In the money

I thought it would be a good idea and a sensible exercise in restraint not to report, just now, the scene that's being played out under – as television commentators like to intone – the eyes of the nation.

Unless most daily work is to stop in this nation, the great majority of Americans will not yet rivet themselves to the box to watch for five hours, five days a week, for the next four months, the huge American drama which, if Anthony Trollope had written it, might have been called, 'What the President Knew'.

Finally, after months of burrowing work into thousands of documents and the questioning in private of 200 or so witnesses, the Senate and House select committees began on Tuesday their joint investigation of what has been called many things, but which, in the end, has settled down in print as the Iran-Contra affair. Breathed there a man or woman with curiosity so dead that he/she does not know that during a two-year period when Congress had passed laws prohibiting either direct or indirect military aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras, there's already a wealth of evidence that some people high up in the White House, the executive branch of government, did provide such arms with monies acquired from selling arms to Iran, which in itself is an alarming contradiction of America's declared policy towards Iran.

We shall say no more about it, but next week, perhaps, I ought to say precisely how congressional investigations come about, who sets them up, what authority they have and, in particular, what are the terms of reference of this joint investigating committee which is bipartisan, with 11 members from the Senate and 15 from the House.

In the meantime, among the things I never knew till now is, to me, the amazing fact that the lineage of all the thoroughbreds in the world – we're talking about horses – can be traced back to only three stallions in the late 1600s and early 1700s. And their names, if you're interested, were Darley Arabian, Godolphin Barb and Byerley Turk. It may be that to horse fanciers these names are as familiar as Jones, Hogan and Nicklaus are to fanciers of two-legged athletes.

I bring it up because after watching the Kentucky Derby – Der-Bee, please – last Saturday, and seeing the winner being buffeted two or three times almost out of the ring, I wondered why one sharp sports writer should say that the race was 'inevitably' extremely slow for a horse race, if reasonably brief for a prize fight. Why inevitably? Well, having checked, like all good reporters, by long-distance phone with my horsey expert, I learned that the slowness is a direct function of those three exclusive stallions long ago.

In other words, the genetic pool is now so small that there's little room for improvement. I read over the phone to my expert a crisp analysis of what's wrong with thoroughbreds today, written by San Francisco's best sports writer, one Art Spander. 'If the strength and speed of thoroughbreds are passed from sire to sire, so,' wrote Mr Spander, 'are the physiological deficiencies.' 'Quite right!' said my expert source, 'Go on!'

'Thoroughbreds,' I recited, 'have an inferior respiratory system which means the lungs can't take in any more oxygen. They have an inferior digestive system which means the horse can't be immobilised for more than 48 hours. They have an inferior skeletal structure which continually puts more than a thousand pounds of stress on a three-inch surface. Still they cover a mile twice as fast as any human.' 'Absolutely right!' my expert said, 'And, furthermore the favourite wore four bandages and bled and had to be withdrawn.'

'Well,' I went on, 'the man says here, the record for a mile, one minute 32 and a fifth seconds, has stood for 19 years and may go on standing for ever and we'll definitely never have another superhorse like Secretariat.' It's the gospel truth, my daughter said. Mr Spander concluded that thoroughbred racing has become 'an exercise in avarice. Animals run for a blanket of roses, people scratch for a fistful of dollars'.

This annual show, to which more than a third of the American population was tuned in, happened the day before a young golfer in Las Vegas sank a 30-foot putt and won the biggest money prize in the history of professional golf, $225,000. I hasten to correct myself – the biggest prize for a tournament win.

In the middle of March, an obscure golf pro made a hole in one and the sponsor of the tournament, a car rental firm, paid him half a million dollars for what is, whether it's done by a bumbler, a hacker or a world champion, always a freak of luck. Incidentally, in the Las Vegas tournament, last Sunday, there was another obscure pro who came in 57th and earned a paltry $2,800. But on the next to the last hole, he got hole in one and was rewarded by an advertiser with a Rolls-Royce Sedan costing $118,000. What has happened to sport, so-called, that can not be put down to the invention of television and the mania of advertisers for promotion gimmicks?

About ten years ago, more, I did a talk which I called 'the money game'. It was about tennis and the emergence of tennis players as world-famous entertainers who had come to exploit obnoxious behaviour as part of the fun and games which, in turn, the spectators had come to expect and which they may not be denied since the money stakes are so high. I ended with an approving nod which now looks smug in the direction of the game of golf.

Well, it seems that all such nice scruples have gone with the wind and the insensate rush for more and more money. About what's happened to tennis, the old world beater, Don Budge, said the other day, 'The season is much too long. They all play too much and they burn out early'. Like thoroughbreds. So, back to the Derby.

A lady who is a genetics specialist says that horses are raced too early and too often for the money. The two-year-old champion in 1983 didn't make it to the 1984 Kentucky Derby and the 1985 two-year-old champion didn't make it to the 1986 Derby.

We talk about and bemoan the sharp trading and corruption on Wall Street and elsewhere, and – another surprising fact – that whereas the Harvard Business School used to produce a healthy crop of graduates that went into manufacturing, most graduates now go straight, at alarming salaries, into investment banking. Many years ago, during the grasping decade of the 1920s which the Eighties more and more resemble, the dour, monosyllabic President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, summed up the philosophy of the decade in one, short, sharp sentence: 'The business of America is business'.

The other day, Mr Lee Iacocca, the chairman of the board of Chrysler motor cars, who rescued the company from bankruptcy and, for a time, was talked about as a presidential possibility, was asked for a comment on his 1986 income which came to a neat $20 million in salary, plus bonuses and stock options. Said the fearless Mr Iacocca, 'That's the American way. If little kids don't aspire to make money like I did, what the hell good is this country?'

I talked this weekend to an old friend of our family who, for 30 years now, has been a top art director – they used to be called set designers – for the movies. I remember the skill and excitement with which he devoted himself long ago to a single set, a billiard hall or pool parlour, a shadowy, menacing scene pierced by shafts of light. It earned him his first Oscar. It was a big budget picture. It cost $4 million.

Just now he's working on a picture about which he's fairly offhand. 'Enjoyable,' he says, 'but low budget.' 'Like?' I asked. 'Oh,' he said, 'about 13, 14 million. The regular big feature film, today, is budgeted at something like 30, 40 millions. You go for broke, but if it catches on, it pays its way in the first month. It goes on and on.'

I said, 'I may be simple minded or just a closet puritan, but isn't it bound to end?' 'You may be simple-minded,' he said, 'but I think the answer is yes and I hope I get out before the roof falls in.'

On the other hand, there are people, intelligent people, who see no roof, only a bottomless sky, with the Dow Jones industrial average going, after a switchback ride of ups and downs, onwards and upwards beyond 2500. Why not 3000? Yet every record day's drop in the stock market – and we've had three in the past two months, followed by record spurts – keeps provoking people to drawing analogies with the late 1920s, whether out of clairvoyance or a sense of guilt, I don't know.

And the present headlong rush of the Democratic party, once the rock-bound party of free trade, its rush for protectionism makes even the president recall the dread Republican names of Hawley and Smoot, the two congressmen who wrote a tariff act, shortly after the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. In my almanac under the year 1930, it is the only listed event of American domestic history. It says, baldly: 'Hawley-Smoot tariff signed, rate hikes, slash world trade'.

It's the fear of many people inside and outside the United States that if Congress passes the massive protectionist bill it's brewing, we might be on the way down the 1929, 1930 road.

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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