Fishing for votes

Looking at the calendar, as I'm just doing, it struck me, as it cannot fail to strike anybody who was present, though the present company is beginning to shrink alarmingly, that tomorrow, or yesterday according to when you're hearing my voice is the 70th anniversary of what the historian Barbara Tuchman poetically called, 'The Guns of August', the outbreak, for Great Britain, of the war that was known throughout the 1920s and Thirties as the Great War and, subsequently, when we sadly came to see that it was only the first of its kind, the First World War.

Now I notice, have noticed for many years, it's known to younger generations as the '14-'18 War. I don't suppose anybody in Paris or Vienna or Berlin or London tolled a bell or fired a cannon or otherwise gave formal recognition to that day which, I regret to say, at the time, was a day of something like national ecstasy, when patriotic poor men responded with a shrug of the shoulders but, also, with the new feeling that they amounted to something in the world. And when patriotic upper-crust young men thought of themselves as about to take off on a splendid adventure, enjoying some of the exhilaration, as Rupert Brooke put it, 'of swimmers into cleanness leaping'.

Well, this daze of euphoria lasted, I should guess, not much longer than a summer and a winter, after which the men on the Western Front began to recognise, and to recoil from the thought, that they were involved in an enormous and timeless slaughter. Only at the end of it, on 11 November 1918, did every combatant nation rouse itself with gratitude in realising that it had not been Armageddon after all and, for the next 10, 20 years anyway, in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, a score of other countries, certainly in the United States, every year at eleven in the morning of 11 November, every busy form of life stopped its motion – trains, buses, cars. Even people stood on the streets and there was this, in big cities especially, this eerie low throbbing silence for just two minutes and then the roar of the cities started up again.

Of course, the coming of what came to be called the Second World War put an end to that and, so far as I know, there is no similar pause of commemoration every year on May 7, the end of the war in Europe or on 14 August, the day the Japanese surrendered. It's probably a good thing that we don't do this, though for irreligious people the two-minute silence on 11 November, the sense of a whole civilisation standing still for two minutes in remembrance was the closest they would ever come to a religious experience.

Maybe this anniversary mania is a generation thing. I notice among my young friends that the sky does not fall when they forget their wedding anniversaries, though the old folks, like me, whether rich or poor, anticipate the event like youngsters awaiting the coming to town of the circus.

Newspapers, especially newspapers that pride themselves in dabbling in scholarship, have always been, or perhaps used to be, alert to historical anniversaries. It was a way of filling up the leader page ahead of time. My own paper, the sainted Guardian – in those days it guarded the conscience and the mind of Manchester only – was specially proud of relating what we used to call 'the march of events' to the long tramp of history.

Well, do I remember in the summer of 1948, when I was off covering Harry Truman on his, as it seemed then, futile whistle-stops, I was bursting with memorable prose and warned my editor from an hilarious stop in California that I had something precious and funny to cable, say, tomorrow. Truman was one of those, one of THE, last presidents who talked simple, gamy, American English and after a campaign appearance in San Francisco, his aides announced that he was whipping over next day to the University of California at Berkeley. We asked the president why and, quick as a rollicking gold rusher, he replied, 'I'm going down to Berkeley fer to get me a degree'.

The rhythm of the phrase struck an immediate chord of memory and when we got over there and stood watching him in the shadow of the campanile, the entire press corps burst in unison, to the tune of 'Oh Susannah', 'Oh I'm going down to Berkeley fer to get me a degree...' Of course, there was more substantial and exciting stuff to report about Mr Truman's frisky, although it then appeared hopeless, campaign for re-election and I knew that Europe was boiling with hot news – the Berlin blockade for one thing – and the prospect of an actual military showdown with the Russians.

Still, America was my beat and my editor, little old Wadsworth, had always been indulgent to an off-beat story from this side. However, he sent back a cable saying that my proposed piece would have to wait and might have to be killed 'because', he cabled, 'we have a national scoop for tomorrow's paper'. He was right. Next morning the Guardian beat the entire British, and possibly the world press with a four-column leader page feature celebrating the 1100th anniversary of the birth of Alfred the Great.

