Bill Clinton's Presidential Honeymoon - 2 April 1993

A quick trip to England's green and not so cheerful land produced for me three surprises, perhaps they wouldn't have been so startling if they'd crept up on me gradually, but for various personal reasons now happily overcome. We hadn't been to Britain since Christmas time 1991 Ð of course I've not stopped reading British papers, books and other publications, but, as my old editor Alfred Wadsworth used to say, "a week of the flesh is worth a year of newsprint".

The first shock, the unexpected pain that will afflict American tourists this summer is the price of things. Now this is not quite the same as the exchange rate, which as I talk is about 50¢ to the pound, but in the purchase of things from a watch strap to a bottle of Scotland's barlienus vulgaris - that is the generic name, honest - and I'm not going to sully a lifetime's integrity by telling you a brand name. I was saying, the exchange rate is deceptive to an American buying anything, it's not what he stopped to calculate. We're back in the situation of exactly 20 years ago, when a very simple equation prevailed; everything in England was twice the American price on paper. If a shirt cost $20 in New York, it would be £20 in England it's exactly so today, the wine of Scotland is $12.95 a bottle round my corner on Madison Avenue,12.95. In London, I shelled out exactly £12.95p.

By the time on Friday, I flew back to New York, I'd come to wonder how anybody in Britain lives comfortably on less than £60,000 a year. A good friend said "we don't, we live frugally". In the London street where we lived on the first morning, I ambled off to talk to shopkeepers I know, it's always a pleasant reintroduction to the real life of any town and was dismayed to find that half of them had gone out of business. I think the most dramatic, the bleakest sign of the recession was an empty window down the street, it was a poulterer, they'd always had in this window stuffed models of the birds and about four months from now they would have had the real thing, the partridges, pheasants, woodcock, widgeon, tule, dual, duke and the rest hanging there in rhythmical rows like an illustration from Dickens. Today, the window is dark and empty. On the top of it are two lines of print in faded gold, John Byrn Poulterer established 1720. After 273 years he's gone bust.

The surprise about the recession did not dim with familiarity, only on the last day did the good word come from the governor of the Bank of England that the recession had probably bottomed out and hearing this, I couldn't help thinking back with a with a twisted smile to the same news coming from Mr Bush's secretary of the treasury in August of last year mentioned very gingerly because the Bush administration had made a point in the campaign of soldiering on in the pretence that the recession had never happened. Well, the fact was the American recession began to expire earlier than last summer. Mr Bush was right, but nobody believed him and it became pretty clear to everybody by the time Governor Clinton had moved his belongings into the White House, so Bush in the White House equals recession. Clinton in the White House, recovery. There go, Clinton did it, hooray for Bill. This of course is logical nonsense, but the mood of it still pervades the country and with visible signs of companies especially small businesses taking on employees, people naturally back Clinton in larger numbers than they did in the election.

Somebody in London asked me if the Clinton honeymoon was still on? A tricky question, honeymoons as I recall started right after the wedding, Flitterwochen is what the Germans call "butterfly week". Clinton's first week could have been called mosquito week, a nasty experience twice stung. First he puts up for attorney general a very able and I must say very beautiful lady and sees her quickly shunted back to her corporation law firm on account of employing not, as a London paper wrote last week, employing cheap labour. On the contrary, the immigrant couple in Zo‘ Baird's household were very handsomely paid, but they didn't have any immigration papers. Ouch, so after that what is the first policy issue President Clinton decides to take up? Homosexuals of both sexes must be openly admitted as equals into the armed forces, shock and dismay at the Pentagon where General Powell is known to be dead against it and in the armed services committee of the Senate whose Chairman, the Democrat's Senator Sam Nunn is equally opposed. The mistake was raising this issue first an awfully dumb start to an administration. And commentators began to say, "we're in for a presidency of bumbles and boo-boos by novices", however that passed.

