Nixon, 'and the rest you know'... - 4 March 1994

Unusually sharp listeners, that's to say listeners who are not scrubbing their backs or saying two lumps, darling, in response to "good morning", such alert types may have noticed recently that I've occasionally said, about some knotty current issue of war or peace, as I talk, I hate to calculate how many sharp listeners exist by this criterion. But one of them, anyway, has written to ask me: what do you mean, as you talk? What other time would I be listening to you? Point taken.

Well the fact is I have not been able to find a polite way of saying out loud the blunt truth that I'm talking on tape on a Wednesday and by the time you hear me, perhaps the war will be over, President Clinton will have resigned, the lion and the lamb will be setting up house together in the Middle East. Friends here say, oh go ahead, say it, nothing drastic's going to happen between now and Sunday, Well I notice from the calendar that this is an anniversary week and after 48 years I know it's not possible, whether you're Mr Yeltsin or Nostradamus, to say what might happen by Sunday morning, let alone by 2000 AD.

Once, I recall, I was sitting all cosy and carefree with an old friend, by a blazing fire, in his Washington house. We were both licking our chops at the immediate prospect of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. The orchestra was tuning up, the flutes doing their switchback giggle, the fiddles doing the twiddly bits, when an excitable young man burst in with an incomprehensible sentence, "The Japanese," he shouted, "have bombed Pearl Harbor". My friend, a British government official, and I, honest, cried, "Where is Pearl Harbor?"

My own chief that day, the venerable, infinitely far-sighted Washington correspondent of the London Times, was off at a country weekend party in Maryland. General Marshall, the army chief of staff was put riding. The president of the United States was manipulating his stamp collection. Luckily there was no Letter from America in those days, so I was able, being on the spot, to leap into the saddle of the absent Sir Willmott Lewis. He came puffing in late in the evening. Dear boy, he said, I should have known. The Japanese learned years ago that Americans have taken up the habit of the long English weekend, during which it is considered bad taste to let anything important happen. I learned from that.

Of course today, thanks in the first place to Ted Turner of Atlanta, it's easy never to be out of sight of Sarajevo or Washington or Jerusalem or Beijing or wherever the news is instant. Even so, there can be wracking days when I fear that by the time you hear my stuff, empires will have stood or fallen. There was the terrible and I'm relieved to say, unique experience of the 6 August 1974. For almost two years, the country had been increasingly distracted from all other public business by what at first was facetiously known as the Watergate caper. A night-time burglary effort by six men into the offices of the Democratic Party.

A Laurel and Hardy absurdity in the beginning. Then it slowly came out that the men had been hired by some Republicans, that a great deal of money, running to millions of dollars, had changed hands. Then suspicion narrowed on two big men. Presidential advisers, inside the White House. Then there was a Senate investigation, which discovered that President Nixon regularly and secretly taped conversations in his office. His chief sin was he forgot to destroy the tapes and ultimately one tape, which the Supreme Court made him turn over to a House committee, which by then was considering impeachment proceedings, that one tape revealed, nay proclaimed in the President's own voice, that he not only knew about the burglary, but only six days after it, he was telling the CIA and the FBI to bottle up any investigation of it.

By that time, I mean by the time that fatal tape was published, the House committee had voted to impeach him, which meant he must then go before the Senate sitting as a trial court. A rapid head count of the whole House of Representatives showed they would follow the committee and in the Senate it was confidentially learned there was less than the one-third vote essential to support and save him. He was doomed. So, would he face the trial or resign or what? Just before I sat down in a studio in San Francisco, on the Wednesday morning which was my deadline, I didn't know and nobody knew for sure. I checked the word from the inner sanctuary of the White House and it was that he would defy the verdict of the House Committee.

I called up the oldest, the most distinguished of American historians, the late, great Samuel Eliot Morison. He said, he'll brazen it out. What to do, as the engineer's finger signalled action, through the studio's control room window. I recounted everything that had happened up to that point. I ended by listing the alternatives he faced. Now it was time to say goodnight. But how? I ended with the solemn and now I think of it, very wishful, sentence, the rest, you know.

The tape flew off to London, two days ticked by. On the Friday morning, Nixon abdicated. Wow. That evening the tape was played for the first time and subsequently, in different countries, throughout the weekend, and every audience heard the same last sentence: The rest you know.

I got more mail than I could count from people saying in various ways, masterly, so dramatic, so tasteful, not rubbing his nose in it, wonderful restraint, congratulations, right on. Well, you can't do that more than once, though at the moment I'd like to talk about either Sarajevo or Hebron or both, but, as I talk, it is Wednesday.

Why, why have I said that phrase, as I talk, several times this winter. Because of the ferocious winter itself. The people who have to get to this studio, really only two who are essential to the transmission of this talk, they live across the river in New Jersey, and when Manhattan gets 10 inches of snow, they get 18 inches and when our sidewalks are as slippery as jelly, their great state highways are skating rinks. One time, about a month ago, after the worst storm, when we were perishing below zero, the day I was sitting here being recorded directly in London, we could no longer trust a transatlantic flight, even taking off, I kept fading. Try again, they cried, in London. For the first time in history the cable on the ocean bed was battered and damaged by storm.

Eventually we got the whole thing over and London patched it together just in time for the first transmission. So instead of saying, as I talk now, I will now openly declare that it is Wednesday and I'm recording these words now, not on Friday because, because we've all been warned, heavy winter storm watch through Thursday, 8 to 12 inches snow and ice. Better, they all said, get it over to London now and take the risk of sounding foolish on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday in New Zealand.

Well, while we tap our teeth and wait and hope the weather bureau is suffering from one of its periodical hysterias, I can tell you about one thing that has happened that cannot be cancelled or reversed. Last Monday the so-called Brady Bill came into effect as a federal, a national law and that's the law named after President Reagan's press secretary, who was badly wounded, paralysed, by the young lunatic who shot Mr Reagan. Mr Brady has been campaigning since 1984 for a bill to control hand guns; 10 years up against one of the most lavishly funded and most powerful of all the hundreds of lobbies in Washington, the National Rifle Association, which for much longer than 10 years has somehow been impressing millions of voters with the tinpot slogan – guns don't kill people, people do. The Brady Bill's controls are very modest indeed. Every hand gun owner must give his name and wait five days till his background is checked. This is going to be possible for the whole country by about 1997.

Now note, 38 states already have gun control laws, some of them very much tougher than the Brady Bill. California makes you wait two weeks. The man who shot up that commuter train on Long Island had submitted to and passed the California law, bought his gun, travelled 3,000 miles and went berserk here in New York. President Clinton wants the Congress now to get busy banning all assault weapons, those rapid repeating rifles that can kill 15 people in as many seconds and cannot possibly be defended or defined as a hunting rifle. He also wants all guns to be registered and licensed, like cars.

Now I ought to say that there are thoughtful opponents of any more gun control laws and they say once you licence and register every home with a gun, a drug lord, for instance, would be very happy to have that list and how many criminals are going to register? Will they obediently insure their weapons? The unsolved paradox is that any gun law will be observed only by, well by law-abiding citizens. To me, the secret, unconsidered threat of strict gun control is a roaring black market and the growth of an underground racketeering empire, such as degraded and ridiculed what one president called the noble experiment of prohibiting alcohol.

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