – that these matters are not at the president's disposal. He's not a prime minister announcing a policy which his party is bound to carry into legislation and which the opposition will have to wait till they're in power to cancel. He's more like the treasurer of a big corporation who puts up to the board a suggested budget which the board will then reduce or expand or ignore.

This is particularly true of the government budget for the next fiscal year. Mr Reagan, we are told, polished it up or polished it off during his holiday in California and will be ready to present it to Congress at the end of the first week of the new session and you may be sure the headlines will say, 'Reagan to Spend 200 More Million on Defense' or 'Reagan Cuts School Lunches Further'. If that's what he wants to do, it's no more than a wish. Congress is responsible – the House of Representatives, ultimately – for saying who gets how much to spend on what.

Same with the depressing load of the federal deficit which now approaches 200 billions. This is constantly referred to as Reagan's huge deficit. Well, even if the federal deficit were accountable to the president, most of this mounting pile was created by the last three presidencies. In fact, it was created during the last three presidencies by succeeding Congresses. It's gone higher because costs have doubled and tripled, so that even if, as the Democrats correctly bemoan, the president goes on proposing further cuts in welfare and social programmes, it is still a fact that, under him, the government is today spending more on welfare and social programmes than it has ever done.

So, for the moment, I'm just warning you against the drift of the big headlines coming up in a week or two when the president presents his budget to Congress. He will not be announcing American policy. He will be making a plea. He won't be Mrs Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer saying in the next year we're going to do this and that, he will be Oliver Twist going to Congress with his cup in hand.

But there are some things we can talk about and one is a topic I've been ducking in the hope that with the departure from high office of the party of the first part, I could say, like the football commentators after a fumbled pass, 'Well, that's history!'. It concerns the man who, in any administration, represents the voice and the image, the reputation, if you like, of America abroad, the director of the United States Information Agency. Some distinguished men have been in the job – the late Ed Morrow, the living John Chancellor who, after his stint under President Johnson with the agency, returned to his job as a highly alert and respected television reporter and commentator.

The present incumbent is one Charles Wick. I need say no more about the function he's meant to discharge than to describe his job as presiding over the fount of information the government of the United States puts out for foreign consumption about the government of the United States, about its policies in all domestic and foreign and cultural matters. At its best, the agency is not a propagandist. It's a disinterested reporter about America.

A few weeks ago, it came to the notice of two reporters on the New York Times that Mr Wick had been secretly taping conversations with people, both obscure and famous, without their knowledge. The two reporters called on Mr Wick and asked him if he'd ever done such a thing. 'Good gracious, no!' They spent a couple of hours with him and he assured them, time and again, that whatever else he was guilty of, secret taping was not it.

A day or two later, the reporters confronted him with actual transcripts of his taped conversations. He spluttered a little and he broke down and said, contradicting the session of prolonged lying, that, well, yes he had recorded some calls since 1 January 1983. One of the reporters, the ever-watchful William Safire then produced records of tapings done in 1982 whereupon Mr Wick changed his admission again. He had, he recalled, done some previous taping, 'a few tapes' as he put it, for a limited time. So, Mr Safire goes back to the machine or the transcripts and finds conversations taped without the other party's knowledge as early as July 1981.

Now you'd think if you were anybody who'd been alive and sentient ten years ago and had heard of Watergate that Mr Wick, who oversees 'mould and glass of form' of the United States of America would have thrown in the sponge, especially when his agency, the USIA was compelled to deliver to congressional committees – one in the Senate, another in the House – 81 transcripts and four audio cassettes, along with a note saying that the records of other conversations had been 'discarded', was the official word.

The congressional committees are now looking into this fat file. Meanwhile, another embarrassing paper raises its ugly head. A memorandum from four top officials of the USIA dated December 17,1981 laying down the rule that all people telephoning the agency whose conversations might be taped should be so informed and their consents be recorded and transcribed. There is no evidence so far that, in spite of this proper warning, the head of the agency ever respected it. Mr Wick went on taping away for two years.

Well, did Mr Wick resign at once? No. Mr Wick says there was early confusion and faulty recollection. So did the president fire him? Mr Wick is a close friend of the president. They saw the New Year in together. The president says Charles Wick is not a dishonourable man in any way. The president says he has done a splendid job. It's an eerie statement, suggesting to some people that we are, indeed, in George Orwell's '1984'.

Mr Wick's ultimate or interim confession was, 'I did a dumb thing. What else am I to say?' Well, of course, he didn't do a dumb thing. A dumb thing is a single act done in a moment of stupidity or amnesia. He, for nearly two years, performed a tricky and deceitful course of action and when confronted with the evidence, he lied in his teeth.

But, once again, the administration protects its own. The president says he has complete confidence in Mr Wick. Perhaps Mr Reagan is privy to some secret, forgiving, knowledge that we don't have. Otherwise you might say that Mr Wick's retention of his job was a sign of the moral numbness that has been distressingly evident before in this administration.

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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