The politics of plain speaking

An extraordinary picture flashed on our television screens last Tuesday evening and was frozen, so to speak, on the front pages the next morning. It showed a man in shirtsleeves, sprawled on top of a motorcar, neither sitting up nor lying down, but bracing himself from falling off by crooking one leg and holding on by the heel. He was plainly a very happy man with a wide grin and an arm outstretched to a swarm of ecstatic people holding out hands and flags and even two-arm embraces.

Now what was extraordinary was first his total exposure to the crowd, a fact which must have given the secret service the jimjams but, more extraordinary, was the ecstasy of the people. Had they not read the papers? Haven't they seen the polls? Don't they know that here was the least popular president at any time of a term of office since Harry Truman just 31 years ago? 

Well, the place was Bardstown, Kentucky, an old town incorporated just short of 200 years ago with many houses in the late Georgian colonial and Greek revival styles. It was here that a man named John Fitch came to live out a bitter retirement after fruitless years in the north trying to get financial backing for his wild idea of a steamboat. He thought it would be just the thing to use on the rivers to take people west. He did manage to launch one on a regular run between Philadelphia and Trenton in New Jersey. He made a slim profit and he turned it into building a bigger steamboat to run on the Ohio. This one, however, was smashed to bits in a storm and people said, 'You see?', and there was no more money for Fitch's new-fangled contraption. 

He retired in Kentucky to a piece of land that he'd bought on a surveying trip but, when he got there, he found it was overrun by squatters and he lived out his last years brooding in a cottage and floating a little model of his steamboat on the town creek. In the summer of 1798 he took a dose of poison and that was the end of him. In the flesh, anyway. When it was too late, he was handsomely honoured in stone. The most prominent thing on the courthouse square of Bardstown is a monument, the John Fitch monument erected by order of the Congress of the United States to acknowledge John Fitch, not Robert Fulton, as the true inventor of the steamboat. 

So Fitch's statue, a symbol of the late eighteenth-century view of energy, was there for President Carter to see on his sprawling way through. Not far away, of course, are the coalfields. The president has said that pending much more research into nuclear power and pending much more money for solar energy, the first weapon for America to use in trying to counter the OPEC countries must be coal. There are only 7,000 people in Bardstown. It lies closer to bluegrass country and tobacco country, but not far off are the mines. Kentucky's economy would be in a bad way if it were not for coal and tobacco. 

So, considering that Mr Carter has just fired the head of the Health, Education and Welfare Department, who begged everybody to stop smoking, and considering that the coalminers have been given a green light to mine away and think of the environment later, Mr Carter had picked, or somebody had picked for him, a guaranteed sympathetic audience. He didn't, of course, identify it as such. To the vast majority of Americans who've certainly never heard of Bardstown, it was just the first, random rural stop in his great new crusade to take the government, and take himself, to the people. 

Bardstown, however, I think it's fair, at least not malicious to point out, was a cagey, safe choice as a receptive audience. What was most interesting to me about this first leg of the 1980 Carter re-election campaign – and he's now quite frank that that's the main purpose of this coming safari through – he swears, every State of the Union, what was most interesting was his attempt to answer the simple questions of ordinary people. He said, a couple of weeks ago, that he was going to take the presidential press conference out into the hinterland and not keep it for ever as a monopoly of the Washington, the White House press corps. That's good. It's certainly something that hasn't occurred to any other president. And it will be more than good, it will be wonderful if he can explain the burning issues in language the ordinary voter can understand. 

This has been an aching chasm in the relationship between the president and the people, ever since, I should say, the departure of Harry Truman from the White House 27 years ago. After him, Eisenhower came in with military jargon and strangulated syntax and then, Kennedy, with a curious sort of graduate-school jargon. Nobody ever wrote a memo for him. They prepared 'position' papers. He didn't call on advisers to help him decide anything, they were invited to get involved in what he called 'the decision-making process'. 

Old Lyndon Johnson, God knows, was earthy and pungent enough in private, but like many earthy and humorous Southerners, he couldn't trust himself in public not to fall into some gutty Anglo-Saxon. So he adopted an air of piety and an ecclesiastical vocabulary to go with it. Mr Nixon’s tortuous ambiguities, whenever anybody begged for a plain answer, became a byword. And Mr Ford, it always seemed to me, talked in public like a very shy man, a German maybe who'd learned the language late and was having to watch his step through all our tricky tenses and conjugations. 

