Mayor Clint Eastwood

At a similarly anxious time in American history, just about 13 years ago this Christmas, I was about to go to bed in my London hotel and I popped into the lounge to see if there was anyone I knew. There was a lonely old man with his daughter.

My distance vision is very good at the fine print on menus or railway timetables, but not very good, well, at a distance. I was about to pop out when the old man raised an arm and waved it. I walked over to him and was delighted to see a distinguished figure, a tall, bony man with the austere air of a New England sage, on the order of Emerson, or Justice Holmes, which indeed he was.

He was then, at the age of 86, the greatest living American historian – Samuel Eliot Morison. He'd been in Florence and had been allowed to see the diaries, or journals, of Magellan for yet another titanic work he was finishing on the early explorers of America. He talked about this for a while, but pretty soon, inevitably, we came around to topic A, which was then the continuing crisis over the Watergate break-in and the still, uncertain involvement of President Nixon.

I asked him how he thought it would come out. He paused a moment and said, 'I think he'll brazen it out'. Well, Morison lived three more years and, of course, long enough to see that he did not brazen it out.

The same question is being asked today about the extent of President Reagan's involvement, how far and how long ago, in the Iranian arms Contra deal which develops new tentacles every day, reaching into agencies and countries and mercenaries and government underlings we could never guess at when that Beirut magazine fired the first charge about the secret sale of arms to Iran in exchange – nobody now credits any other main motive – in exchange for the release of American hostages.

It's a story, in some ways, more serious than Watergate that cannot be brushed aside. The two committees, one in the Senate, the other in the House, are going along every weekday probing into the memory and knowledge of more and more witnesses and there seems no doubt that it will not, as some people are saying or hoping, it will not go away. But there are other things going on and across this continent, of course, and for now I will just make a point that could possibly have puzzled some listeners.

It was the act of Admiral Poindexter and Colonel North in doing something never done before in living memory by a member of the armed forces – the refusal to testify before a committee of Congress on the principle of self-incrimination. The admiral and the colonel both took, as we say, 'the Fifth'.

The fifth amendment to the constitution was one of the ten original amendments that are known as the Bill of Rights. All but three of the original 13 states ratified these amendments by 1791. The fifth amendment set up the grand jury system. It went on to forbid anyone's being tried twice for the same crime and then it comes to the famous and, today, relevant clause, 'Nor shall any person be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself'. That is the protection that Admiral Poindexter and Colonel North seized on.

This protection was never in dispute when the first American governments came to propose it. The memory was very green in the minds of those old colonials, when they were British subjects, of being thrown in jail or otherwise forced to tell their own part in acts of defiance against laws passed by Westminster which the colonials thought unjust and which, in the end, led to the revolutionary war. They'd seen enough of brow-beating and physical punishment and the new American governments extended the protection to all criminal, or otherwise infamous, charges. A man could not be forced to condemn himself. There must be witnesses.

So, the admiral and the colonel asserted no more than their constitutional right in refusing to answer all and every question that might, in retrospect, incriminate them. Now, there's no doubt at all that, as American citizens, they have every right to do it, but there's been a lot of hot and angry debate in the innumerable nightly panels of congressmen, senators, reporters and the like, about the wisdom of claiming the fifth in this case.

One member of the Senate Intelligence Committee pleaded for the men to change their minds and their stand on the ground, as he put it, 'that we have 95 pieces of this puzzle and it won't be fitted together until we get the other five, which these two men could provide'. That's a not very good argument for their surrendering their constitutional right.

Other people, equally impatient, think the president ought to compel them, which he can't, or beg them to think again and, by now, he may have succeeded. But I'm afraid that a murky cloud fell on the two of them when they took the fifth because the cases that most Americans can recall of hiding behind the fifth amendment have come from gangsters and hoodlums called to testify before a famous Senate committee hearing on the structure and behaviour of organised crime. When such types claimed the fifth, everyone assumed their guilt.

