Presidential campaign begins

I'm sure there are members of the class present who like to feel they are reasonably in touch with the rocking crises of American politics, but don't want to have to answer a quiz on, say, who hopes to be the Democrats nominee for president.

It'll be, I hope, an enormous relief to such people to hear that, on this weekend, before the first electoral test in New Hampshire on Tuesday, we're not going to try and distinguish between the political beliefs or the characters, or even the profiles, of Jimmy Carter, Birch Bayh, Fred Harris, Sargent Shriver and Morris Udall. For all that most of us care, these might be the members of a basketball team and, by next Wednesday morning, at least four of them could wish that they were, since the losers are likely to be thinking up ways of paying off thousands of dollars of campaign debts, whereas the average first-class basketball player in the United States earns anything from fifty to a hundred thousand pounds a year without even entering a primary. 

The presidential bug is a strange and tenacious affliction and, once you get it, you seldom get over it and, until it becomes obvious to you, years after it's been obvious to everybody else, that you're 80 years of age and unlikely to make it to the White House except as a harmless guest. 

In the days when I was very close to these things, I never seemed to get over the shock of discovering, rather late in the evening and when the final nightcaps were being served, that my host had invited me, a comparative stranger, because in his vain way he cherished the notion that I, a mere journalist who reported for a foreign newspaper, might be able to help him become, of all things, President of the United States. This is ludicrous even to recall. But, considering the identity of some of these hopefuls, it was even more ludicrous to think of at the time. 

I think, for instance, of a man, a linoleum manufacturer – he'd now be, if he were alive, 102 and still hoping. He was, in his world, which was the world of gross product and retail sales, a very important tycoon and like many such he surrounded himself with a circle of admiring, or at least fawning, cronies in his business. His subordinates, in fact. Well, he eventually got into the Congress of the United States and we though that remarkable enough at the time, but it was the time when we still remembered that a President of the United States had said, 'The business of America is business'. And if that was so, what could be more fitting than that the Congress should be filled with businessmen? 

Somewhere along the way of his living in Washington, he became very friendly with a prominent United States senator who was, for a time, a genuine, top candidate for the presidency. He was, in fact, the late Senator Robert Taft who was General Eisenhower's chief contender for the Republican nomination in 1952 and, after a Herculean struggle at the convention, lost to Eisenhower. 

Well, before that, Taft had been a guest in the home of the manufacturer/congressman and, at the end of a jolly evening, they were all sitting around playing the deathless American game of guessing the identity of the next president, of choosing, as they say, 'presidential timber'. When somebody paid the host, the manufacturer, a skittish compliment – I forget now about what, maybe he'd just thought up a new form of tax forgiveness or maybe he'd simply been to Florida and acquired a flattering tan, I don't know – anyway, old Senator Taft chuckled, something he did very rarely in a hard-working and thoughtful life, and he said in a frivolous aside, 'You know, Fred? You, yourself, wouldn't make a bad president.' This was so preposterous as to produce an explosion of laughter. 

For the first and the last time, in history, the assembled company thought of the senator as a card. Now this may not sound to you an uproarious moment but, as the undergraduate said to the magistrate, 'I'm sorry, your honour, but it did seem amusing at the time'. Well, it wasn't amusing to the linoleum man. He thought of it as he got ready for bed and he thought of it again in the morning and as he shaved this cheek and that he tilted his profile one way and the other way and he, frankly, had to admit that the senator had something there, that, by George, he thought he'd got it! And from then on, the man was already in his sixties, which is to say beyond the age at which the oldest president had ever entered the White House, but he'd become infected with the bug and he never shook it. 

He was an honest man but, apart from downright theft, there was nothing he wouldn't do from then on to spread the idea that, come the next convention, he was the great white hope or, at worst, the likeliest dark horse, of the Republican party. And, in what surely must be the most desperate ploy ever attempted by a presidential hopeful, he one day summoned his yes men, his cronies, and told them they were packing their bags and off to Scotland. In theory, this was to be a break, a holiday, but the congressman/manufacturer, was already on to a principle that Adlai Stevenson for one actually confessed to. It's the discovery that nothing so quickly polishes up the image of an American politician as a good notice from abroad. 

