Bill Clinton's first cabinet and multiculturalism - 8 January 1993

Every decade, I suppose, throws up at least one favourite buzzword. In the '60s, the hippies rationalised their various forms of self-delusion, from drugs to yoga, as consciousness raising. And for several years during the 1980s athletes who had hit their top form and once would have been said to be hot were now said to be in the zone.

One dreadful cliché that has not been shed after 20 years at least is a favourite of critics, of especially theatre and movie critics, a word of praise for a heroine who is gentle or slightly startled or plainly going to be the victim of some snaky male, she used to be called "sensitive". And in New York, actresses who presented a shining performance of this sort were praised as being "incandescent", really I don't think incandescence, apart from the bulb, every got to England.

What I have in mind is a word that you'll find anytime in every serious American newspaper or magazine review, it's used more often than not of an actress and is evidently intended as a tender compliment, she is said to be vulnerable, they never say vulnerable to whom? Saddam Hussein, Dracula or to, what, ice skating, the Asian flu?

Well in politics, a buzzword can be treacherous, especially if it has at the beginning an heroic sound, the New Deal, the new frontier can be turned against your failures. Mr Clinton wasn't exactly coining anything treacherous or even memorable when during the Democratic convention, he announced a deal with the American people, which he called a new covenant. That's a very high-priced word to sell to 250 million people and it has the main disadvantage in a country with no state religion of heavy religious overtones. Remember, the the Ark of the Covenant, the compact between God and the Israelites.

Well, need I say whoever coined the word for the governor had better forget it, it died on his lips and has never been quoted since. But in the past month or so, President Elect Clinton has come to be dogged by a word, which he tossed out felicitously at a rally somewhere, I think it was after he'd been elected, and he was being asked about the likely composition of his cabinet. In a happy moment, he said it will look like America and went on to say he would seek – in his cabinet and beyond his cabinet throughout his appointments – diversity, it's a new neater more compact word than the one that politicians have been mouthing for a decade or more, "multiculturalism". This sounds open, above board and progressive.

The trouble started the moment he began to compose his cabinet and pick two or three men, late middle-aged verging on venerable, who had served in Jimmy Carter's Administration and were generally known as Carter liberal'. These first appointees were men and they were white, which was immediately noticed by the large class of Democrats' old friends, campaign advisors, campaign contributors and lobbyists, other groups who once the election is decided and their man gets in, immediately and impatiently expect a reward an under-secretaryship, an ambassadorship, top job at the United Nations and so on. So in view of his early choices, the hands were up and waving, "Please teacher, what about us, the blacks, the Hispanics, the women, the black women, the Hispanic women, the lovers of Israel?"

I remember the press conference at which these eager people offered to serve or you could say threatened the president elect, dared him to ignore them. It was a tough moment and Mr Clinton seemed to swerve round it beautifully by saying he was not going to put together an administration on a quota system, a system that has cursed some forms of welfare and of promotion in employment – 11% of the American population is black, therefore, there should be 11% blacks in every factory, office, school staff and so on. Clinton was applauded for taking an instant stand against quotas. But then what happened? The women, women's groups were the first to protest.

Mr Clinton had a former governor, a Southern friend and something of an expert on energy and he was more or less certain to be named energy secretary, but after the women piped up "how about us?", Mr Clinton ditched his old friend and appointed a woman, a Northerner, a utilities executive. He made another woman head of his Council of Economic Advisers. Now the blacks complained.

Vernon Jordan, an old experienced black leader had been co-chairman of the Clinton transition team, but evidently was not going on from there, so Mr Clinton appointed a pension expert, a black man Mr Wharton to be the American Ambassador to the United Nations and he promised to raise that job to a cabinet post. Then more women protested about being left out of top jobs, so Mr Wharton was switched over to the State Department as Number Two to the new secretary, a 70-year-old Carter veteran – and one Madeline Albright has gone to the UN. There'll also be a woman attorney general.

How about the Hispanics? Mr Clinton got high marks at once for appointing the very able former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, Mr Henry Cisneros to the vital post of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and I say vital deliberately, because unless President Clinton develops a policy and a programme for cleaning up and reviving the rotting inner cities and the policy is seen to be working, there will be more Los Angeles riots in more cities, more of the fire next time.

Now that Mr Clinton's cabinet is complete, it is seen to be in fact diverse, but it's also seen by some mean people as a cabinet dictated by the quotas Mr Clinton swore to shun. There's a singular absence of Clinton's own genetic type, young white males; they are, however, to be found among his old and new buddies and a careful pick of them may expect to become a group without which no president can function, the so called "kitchen cabinet", always a tight group of old pals, cronies, college friends, aides during his governor days so on – every president has a kitchen cabinet. And paradoxically it is more important, has its hands on the governor's of power far more than the cabinet.

Read the memoirs on the short Kennedy administration and you would be surprised how little mention is made of cabinet officers, it's not really a cabinet system – the people who make the decisions on the spot are the men who work 18 hours a day in the White House who see all – of Ted Sorensen, Dave Powers, Kenny O'Donnell, Larry O'Brien, no wonder it was called the Irish Mafia.

Clinton will have his own kitchen cabinet and it's ironical that all the newspaper and television pieces are about the formal big-shot cabinet appointees who once chosen will retire into their departments and leave the running of things to the Little Rock mafia.

There remains with the diversity promise what one sharp reporter has called a trap with the next raft of appointments below cabinet level, the under-secretaries, the special envoys, the men and women at the various state department desks. These are the people who as a group must maintain a high disinterested level of performance, it's impossible to be too bright, too qualified for these jobs. And here there's a great temptation to throw a bag of bones to the competing ethnic and liberated groups – the women, blacks, Hispanics – who want more big jobs, whether or not they are truly qualified. The trap here is that if Mr Clinton goes ahead indulging more of the quotas he rejects, he'll find it hard then to sack these people. It's getting harder in America whether you're a small businessman or president of the United States to fire a black or a woman of any colour unless you are prepared to line up a battery of lawyers with incontrovertible proof of incompetence.

So these are the anxieties prevailing or should we say seeping through Washington two weeks before the big party, the vast joyful ceremony of the inauguration of a president, which too has promised this time will be notable for that very diversity Governor Clinton has boasted about, which means among other things that certainly for the first time in American history there will be a marching delegation of gays and lesbians. Do you suspect this show of diversity is being overdone?

Well, remember my note about that hospital I visited where I guessed that 80% of the staff were born abroad, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Barbados, Singapore, the Philippines and had English as a second language, I was way off the truth. I have discovered since that one of the plagues to New York's healthcare system is patients who can't speak any language known to the doctors or nurses.

In this city now, both public and private hospitals are subscribing to an electronic network that provides translators in 140 languages in desperation at the polyglot diversity of all these waiting patients. Some hospitals are introducing what are known as flash cards offering translations into English of the commonest 20 cries of help from suffering Hispanics. Several hospitals have started courses of compulsory intensive training in Spanish for all incoming young medical residents. Certainly the day's long gone when any nurse anywhere in this city can expect to do her job in English alone. It strikes me that a march past of those 140 interpreters waving banners with a logo of their languages would add to the inauguration parade a vivid not to say frightening demonstration of just how diverse American diversity has become.

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