When the admiral and the colonel did it and did it, unlike the gangsters, not shiftily, defiantly, but courteously, regretfully, their demeanour had the effect of making people say, 'If they can be so calm and sorry about having to do it, they must be covering up for the very highest authority'. It appeared they were calm and regretful because they'd decided to stay loyal, whatever happens, to their chief – a military principle, if not a civic one.

Well, these assumption, inferences, are quite likely unfair to them both. I'm simply reporting how immediately sinister their action looked when people stopped to wonder why they'd taken the fifth and noticed the way they did it.

I was down the peninsula from San Francisco last weekend and I went into Carmel, a small town on the Pacific coast famous for its mild climate, its towering pines, its air of preserved gentility and the numbers of retired old soldiers who chose to live out their days there. General Omar Bradley was one, General Doolittle is another and on Sunday this tiny, wiry old hero, the first man to fly over – and alarm – Tokyo was given a large birthday party to celebrate his ninety years.

Carmel is close by the staggeringly beautiful coastline of the so-called 17-Mile Drive which looks out on the swelling Pacific through tangled, hoary trees, the famous Monterey cypress which is indigenous to this stretch of coast. So Carmel gets a fairly steady troop of visitors and tourists, but long ago Carmel zoned itself, kept its skirts clear of the passing tourists by limiting the number of hotels, of parking space, vigorously restricting all building close to the shoreline, with the help of the very strict, very alert California Coastal Commission whose permission you must get to cut down any trees, let alone to build a house or a golf course.

It took a friend of mine three years to get permission to buy a small tract of land along the 17-Mile Drive and to provide plans for the house he meant to build. When it became obvious that he would not be allowed to clear dead cypresses so as to open up his view of the ocean, he gave up and put the land on the market. So far there've been no takers.

The nearby town of Carmel is known, then, to tourists going south, around Carmel Bay and on through the old fishing town of Monterey. But, until a year ago, it was unknown, I should guess, to newspaper reporters in Tokyo, London, Bonn, Stockholm. No longer. They've been pouring in media scouts from all around the globe. Have they come to learn what one small seaside town can do to stem the tide of development? Alas, no.

They've come to see the mayor who was elected last year. The mayor is Dirty Harry – Clint, 'Make my day' Eastwood. One local reporter bemoaned the presence of these outlanders, not because they were here, but because, as he put it, 'these people show a monumental lack of interest in the town's political issues. They have overlooked the essence of the Carmel story because they're obsessed with a major lunacy of our time, celebrity mania. They want to see in a sloppy, general way, how this tough-guy mayor is doing his job'.

Quite simply, Clint Eastwood is not a tough guy. He's a slender, shrewd, concerned citizen of the town who has an ambition that should evoke sympathy, at least, in all good politicians. He wants to keep intact the natural beauty of the town and yet control the growth of businesses that might spoil that beauty. He doesn't want to stifle new enterprises. He's asking perhaps the impossible of enterprising businessmen, he's asking them to limit their aims and this means that an application for a motel's expansion, for a new jewellery shop are matters of great moment. He takes his time. The old timers want to clamp a lid on Carmel as it is. The new timers want to expand and boost and wax prosperous.

Eastwood has trod a careful middle path. He's cleared the midtown traffic clutter with a new parking lot. He tore down a fence along a scenic ocean drive and built a public access stairway to the beach. He's built restrooms for tourists in the town park. He has poured money into the Carmel Youth Centre to attract the young to an open meeting place. He's allowed children to buy ice-cream cones and take them out on the streets. Incredible! What a work of statesmanship.

Tiny moves, you might say. What he's doing is attempting, in this very pleasant place, very tempting to developers, to set an example for all small towns to control growth. I wish he'd been drafted years ago as mayor in several score other small seaside towns I could mention in other countries to anticipate and arrest their defilement by tacky lunch counters and caravan sites and novelty shops and general dreck.

Oh yes! Last weekend, Eastwood paid $5.1 million out of his own pocket to buy and freeze, in its present virgin state, an old mission ranch that was up for development. Some things in the past, he says, should be kept the way they were in the present.

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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