There is, I'm sorry to say, nothing in this year's presidential campaign to match the fun and games and sass of Harry Truman on the stump. In theory, the campaign ought to be at a blessed standstill. In the sweaty dog days, we are usually delighted to report that the newly crowned candidates – this year Mondale and Ferraro – as well as the incumbent monarch, King Reagan, are resting, picnicking, traditionally fishing, but what's happened is this. Television.

Before television, newspapers reporters assigned to the campaigns filed small, inconsequential stories from the candidate's home ground, Wounded Knee or Bent Fork, Nebraska or wherever in the candidate's native state he could best pretend to be just folks. But this is not enough for television. It has to have a bright or tantalising or vivid story, preferably accompanied by a fire or a train wreck, every day and this insatiable desire for news that you can see in living colour actually forces the candidates not to seem to be resting or dawdling.

So, in fact, Mr Mondale and Mrs Ferraro have been off repairing fences, as they say – in their case building fences – in states where they fear the worst, especially in the South and in the state of Texas which, both Democrats and Republicans predict, is going to be practically essential for the Democrats to capture if they are to run up those 270 electoral votes in November.

But there was one great story in the old tradition which veteran presidential watchers, and even the brash television boys and girls, leapt on with joy. It came, according to the old tradition, out of Gunflint Lake in Mr Mondale's native Minnesota, which is proudly known among Minnesotans as the land of a thousand lakes and, indeed, the count is not too grandiose. It is quite a lake district.

Now Mr Mondale, as I mentioned last time, did what all candidate who've just been nominated at their convention do. He went fishing. At this point, I will take up the account of an old friend and, by now, almost an elder presidential reporter, Mr Tom Wicker of the New York Times. Mr Wicker is a Southerner who first covered Kennedy as president and has since become one of the most astute and eloquent of Washington commentators.

The other day he pounced on the story out of Gunflint Lake like the prodigal hotfooting it home. For, though Mr Wicker is normally a serious, even ominous, commentator, he's also a Southern boy, as thoroughly at home with Southern habits and customs as Huck Finn. Among those habits and customs you can confidently include hunting – which means shooting and positively does not mean prancing in a pink coat on a horse – and trapping and absorbing in your bloodstream when young the knowledge of every animal that runs and lurks and every fish that swims.

I noticed early in my days in Washington that Southern senators were unique in practising a juicy form of rhetoric that combined the rhythms and eloquence of the Bible with an acute knowledge of animal biology.

Well, Mr Wicker noted that Mr Mondale's behaviour as a fisherman was marked by great guile. Mr Mondale confessed, nay he announced, that he had gone two whole days without a bite before he landed a fish. This endeared him at once, Mr Wicker remarked, to millions of Americans – and there are 25 million fishing licences issued every year. To the millions who don't want to be insulted by a man who goes out and in the first hour reels in a whopper, Mr Wicker thought Mr Mondale had gone to school, as the saying goes, on President Eisenhower who knew how many hack golfers there are in this country; the week didn't pass that Ike wasn't pictured duffing one into a bunker.

In other words, Mr Mondale was busy and successfully proving himself to be one of the people. The touch of genius in his performance was that he put himself with the very great majority in using spinning gear. Not the gear of experts, the aristocracy of the dry-fly man or even just below them, the wet-fly men, but the great common people of whom, as Lincoln said, God made so many, who use spinning gear just above the great unwashed who use live bait.

The moral of the fable is simple. Eisenhower, the self-advertised duffer, was elected twice. The only absolutely expert fisherman among the American presidents was Herbert Hoover and he it was who laid down the descending order of fishing expertise from dry fly to the contemptible big fisherman, and, as Mr Wicker sagely enquires, how many terms did Hoover win?

Well, he was obliterated by Roosevelt, a wet fisherman who actually went after, as one newspaper man wrote, 'fish the size of cows with bait the size of billy goats'. Where does this leave Ronald Reagan?

In peril, I suggest. He does not fish, he does not shoot. He rides, not like a poor Southern boy on a bony mule, but on a gleaming thoroughbred. He wears a sharp-cut hacking jacket and cavalry breeches and, no doubt, Gucci boots, just like those new, rich movie-star agents in Beverly Hills.

This could cost him the election.

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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