Recession may finish Carter

Where to begin? Most weeks one or two things happen and start two trains of thought and I decide to ride the train most likely to interest most people outside the United States. It's not a question of picking the most serious or dramatic of two events, two happenings, two statements.

Sometimes, as you'll have noticed, I'm shocked by some tiny happening into realising how ignorant I've been for so long about a radical American characteristic. Some of you may recall, as I shall always recall, the moment when my daughter was a tot. I was settling to my talk and I blew my nose. There was a scutter of little footsteps down the hallway. My four-year old appeared at my study door. 'What's going on?' she cried. It was the first time it struck me in 20 years that while Englishmen blow their noses, Americans wipe them. Let no foreign affairs expert or other double-dome intellect belittle this blinding insight.

Well, this has been a week in which so many things have happened, seemingly big and small, which could radically affect the way America is to move socially, economically, politically in foreign affairs that to pick out the most significant train of thought becomes a personal choice. I'll list some of these things and it may be that you'll choose your own train to ride.

In a humdrum week, any one of them would have been the compulsory topic to talk about: Marshal, President, Tito died at last, and the papers and the airwaves were dense with discussions of whether the great range of Yugoslavia's ethnic and language divisions could be held by a collective presidency or whether the Soviet Union would begin, first by infiltration, to try to retrieve Yugoslavia as a Russian satellite.

Into Key West, Florida, first the inhabitants of that southernmost town were alarmed and then the navy and then the coastguard and then the State Department and then the White House at an invasion of Cuban refugees to the extent of over 16,000 in two weeks, which forced the newcomers to be corralled, if they were lucky, in tent cities, in schoolrooms. If they were unlucky, on open ground without political status, without any visible place to go; without, in some places, ordinary sanitation.

There were four more presidential primaries and they left Mr Carter and Mr Reagan so close to the necessary majorities they need to get for the presidential nomination of their parties that the coming conventions began to look not like the battlefronts or chessboards they were meant to be, but more like coronation ceremonies and this at a time when less than one American in three wants Mr Carter back in the White House and some fewer than that want Mr Reagan to enter it.

Mr Cy Vance, having given his all for President Carter, including the unpleasant task of lying to America's allies about economic sanctions against Iran as a sure guarantee that no military exploit of any sort would be attempted, Mr Vance couldn't bear the rub of his conscience and resigned as Secretary of State, to be followed by a man who had nudged the White House a long time ago with the suggestion that any time Mr Vance chose to leave the State Department, he would like to move in – Senator Edmund Muskie of the rock-bound, tight-lipped state of Maine. He's surely worth a profile but we shall have to wait and see if his convictions coincide with his loyalty to Mr Carter and the Democratic party. For the moment, he's treading water.

From London came the crackling news of the brilliant manoeuvre of the Special Air Services regiment in rescuing the Iranian hostages, an exploit that would certainly receive a ringing tribute from John Wayne, if he were alive and one that invites, is inviting, all sorts of odious comparisons with the American fiasco in the desert, comparisons which, the more you think about them, are irrelevant and even absurd, but the ironic twist which made Americans wince was the prompt act of the Iranian government in congratulating the British government for rescuing hostages illegally held, quote, 'against all the tenets of international law' – a phrase we seem to have been hearing from Mr Carter since the beginning of November.

In the meantime, both the Congress and the Pentagon have started their own separate investigations into what went wrong in the Iranian desert. Hundreds of thousands of words of testimony will be given to the congressional committee that's looking into it and, in the end, they will be printed in fat booklets and I doubt we shall be any the wiser.

Yet, with all these things happening or impending, most Americans believe that there are two things which will most seriously affect their welfare this year and the outcome of the presidential election. Those two things are linked in gloom. The unchecked inflation and, suddenly, the beginning of the long lines of unemployed. The sure sign that the recession we've talked about, hinted at, denied, is really here. Six months ago, economists and financial men told the president that his policy of raising interest rates would surely end in a recession, perhaps a deep one and Mr Carter replied, with characteristic calm that the policy would, in the long run, defeat inflation but in the short run, he granted, produce a recession; one, however, that would be, he said, mild and brief.

