Foreign correspondents

I suppose that from the first day the first foreign correspondent was sent abroad to report on foreign parts to the folks back home, his readers assumed that since he'd been posted to the capital of the foreign country, he was at the heart of things – not only at the heart of politics, but at the heart of the life of the country he was living in. This is very natural but also very wrong.

The bigger the country, the more mistaken the assumption, especially if the country has a varied landscape, stretches over several latitudes and longitudes and, therefore, produces different economies and different ways of life. The politics apart, I doubt that any of us living have ever had a large, embracing view of the Soviet Union. This is very much the Russians own fault. Correspondents can go only where they're allowed to go. So, since we've had diplomatic relations, correspondents have been based in Moscow. One city in a vast country that has six time zones and reaches from the shores of Europe to a shoreline in sight of the United States. 

But in the countries that have a free press and which also let in foreigners from countries free or otherwise, things are different, you'll say. Correspondents in Britain or the United States are free to go off and write from Edinburgh or Devon, from Texas or Alaska and, before the Second War, the United States was a moocher's paradise. 

Not only was the government open to inquiry and private talks – I mean everybody from Congress and the Supreme Court and the military, down to governors and mayors and union bosses and business tycoons, oil men, ranchers, even bishops and gangsters – an accessibility which I have not known elsewhere before or since. But, also, you could be driving across the Nevada Desert, say, and notice on your petrol station map the town of Hawthorne with a marking saying, 'US Naval Ammunition Depot' and it took only a letter asking permission and they'd let you in to look things over. 

Well, all that was nearly 40 years ago and things have changed somewhat, thought it's still a heartening thing to a reporter in this country to know all the important people he can still see and all the places he can still go – the policy meetings of political parties, the inner councils of state government, the sparring matches for power inside the trade unions. But the habit of assigning correspondents only to foreign capitals still dies hard. 

The tendency of American papers, still, is to send their man to London and keep him there. And, from there, he rewrites from local papers or from the wire services, anything of note that seems to be happening in Scotland or Wales or Little Piddletrenthide. And in the same way, British correspondents and French especially and, indeed, correspondents from all over the world who are assigned to America, make a beeline for Washington and stay there, except when there's a presidential convention or a scandalous trial or something equally gaudy. 

It was a very wise decision of my old, long-gone editor, A. P. Wadsworth, that when he made me his chief American correspondent and I had to face the move to Washington, he urged me to stay in New York, which is the receiving news centre of the United States. 'We don't want to know about Washington,' he said, 'we want to know about America.' Of course, New York's not America either, but it's certainly nowhere else.

Accordingly, I did get around and I remember with gratitude when 1949 was coming up, the 100th anniversary of the Gold Rush, and I gingerly suggested going out to California to write a series on the history of the Rush. I knew there was little chance of his agreeing because Washington and London and devastated Europe were just then agog over a bill coming up in Congress, THE bill for economic aid to Europe which was intended to do no less, as Dean Acheson put it, than 'repair the fabric of European life.' Well, I got a terse cable back. Wadsworth never used two syllables if he could use one. The cable said, 'Go California. Why do we employ Reuters?' 

Well, all this is by way of stressing what can never be stressed too much, that America is a continent and whenever you hear that the 'eyes' of America are focused on a single event, you can put it down as typical eyewash dispensed by a journalist tied in one place to a typewriter and a telephone. Short of a presidential assassination or the election of a president, you can be quite sure that whatever is obsessing New York is only dimly regarded in Seattle or Chicago. The eyes of Texas are seldom on anything but Texas except, of course, these days on Iran and Kuwait. 

I happen, at the moment, to be in California and I can only tell you that the main thing here is great rejoicing over the interminable rains of January that have all but put an end to the three-year drought and out here there is only decent sympathy for the paralysed region of the Midwest, an area about half the size of Europe, that's digging its way out of monstrous snows while awaiting the next storm and counting the dead and the hideous cost of the blizzards and the ice storms and the shattered power plants and the dented highways and the closed schools, and all the rest of it. 

If you were to ask me, 'All right then, so what are they eyes of California focused on?', that would still be a hard question to answer, California being 900 miles long and, at the widest stretch, about 200 miles wide. 'Well then,' an English college student might persist, 'what is going on in the capital city?' – of California. The capital city is not Los Angeles or San Francisco, but Sacramento and it is, of course, the hive of California politics and we're not going to get into that, or them! Something less than a hundred years ago, Lord Bryce wrote that, 'systems of democratic government are of four kinds. There is the British parliamentary system, there is the French assembly system, there is the American federal system and there is California politics. Of these four, much the most complicated is the California system.' 

However, to an outsider, California has some laws of its own that are, to say the least, intriguing, written into the California constitution. Each state, by the way, has – help! – its own written constitution. California has a provision, two provisions, which might be healthy checks on the competence of public servants in some other places. They're called 'referendum' and 'recall'. Generations before Mr Wilson adopted the daring strategy on calling for a referendum on whether Britain wanted to go into the Common Market, California was allowing referenda on burning issues that might inflame the general tranquillity if they were left to be decided at an election three or four years away. 

The other provision, the word 'recall' has a special and ominous ring in these parts. The California constitution allows for any public official, all the way up to the governor, to be recalled from office – that's to say, 'fired' – on the submission of so many thousand signatures asking for it and a vote on the submission at an interim election. 

And then it's always fun to puncture the blanket contempt of some foreigners for Hollywood and its lush life by recalling that one of the many relics of Spanish law that have passed over into California law is the provision in divorce agreements which says that half the husband's estate shall go to the ex-wife under the Community Property law. Next time you're inclined to chuckle at, or perhaps even envy, a movie star about to embark on his fourth marriage, just think back to the first division of his property with the first wife, the second division of what he has left with his second wife and now the right of the rejected third wife to have and enjoy a half of all that remains. Becoming the fourth wife of a movie star is not a smart move in California. 

There's one law from which I'm happy to say we, in New York, are free. It is known, rather clumsily, as the Conservatorship Statute. It might better be called the 'guardianship' law. It allows the state to appoint guardians over the person and the estate of any person, quote, 'likely to be deceived or imposed upon by artful or designing persons'. Well, it's happened before now to drunks, to unstable people of all kinds – even more lately to a movie star, proved to the law's satisfaction to be incapable of handling her own affairs and, in her case, the guardian appointed was her daughter. Now this law has been invoked by five California parents whose children – and they were adults, by the way – joined the strange cult of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. The claim of these parents was that their children had been brainwashed and the first court upheld them and returned the adult children to the care of their parents. The children appealed and the judgement was reversed. The parents appealed and, a month ago, the California Supreme Court upheld the reversal. In other words, the children are free as right-thinking, or wrong-thinking, adults to go their own way. 

I like the judgement of the Appeals Court. It said the statute was too vague to be applied in this case or perhaps in our time. 'In an age,' it said, 'of subliminal advertising, television exposure and psychological salesmanship, everyone is exposed to artful and designing persons at every turn. It is impossible to measure the degree of likelihood that some will succumb.' In other words, life – and not only the Reverend Moon – is full of artfulness and interesting seductions and going home to Mum won't keep you from them. 

Talking of covering the American continent and being where the news really happens, I wish this week I could have been in the huge, waste landscape surrounding the Great Slave Lake of Canada's Northwest Territories. That is one place on which the eyes of America and the eyes of the world had better begin to focus and, saving some national scandal or disaster, that is the story I mean to go into next time.

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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