Well, we thought at first, certainly after Jimmy Carter's acceptance speech before the Democratic convention in 1976, we thought that we had, at last, returned to a type of president big enough and intelligent enough to try to translate the government jargon into a language that, as the Bible says, would be 'understanded of the people'. But he'd been in the navy and he'd been a nuclear physicist and he was soon surrounded by committees and commissions and advisers who talked about energy resistance quotients, instead of how much can we save, and – I swear I heard this the other day from a big government man – what is his calculated longevity factor? Which means how long is he going to live? And since the first year, Mr Carter, I'm afraid, has at times almost sunk without trace in a bog of government prose. 

I hope... I hope nobody will think I'm being facetious about this, or worse, riding a pedantic hobby horse. The bigger our democracies grow, the more we have to talk to millions of people by whose consent we govern, the more pressing it is for democracies' leaders to be able to make hard issues vivid and plain to the people. Before we look at how Jimmy Carter's doing in this most testing, and I think most telling, gift of government, let me remind you with an example or two what I mean by 'the gift of tongues' – not what is now called 'a capacity for communication'. 

Franklin Roosevelt is the first pro who comes to mind. Of course like any president, like any prime minister, he couldn't possibly sit down and compose all his own speeches. He'd get a draft written out for him, look it over, send it back with the single word of advice in the margin, 'Simplify'. And when it was done, he went through it and cut out the fat. The most famous example I can recall was a speech he was going to have to make, a fireside chat he preferred to call it, to the people at a very tricky time in America’s relations with Europe. The Second War was on and America was not in it and many millions of Americans were watching the White House very warily to see that they weren't going to get in it. 

When Britain was in extreme peril after the fall of France and desperately need ships' bottoms, Roosevelt thought up the expediency of 'Lend-Lease'. We won't send them ships for free, he said, we won't be open to the charge that we're coming into the war on their side, but we'll lease some American-owned bases in the Western hemisphere and we'll lend them some worn-out destroyers. Nothing wrong with that, surely? He sold the idea to the people and the Congress by blue-pencilling his writers' drafts and writing in, in his own hand, a homely metaphor. 'When your neighbour's house catches fire,' he said, 'you surely would hand him your garden hose over the back fence. Well, that's what we're going to do for Britain.' It may have been over simple but it did seem the least America could do without committing herself as a fighting ally. People understood it – and it worked. 

Go back to a much more dramatic and splendid example. I hardly dare mention it for fear people will switch off when I say we're looking at the American Civil War, about which thousands and thousands of volumes have been written on what it was about, especially about its relation to slavery. Abraham Lincoln had no doubts about the issue and he faced, with almost brazen bravery, the rude alternatives. He may have been worshipped later as the great emancipator but, at the time, he said in public, 'If I could save the Union and free all the slaves, I would to it. And if I could save the Union and free no slaves, I would do it. And if I could save the Union and free some slaves and not others, I would do it. The thing is to save the Union.' 

Well, the first question the people of Bardstown put to Mr Carter was right on the button. 'Mr President, why don't you try to do something about the big oil companies that are making so much profit?' Mr Carter said, 'I don't want to mislead you all just to get a round of applause. I believe that the profit motive is the best incentive to provide the services we need, but we've also seen the oil companies misuse the profits they've made. If they take the profits and invest them back in the exploration and the production of additional oil and gas in our country, then I've no objection to their profits being made. But what they've done is to buy restaurants and motel chains. They tried to buy circuses. They bought department stores. They've taken profit from oil and gasoline and not put it back in the ground.' 

Why hasn't he said this before? In all the wordy hassle over whether a windfall profits tax means a profits tax or an excise tax on revenues, nobody in the government has put it on the line as simply and forcefully as that. The people cheered. No wonder. If Mr Carter could leave the White House and live in a motor caravan and travel the country and talk like that for the next 15 months, who knows what miracles might come of it? 

We might even have Jimmy Carter as president in 1981.

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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