The president quickly got out his economic bill violating his campaign promise to save a dollar spent for every tax dollar, the ratio in his bill came out more like $2 to be spent for every dollar raised in taxes. No matter, the House whipped the bill through, it was doubtful it would ever pass the Senate. Wrong, barely amended it swept through the Senate even old staunch Republicans began to ask in a manner of speaking "what food doth this Caesar eat that he grow so fat", so the answer to the lady's question is the Clinton honeymoon still on is, yes, indeed it has only just started.

The second shock came when I read a piece from a rather distinguished English critic-biographer who's not generally thought off as a lover of America, she wrote that she'd noticed during the past few weeks among her friends and acquaintances and ordinary people casually met, she'd noticed a new feeling about America, a feeling of envy. What is new about that?

Well, I must say that not since Roosevelt, no perhaps not since Kennedy has there been a wave of genuine good feeling, admiration even, flowing from east to west, but now a serious British critic looks across the Atlantic at President Clinton talking to scholars, politicians, plumbers, kids in small studio audiences all over the country. Clinton saying what he thinks and feels about everything from the Middle East and Bosnia to training the unemployed, what to do with the rotting inner cities, tax breaks for small business, tax wallops on the sick who are also rich and old; young Hillary Clinton at his side or off in a big room listening to everybody and his doctor's aunt, chemist and dietician telling her what to do about sickness insurance. I wished we'd stopped calling it health insurance; nobody puts out money for health.

Anyway, this bright and rather severe British lady looks across the Atlantic gets the feel of things, senses the vibrations of a government on the move, whether it's forward or backwards doesn't at this point matter. And we may be mad but it's true that I dare to say most Americans are feeling it, I'd define it as no more but no less than the notion of something we've seem to lack certainly since the arrival in the White House of Ronald Reagan, the stride of leadership. Better not go on, as Harold Wilson said in politics a week is a year - and a year, a month from now, we may be along with the voters in Germany, France, Italy and Britain in the dumps looking round with little hope to find that very rare bird a genuine leader.

In the meantime, I hope you'll forgive Americans for basking however briefly in the rare sunshine of approval, envy indeed, from the more quirky and often superior Brits. By the way, best cure for superiority feeling on either side of the water is the incomparable Jane Walmsley's book with alas the clumsy title Brit-think, Ameri- that means Yank-Think, Ameri-Think.

The third shock is contained in two confessionals I read in England, one from the novelist Anthony Burgess, the other from an old and for long-incorrigible beatnik Jay Landesman. These confessionals were prompted by another round of an old and never-resolved public debate, which has been going on for at least 40 years: does violence on the screen, the cinema, television encourage violence in real life or has it nothing to do with it?

Well, for 20 years or more, the fashionable wisdom came from innumerable testifying psychiatrists to the effect that the impulse to violence lay in the individual and could not be stirred by violent movies. On the contrary, they said the watching of blood and lust acted out and served rather as a purge of emotions that otherwise might be expressed in life. The first jolt I had to this advanced theory was when a woman friend of mine in San Francisco was raped, then tied up and made to watch the rape of her 15-year-old daughter by a trio of very oddly dressed rather bland courtly men. She asked them at one point, what they thought they were doing? One quietly sneered: did you never see Clockwork Orange?

Well this week Mr Burgess the author of that vivid work has recanted saying anyway that his book never taught violence but did teach new styles in violence and he's truly sorry. As for the old beatnik Landsman, he deplores the young who are imitating repeating his socially destructive and self destructive way of life of 30, 40 years ago. Now he said the other day, I do have regrets all that business that we started in the '50s knocking the traditional values, knocking patriotism, family, homes, schools was a terrible mistake and sometimes I feel mea culpa. We were the people who started it all undermining the values of American society in the name of self-expression and freedom, unquote. I like to think without much hope that these penitential statements will give thoughtful pause to all those liberated types who bawl censorship at the suggestion of banning anywhere any human expression or act however vile or degrading.

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