Presidential memory loss

One of my favourite writers, Calvin Trillin, has a character called Harold the Committed who may or may not be a real person, since Trillin says he's giving up writing satire because the news itself, these days, gets ahead of a satirist.

Anyway, Harold is, was, an assistant editor on the weekly journal for which Trillin wrote what most people regarded as a humorous column, but which Trillin insists is fearless commentary on our life and times written with malice towards practically everybody, especially to anybody in the White House.

This editor used to wriggle and fuss when he read Trillin's copy because Harold was a very serious, political observer, a type that is rife in all political weeklies throughout what we call the free world. Harold got annoyed when he proofread Trillins's stuff because it was, by his lights, too flippant, too ready to believe frivolous rumours about great events.

As when a deadpan Trillin revealed the real reason why Mr Reagan's first secretary of state, Mr Haig, was fired, Trillin wrote that it had nothing to do with disagreements about foreign policy. It came about when the Belgian royal family visited Washington – an extremely successful visit to the White House marred by an unfortunate remark by the then-Secretary Haig.

The Belgian embassy, according to Trillin, put out a stern statement to correct the impression Secretary Haig might have given that he was in the line of succession to the Belgian throne. The State Department had to admit that one phrase Mr Haig uttered seemed particularly offensive to the Belgians. It seems that on greeting the King of the Belgians, Mr Haig said, 'I happen to be a Hapsburg on my mother's side, so la-de-da!' The State Department said the phrase was taken out of context.

Harold, the serious editor, was probably the only person on the staff, or for that matter among the readers, who didn't know how to take this. Everything he read by way of political reporting or commentary was true. The question was, was it worthy of a serious weekly magazine? In other words, he was looking for commitment, as television documentary directors in the early 1970s were always looking for commitment.

You'd be telling the story, say, of how Congress passed a law in the 1860s giving immigrant farmers 160 acres of land free if they could produce a good crop within five years – that's a fact, by the way. They were named homesteaders after the act that created them and then how somebody invented barbed wire which helped the homesteaders to fence in their property, and how the cowboys in the south-west, driving their yearling calves north to the feed lots in the Midwest would come on these fenced-in lands and have to divert the herds. Finally, how the cowboys, who were in large measure nothing but land pirates just hacked the fences to bits and rode roughshod through the homesteaders' holdings. And, in one ghastly episode in Wyoming, massacred most of a homestead village.

You'd get through filming and telling this chilling episode and the director would tend to say, 'Yes, but you must commit yourself to a position. You must make a statement.' The only statement I could think of at that point was, well, the cowboys done wrong. It was inadequate as the comment of a committed writer so we let it go.

Well, Harold was like that and he kept asking Trillin, where is your commitment? Do you believe that in the nuclear age we may well see the end of civilisation as we know it? Or do you not? Well, yes, Trillin would say, but not this weekend.

Trillin came to give Harold a nickname which I'm often tempted to apply to one or two men I know who edit what an old American newspaperman called 'double-dome weeklies'. Trillin called him Harold the Committed. I thought of him during the bustle and the traffic jams and the blazing lights of the department stores and the sidewalk Santa Clauses with their runny noses and tin cups and people waving and stopping and wishing each other all good things. And I decided that this is no time to go on bashing President Reagan. Even Harold the Committed, I feel might choose to take a rest from topic A, even if he wouldn't stoop to wear a funny hat.

But I can't do it. I have to fill you in with the good news that after the reams of rumour, speculation and, let's face it, dismaying facts, at last the Congress and the Department of Justice have agreed on a final, new procedure. Remember, Congress has gone home, or rather the 99th Congress is dead. The new one, elected in November, finds the Democrats in a majority and, therefore, in control of the Senate, as well as the House. Which means the chairmen of the vital committees will be Democrats.

I think I mentioned that nine committees, for instance, banking, armed services, foreign relations, have a legitimate interest in the Iranian-Contra horror, but two special select committees, one from each House, have been set up to take care of the congressional investigations and they will begin in January. Also, finally, to everybody's relief, there has been appointed a special prosecutor, as was done in the Watergate case. His name is Lawrence Walsh and we shall hear much of him in the months, I fear, to come. He's a former federal judge and a former president of the American Bar Association.