Well, now that the banks have started lowering their interest rates by as much as a full point from a month ago, President Carter has a smile on his face and is saying that inflation will pause and wilt this summer and give us a clear sign that the United States has 'turned the corner'. That was his actual phrase and it sends little shivers down the spine of Americans old enough to recall the same phrase and similar ones used by President Hoover only weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

You may well wonder why it is that President Carter, when exposed to the referendum of Democratic voters in state after state, goes on serenely winning majorities, piling up a number of delegates pledged to vote for him come the Democratic convention here this summer. As an old student and reporter of nominating conventions, I tried to explain some time ago how the new emphasis, especially of the media, on the primaries has spread the popular belief that they, alone, will decide the nominees before the conventions assemble.

The old days are plainly gone for ever when, in spite of primary victories and defeats and surprises, the main battle was joined on the convention floor. So that as the last, most dramatic, example, the Republicans could gather in Philadelphia in 1940, more or less convinced that the fight would be between the two giants of the primaries, one Governor Dewey of New York and one Senator Taft of Ohio, but a man who had never entered a primary, a man who had never voted Republican, of all political innocence, a Wall Street lawyer, had caught the ear, not even the eye, of the people on a popular, though rather highbrow radio quiz show. Now, surely, there were politically minded men, though political amateurs, who saw in Wendell Willkie the prospect of a new policy, a new man and began to muster a new force. They were pooh-poohed and on the first two ballots in Philadelphia, the armies of Dewey and Taft moved confidently into battle.

They ended in a collision and on the fifth ballot, there occurred what, to me, has remained the single, most thrilling moment in my experience of radio or what the BBC used to call 'outside broadcasts'. To the astonishment of the Dewey and Taft armies, neither of them could establish a majority at the end of the fourth ballot and Wendell Willkie, the shambling bear of a man from Indiana whom the Democrats derided as 'the poor, barefoot boy from Wall Street' was moving up in the voting.

In the middle of the fifth ballot, Kansas was called on for its vote. The leader, the chairman of the Kansas delegation was former Governor Alfred Landon and he, obviously, carried great weight in the convention for he'd been the Republican presidential candidate four years before. When Kansas was called twice, there was a large rustling sound over the radio. The chairman of the convention said, in an aside, 'What was that?' and then cried out, 'The chairman of the Kansas delegation wishes to make a statement. He will please come to the rostrum.' Through a rising wave of mixed cheers and mutterings, the file of microphones in the aisles picked up the footsteps of the Kansas chairman as he walked to the rostrum.

Alfred Landon, it seemed, had bought himself a pair of new shoes. As he walked, with a light and measured tread down the aisle, his shoes gave off to the listening nation a 'squeak, squeak, squeak', all the way to the rostrum. It was a touch worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.

There was a great receding wave of cheers and then silence. In his thin, high-pitched Midwestern voice, Landon announced, 'The great state of Kansas gives all its votes to the next President of the United States, Wendell Willkie.' After that, the roof fell in and, with it, the candidacies of Taft and Dewey.

Could anything like that happen again even in the day of the arithmetical procession of the primaries? Well, the pundits and the politicians say, 'Absolutely not! It's all over,' they say, 'bar the coronation of Carter and Reagan.' I still wonder whether a gathering recession, the Iranian debacle and the possibility of more tumbles in the reputation of Mr Carter may not produce another unpredictable precedent. Certainly, something happened this week which could produce a chaotic split on the floor of the Democratic convention.

Governor Hugh Carey of New York – who owns, so to speak, the New York Democratic delegation, though he's chosen not to be an actual delegate – Governor Carey deserted President Carter. Under his leadership, the governor said, the nation is in trouble and he asked both the president and Senator Kennedy to release all their delegates from their pledged allegiance to one or the other and hold a totally open convention.

The national chairman of the Democrats was quick to wring his hands and predict that if the delegates were free to think again on the convention floor, they could stage an unholy battle and, in the end, throw New York State and the election to Ronald Reagan. It's nothing but the truth.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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