Do Russians want Reagan out?

I've had a letter from a lady, a very earnest letter with many underlinings, which are usually a sign of passionate sincerity or a fear that you won't get the point. Well, her point is sharp and clear. Please, she begins, underlined, please do not make the mistake you did in 1981 (she means 1980) when you spent so much time telling us who might get to be president. We are not in the least interested in whether Reagan is going to be the next president or isn't. It doesn't concern us who is President of the United States. We want to hear about American affairs.

Well, the problem here is that I get many other letters saying nothing is more important to all of us than the question whether Ronald Reagan is going to run again and, please, keep us posted on every move. I must say that the lady's letter touches a sore spot.

Whenever I'm in Britain for several weeks, I begin, myself, to weary of the American political news, especially of the party infighting but then, when I'm back here, I soon find it hard to keep up a gripping interest in Labour Party conferences or power struggles between Conservative Cabinet ministers. When you're in the place, it's different.

It has just occurred to me that there's going to be a general election in New Zealand this year and while I was in New Zealand and visiting the pols, or politicos, on each side, I became fascinated with the philosophy and tactics of Mr Muldoon and the opposing philosophy and proposed tactics of Mr Lange, but I have to admit once you're away from New Zealand for long, the interest in the New Zealand election is no longer quite so breathless.

What to do about the people who say, 'For heaven's sake, forget Ronald Reagan!' and the people who say, nothing and nobody is more vital to the future of all of us than the identity and the philosophy of the next President of the United States, keep us posted at all times!

The only sensible answer, it has seemed to me, is to listen to both of them and, with my lady's permission, or even without it, I must talk just this time about Mr Reagan and Congress because Congress has just reassembled for its final session. Then I promise we'll turn to other things.

What I have in mind are no tortuous details about the game of American politics, just a few facts about where we all stand after the senators and congressmen have returned from sucking on the grass roots and before, on 29th, Mr Reagan tells us all whether he is or is not going to run again. I'm even going to skip this time the president's annual State of the Union address to Congress which was given on Wednesday evening.

Most of you will know Mr Reagan's personal decision shortly after you've heard this talk. Some overseas listeners receiving a delayed transmission will already know. So you can bet that I'm not making any cocky bets on the outcome of that five-minute talk to the nation.

I ought to say that at the very last minute before any of us knew the outcome, the Washington wiseacres divided into two knowing camps. Camp A said, 'Look at all the Cabinet officers and/or White House advisers who, in the past year, have decided to quit and go back to their beloved California!' I should say that no president is compelled to make up his Cabinet or his 'Kitchen Cabinet' exclusively from friends in his home state, but no president we can think of has ever gathered round him so many old home cronies, so many as to suggest that the other 49 states are singularly bereft of high intelligence and political talent.

Anyway, the theory of Camp A is that all these people would not have left if they thought they'd have a steady job in the White House after next November. The argument of Camp B is that, on the contrary, most of them, the men who've quit voluntarily, have done it so that they can be free to help run the president's next campaign. Look at the Attorney General, Mr Smith, who's just resigned – a big surprise to everybody but him and the president. He wants to free himself, surely, from the impropriety of campaigning for his man while he's in the Cabinet. He wants to roll up his sleeves and start organising the money and the state chairmen and the money, and the plastic chicken dinners and the money.

Camp A and Camp B are, as I talk, having a final fling and making last-minute bets. The multitude of us on the outside are more naive. We think of the recent scene in Washington where the marine band piped the president aboard, so to speak, before 3500 ecstatic followers who heard the great man talk about a new beginning. We see the Gallup poll just out which shows Mr Reagan to have a higher percentage of approval for the way he's running things – 56 per cent – than any other modern president except Eisenhower at this stage of his presidency. That's to say, at the beginning of the fourth year which is almost always a time of deep disillusion in the voters, when they begin to yearn for a new saviour.

