Carter cuts aid deals

A few weeks ago, an old Yale man turned up on the campus to talk to some picked classes of students and though he was shadowed, so to speak, by a couple of men who always have one hand in their coat pocket, there were no surging crowds, no fuss, no Klieg lights, no whining sirens. His name is Gerald Ford.

I suppose there are few countries where the gap, the chasm, between being in power and out of it, is so enormous and so visible. A prime minister is comparatively inconspicuous walking along the street whether he's in office or out of it, but the difference between being President of the United States and being ex-president is the difference between being a field marshal in full regalia inspecting a guard of honour and the same man in retirement pottering around a golf course in a sweater and slacks. 

The main reason, I suppose, and it's not true in most other republics is that the president is the king and the prime minister and the commanding general of the armed forces all at once, which is to say that he is the head of state as well as head of government and the chief of the party in power. Even Mr Ford seemed at times swallowed up by what movie and television people call the 'production values'. 

The president can go nowhere, up to the Capitol or off for a walk without lights flashing all over the White House switchboard and the secret service going into a dither of walkie-talkie instructions, screening shops and buildings along the way, clearing streets. He can't even go to the bathroom without an agent accompanying him to the door and standing guard. 

When he gets out of the White House, he is, at a stroke, Mr X. On the day of Mr Carter's inauguration, Mr Ford decided to show his family and a few friends who were following him into retirement in the California desert, he decided to give them a final bird’s-eye view of Washington which is as handsome a government city as there is. And the cameras followed him, the television cameras, almost reverently, leaving the Capitol, down to the helicopter and then traced the flight of the copter till it was out of sight. Next day he was on the tube again. This time he was walking along a fairway in California with the old golf charmer Arnold Palmer and they were joshing each other and ex-President Ford was in trouble with the ball behind a tree. And when he managed to loft it over the tree, there was a good-natured little cheer from a little bunch of people who stood not ten feet away from him. 

There's another thing that makes the contrast between being in and out so sharp, so dramatic, it is that – how can I put it? – a man is plucked for glory from his hometown and then is immediately dumped back in it. The locality rule in American politics, the tradition that you stand, run for political office from the place you live in, preferable were born in, it's very strong. The idea of Winston Churchill becoming MP for Oldham (was it?) would be impossible in this country. I can't think of a president who, once his term was over, ever stayed on in Washington or bought a house there. You go back where you came from. And it's not the same as the president or the prime minister or the foreign secretary retiring to his country place. Only two of the last nine presidents had anything you could call a country place. Coming from the country, that's a different thing. 

Franklin Roosevelt, with an estate up the Hudson, is rare enough to be bizarre. Harry Truman is closer to the regular type. Born in rural Missouri on a farm, family moves to a small town, Independence. He goes to the day school there, he goes to work as timekeeper for a railroad construction gang. He becomes a haberdasher, he goes to war, he comes back to Independence. In time, he gets to be a United States' senator and then president. And on the very day that another country boy from Abilene, Kansas, is being feted in the streets of Washington with bands and parades and drum majorettes and cavalcades of Cadillacs, Harry Truman is at the railroad station, not many people around, climbing aboard a train and saying, 'It'll be good to be home'. And he's off to the old house on the same street in Independence and he dies there. 

It's hard to believe, watching President Carter now, that when his time is up, he'll be on his way back to Plains, Georgia, population, what is it, 265? But it's more likely than not. What always surprises the big Washington social crowd is how soon and how easily the new man fits into the magnificence of the White House. You'd expect they'd be permanently uncomfortable with it and want to do it over like the old homestead. 

Well, Jimmy Carter, as he insists on being called, is, I don't think, uncomfortable anywhere. He has one of those characters that's so self-sufficient, so aware from birth what it can do and what it cannot do and aware who he is, that nothing seems to faze him – a peanut wholesale business or the command of a nuclear submarine, a raft of foreign grandees or a churchwardens' meeting – he's appointed some famous and learned and powerful men as his advisers, to his Cabinet, whatever, and I'd guess that the first time you sit with them assembled, you'd be pretty scared. Being scared under such circumstances can take two forms. You either shut up like a clam or talk your head off. Carter evidently does neither. One of the men who's there all the time says he sits upright, very much at ease, he listens coolly to some expert try to expound the complexities of a problem that he wouldn't expect a new president to know much about and when he's finished, Mr Carter has taken it all in, summarises quickly the alternative lines to take, takes one and moves on. 

We kept saying for months and months – and some boneheads still think it fashionable to go on saying it – that Carter was a mystery man, unfathomable, a character that nobody could pin down and examine. Well, the mystery seems to be clearing away like a morning mist. What we now have is a man, whatever else he is, a man of remarkable natural dignity. It appears that he has ordered to stop all White House limousines for his aides, to keep the thermostats down to 65, to stop the riffles and flourishes of the marine band, not to require people at work to wear jackets and ties and, as he did, to open up his telephone for one day to the American people, that these were not showy, populist gestures, not a well-advertised theatrical performance, like Lyndon Johnson's padding round the White House turning off lights. 

Carter, I think it's fair to give him the benefit of the doubt, Carter seems to share the strong feelings of Thomas Jefferson that, with all respect to royal houses, a republic should not ape display and any form of regal ostentation and that its president should be, as sensibly as possible, the symbol of the common people who put him there. This is a very tricky thing to do without affecting a sort of mucker pose and from all I hear there are more surprises of this sort to come. From people who've watched him since he got in the White House, I gather that he does not intend them as surprises, just as expressions of his resolve to simplify the presidency and make the office, and not its trappings, the main thing. 

Jefferson appalled a lot of people, especially visiting dignitaries from Europe, by greeting them at the White House in his carpet slippers. Mr Carter equally appalled a lot of people but today, I should guess, not proportionately so many, by doing his first television fireside chat in a cardigan. Apparently there was a flurry of debate before this decision was made but he saw no problem. 'It's what I wear,' he said, 'when I sit by my own fireside.' This doesn't excite every American to admiration. One man, I'm sure, spoke for many when he said, 'I don't want my president to be a buddy. I want him to be President of the United States' which is a rather baffling prescription. One man's presidential get-up is another man's poison. 

However, in one resolve, President Carter is running, I think, a big risk, or you could better say, is treading a high wire between the ideal world and the real world. He said during the campaign that his devotion to human rights was unqualified. Well, during a campaign, presidential candidates say anything and everything and after the first January sneers, we usually forget it. But Mr Carter has done what Mr Gerald Ford now says he wishes he'd done, which was to greet and salute a famous Russian dissident. Mr Ford told the students at Yale he thought he was in error in not welcoming Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the White House. President Carter has taken in Vladimir Bukovsky, whom the Soviet leaders describe as a criminal and potential terrorist. 

Mr Carter's more alert critics, and he's collecting more of them every day, said, 'Fine, fine thing... make a big gesture protesting the Russians' suppression of civil rights but how about the other countries we trade with and to whom we even give large dollops of foreign aid?’ So Mr Carter promptly cut off foreign aid to Argentina, Uruguay and Ethiopia on the same grounds – they violate human rights. 

Well, it would be the understatement of the year to say that the Soviet Union is furious at Mr Carter. The Russians have mounted a counter-propaganda campaign and their papers this past week have painted a picture of the United States in which the prisons are packed with political prisoners put there on other trumped-up charges, in which the rich escape jail and the blacks, Puerto Ricans and Indians languish there, in which no American can pick up his telephone without wondering whether his call is being recorded by and I quote, 'special secret agents'. 

Asked if he'd expected this vicious, backbiting campaign, the president said, 'What else?' A very cool, a rather tough hombre.

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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