The tycoon and his circle arrived in London and, in an important telephone call to St Andrews, the secretary of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club was given to understand that an American statesman of the first chop wished to come and play the venerable old course and would be bringing with him his own foursome and would be obliged to know, or be given, a starting time for, say, Tuesday afternoon. But his crony, on the telephone, didn't say starting time, he said, 'Tee off time' and over the rather strangulated connection between London and Scotland, it sounded to the secretary like 'tea time'. The secretary said they'd be delighted to welcome the distinguished congressman and four o'clock would be splendid. 

Well, the party took the train to Scotland, checked into their hotel in St Andrews and next day sat around waiting for what they did think was a rather late starting time of 4 p.m. However, they went along to the club house and were alarmed to find that they were first going to be given tea. In New York, where the congressman normally played, you don't start a round of golf at 5 p.m. even in high summer because New York, as you've heard, is not only 3,000 miles west of London, it's 800 miles south of London. Consequently, there's little twilight and by August it's going dark by eight in the evening. 

However, it was explained to them over the tinkling teacups that in Scotland, in summer, people go out to start a round of golf at 9 p.m. The congressman was impatient to begin. He pictured the news flash to his local paper and – who knows? – to the national press agencies, 'US Congressman Shoots Record Round at Fabled St Andrews' – if that happened, it would be worth the votes of a million or two golfers. Against the possibility of this miracle, the congressman had acquired a new set of clubs, beautiful, matched, shining with steel containing, as the ads say, 'built-in dynamic flow power' or some such rubbish. He had a golf bag the size of a cabin trunk. 

They all drove off the first tee and, as they went down the fairway, the congressman noticed, about 150 yards ahead, three little boys banging away in a carefree fashion. He was astounded. At his home club, even the most adult golf players, unless they were wizards, were brushed aside or politely asked to wait till the congressman and his party drove off, but here he was, 3,000 miles from home on the sacred turf of the most famous golf course on earth, being held up by three urchins with, he was then appalled to notice, two romping dogs. 

'What,' he asked his caddie, 'do those boys think they're doing here?' The caddie hefted the congressman's enormous bag and said, 'They're just out of school'. This was no reply at all but, when the round was over, the horrible truth was quietly revealed to the congressman. He heard for the first time that the old course was, indeed, a public course – in fact, a public park – belonging to the town and that on Sundays golf was prohibited while old men and maidens with prams, and little old ladies and little boys with frisking dogs, took over the course. 'Hot damn!' said the congressman, 'I've been made to look like a fool.' And he flew home and spread the word that he'd been abroad to study housing conditions in Britain, but the word got out that he'd been off abroad playing golf and it killed off his chances of entering the New Hampshire primary. 

Well, this weekend, five Democrats are slogging through the snows, the little manufacturing towns, the mountain villages, the broken-down seaports of New Hampshire and, by Wednesday, four of them will be wondering whether to quit the race. And, by Wednesday, also, on the Republican side, either Mr Reagan will become a national threat to President Ford or Mr Reagan, too, will wonder if it's worth the long fight through the other primaries. 

Why? Why should New Hampshire be so significant? Why can it make or break a presidential hopeful? It's one of the smallest states in the union. In a country of, say, 70 million voters, it has, at best, 300,000 people who will go out and vote. It is wildly unrepresentative of the nation. It spends less money on education than any of the other 49 states. It doesn't believe much in government. It's the only state that has no sales tax, not to mention a state income tax. It is ultra conservative. It gets about half its revenues from taxes on spirits, tobacco and a state lottery. More than a third of its population is French Canadian. 

Well, it's the first election that sets all the hopefuls against one another. New Hampshire tells the country that New Hampshire is vital to the nomination of the next president and the country tends to believe it. New Hampshire says, 'Look what happened to the men who lost in our primary? They quit right after it!' – Harry Truman, Rockefeller, Lyndon Johnson. 

The country doesn't know or care that New Hampshire is typical of nothing but itself. New Hampshire is called important, for the same reason that a dance held in Cambridge in June is called a May Week Ball. It's traditional.

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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