Everybody – the president, both parties, the justice department, the media – seems to be agreed that it would be next to impossible to find a more disinterested judge. I say we may hear about him and from him for months because, first, his own staff of investigators will have to be screened and cleared for security by the FBI, then they will have to go through all the testimony presented to the two intelligence committees, one in the House, the other in the Senate, that have just wound up their preliminary investigations.

Then they will have to go off tracking down clues to the original sale of arms to Iran, who ordered what and when, then the increasingly sinister business of the transfer of funds to the Contras, who got what, and the whole maze of the Swiss bank accounts, the actions of the National Security Council, the minutes of a commission already investigating where and how the council exceeded its function or illegally hid its actions, and so on and so forth.

It could take the special prosecutor from now until I'd guess at the earliest, the late spring, to get through. Anyway, from now on, it's up to the two select committees of Congress and the special prosecutor. The one institution that is not going to suspend its enquiries is the Fourth Estate – the press, the media. Whatever you hear until the select committees meet is what you hear from the press. It will be confirmed or disproved by the committees or the prosecutor.

We can leave it there, I hope, except for one, quite new, bizarre note struck by several doctors. One, in particular, wrote to James Reston, the veteran political commentator of the New York Times. He, the doctor, suggested that perhaps, after all, nobody was lying, by which he means that quite possibly the president did give permission to Admiral Poindexter and Colonel North to get money from the arms sale to the Contras and perhaps, in the first place, he did hear from his chief of staff, Donald Regan, about the sale of arms. Simply, maybe, he honestly doesn't remember.

When he says, the doctor wrote, that Israel did not send arms and that he never condoned such a thing, he's telling the truth as he remembers it. In the elderly, recent memory begins to fail. His staff may brief him immediately before a press conference but in a few minutes, he could honestly forget almost everything that had been prepared. This doctor is 74. Mr Reagan will be 76 in February. And he added, 'At my age, I can go into the next room to get something, only to find when I get there, that I have forgotten my original purpose.'

That letter adds a new poignancy to the last, reported sentence Mr Reagan has said about the affair. Senator Dole, the Republican leader in the Senate, came from seeing the president the other day and quoted him as saying, 'People like me but they don't believe me. Where we go from there, I don't know.' If true, it would confirm the practically universal belief that whatever else you may think about the president, he's so generally liked because he appears to be a decent, honest, rather simple man, closer to what millions of Americans take themselves to be than perhaps any president in memory.

It also could explain, Reston thinks, the president's unpreparedness at Reykjavik and his later conviction that he'd never offered what Mr Gorbachev and many of the people on both sides said he'd offered, namely an end to all ballistic missiles. Reston puts it this way, 'The unpreparedness was clearly not a calculation the president had in mind in advance. It astonished both his supporters and his adversaries. The problem in all these things is that he had nothing in mind but improvised along the way.'

Well, if that memory loss is there and got worse, that would bring up the disability clause of the constitution, by which a president can be gently and honourably removed from office. There were times, by the way, towards the end of the last ministry of Winston Churchill, when such a drastic decline could have been proved, but so far as I know, there's no disability clause in the unwritten British constitution. No doubt, I'm wrong; I await the scolding letters.

Still, we're certainly not going to go into that. Let me end on a puzzling, but timely note. I saw the other evening an episode of the television adaptation of J. B. Priestley's 'Lost Empires', about a touring music hall company celebrating Christmas 1913. J. B. Priestley didn't say it in his novel, but the young adapter had everybody wish everybody, 'A Happy Christmas'.

I dare to say that nobody in England said 'Happy Christmas' in 1913 or 1923 or '33 or '43 or maybe '53. I wish Fritz Spiegl or Kingsley Amis or some other linguistic watchdog would tell me when the change came in.

In the meantime, let me offer you, if a little late, the greeting that is still universal and unchanged in America, 'A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!'.

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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