And if Mr Reagan is, were, able to resist this enormous appeal to his vanity, how can he resist the scene in New Hampshire last week when the eight – it's now eight – Democrats who hope to succeed him, sat for three hours on national television and bickered and snarled at each other and strongly suggested a party almost as lost for leadership as the Labour Party was before the last British election.

I would have gone out on a limb long ago and said, 'of course he's going to run again' has it not been for a sophisticated editorial in the Economist the other week, which practically ordered Mr Reagan to think again. It put the attractive argument that, while he's been a startling president and improved on his predecessor and made a decisive shift in the direction that government should go, yet, quote, 'by hanging on in old age, Mr Reagan might undermine his legacy more than if he leaves it persuasively behind him now'.

However, it's possible that Mr Reagan won't have seen the Economist and won't be able to change his mind in time. It is by such little accidents that the fate of great nations is decided.

As for the returning senators, the hundred returning senators and the 435 returning congressmen, there's no need to guess or speculate on what's going to concern them most during the next six months. A big majority of them said that the one great anxiety on the minds of their constituents was the presence of the marines in Lebanon. Congress had passed a resolution allowing the president to keep them there for 18 months. It seems pretty certain that the House at least will cut back that time.

After the general anxiety about the marines, there are two other issues that will undoubtedly produce long and bitter fights in Congress – a strong statement about those issues came the other day from, of all people, a former president of Mr Reagan's own party, none other than Mr Gerald Ford. He said the approaching $200 billion federal deficit was the ominous cloud on the horizon and that to reduce it, the president must stretch his defence budget thinner and impose new taxes. So say not only the mass of the Democrats, but such otherwise loyal Republicans as the chairman of the Senate finance committee, Senator Robert Dole.

To all of them, the president has three straightforward answers. He will not fetch the marines out of Lebanon. He will not stretch his defence budget. He will not call for any new taxes. So there!

There's one aspect of Mr Reagan's presidential intentions which I'm quite sure affects Europeans quite as much as it affects Americans and in the past month or so there's been a great deal of cogitating and writing about it in the serious press. The question is simple. The answer is cloaked in ignorance, secrecy, hopes and fears. The question is, what do the Russians want to happen next November? Do they want Reagan in or out? And why?

Now, here, there's a division of opinion, a sharp party division, but it goes beyond that. Every Democrat who's running for president and all the separate armies of their disciples are convinced that the Russians would like to see Reagan out of the White House. They are so convinced because they believe that a Democratic president would make a sincerer, a more determined effort, to come to terms with Mr Andropov or his successor, and would break the nuclear stalemate. The Democrats believe this because they all think they can safeguard the national security at a cheaper price and because they believe their man, whoever he is to be, would not be so bellicose about the Russians, would be more agreeable, would not be afraid of returning to the theory, never mind the practice, of détente.

The Republicans, many of them do regret the president's belligerent tone and especially deplore that never-to-be-forgotten 'Empire of evil' speech. The Republicans, nevertheless, on the whole, agree with the Democrats that the Russians would like Reagan out of the White House because, in the Republican version, the Russians could then manipulate a liberal Democrat, could convince him of their generally peaceful intentions and could then return quietly, but unflaggingly, to building up a force both conventional and nuclear so superior to anything that America, Britain, West Germany and France in concert could possibly match, that the time would not be far off when the Russians could present us with the nightmare of an accomplished fact which conservatives since Churchill have feared – the open demonstration of a power so overwhelming that the free world would have no peaceful alternative but to become a ring of puppet states, or, at best, independent countries with governments agreeable to Moscow.

There are slight variations and qualifications in both these points of view but, on the whole, these are the protagonists. I should say that the bias of historians, and especially of military historians, tends to run with the second view, that's to say with the Reagan doctrine that peace is better secured through strength first and only then through accommodation.

It all comes down, it seems to me, to a difference of opinion which people of different temperaments will never resolve, between those who believe that if you prepare for war, you will get war and those who believe that if you prepare for war, you will get peace – a conflict which, today, I must say, is exacerbated both by the dogmatism of the hawks and the self-righteousness of the doves.

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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