Reagan's charm offensive

//on a glittering, cloudless day in the happy delusion that my eyesight is that of a 20-year-old. All the golds and lemons and scarlets of the fall, which burst on us two weeks after the fall is supposed to be over, have gone now. The foliage has turned to light yellow on orange fuzz surrounding the reservoir which shines like a sheet of mercury.

In the middle of it is a very rare sight. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more, snow-white pigeons are lined up in a single rank on a ledge or parapet, as if awaiting the arrival of the Queen or, at least, the President-elect. They're standing on the spillway of the reservoir which, not one in many years, appears above the waterline. This is a graceful and funny sight but it's an ominous one.

It means simply that New York City's water supply is at an alarmingly low level. The drought which started as far back as May goes on and on; the reservoirs of this state are well below 60 per cent of normal. Still, every day, we are pumping millions of gallons of water into the state of New Jersey across the Hudson River, for if our condition is parlous, that of New Jersey is dire. Over there the reservoirs are down to 38 per cent of normal and the weather bureau has issued the not-very-helpful observation that to bring things back to normal it would have to rain continuously for 78 days.

The effect of this more or less splendid weather may be depressing to industrialists and firemen but it's a deceptive tonic to the ordinary citizen. I say 'deceptive' because while most of us take good weather at its shining face value, few of us take it for what it's worth. It's worth millions of dollars worth of electric power and when the winter comes on and the sewers and streets begin to show telltale cracks and fires crackle and productivity dips in surrounding factories, most of us will just blame the mayor and he will go begging to Washington and the new regime for emergency millions, which a budget-conscious administration is loathe to hand out.

If things go on this way, the winter of our discontent cannot be far away.

Still, this is no time to be anticipating gloom and doom in the flush of Mr Reagan's honeymoon. As I talk, he's back saddling up his horse and galloping round the old corral on his ranch in California but, pretty soon, he'll no doubt be back in the house across from the White House which the government has put at his disposal as his working quarters during the transition.

Washington is still in a surprised daze over the visit of the president-elect and even liberal Democrats who were paranoid with despair right after the election are admitting that Mr Reagan established a rousing precedent and cut a very engaging figure. The president coming to Washington at all – since the days when Lincoln stayed in Springfield, Illinois and summoned friends and possible appointees to come trundling over the mud-ravaged highways a thousand miles or more to see him, to the day four years ago when Jimmy Carter set up his transition team in the school house at Plains, Georgia – the president-elect has always stayed home, as far away from Washington as possible. Unless, of course, he was Franklin Roosevelt who had good cause to think of the White House as his permanent Buckingham Palace since, after his first term he was president-elect in 1936, president-elect in 1940 and president-elect in 1944.

The Republicans, through those 13 interminable years of the Roosevelt presidency, shared, as a fear, what Roosevelt began to assume as an hereditary right. They were afraid he was going to be there for ever. So when he died, they took no longer than two years to put through, and the states eventually ratified, a constitutional amendment, the 22nd, which says quite explicitly, 'no person shall be elected to the office of president more than twice and no person who has held the office of president or acted as president for more than two years of a term to which some other person who is elected president shall be elected to the office of the president more than once.' And this meant, in its application, that since Harry Truman had three years as president after Roosevelt's death and then was elected in his own right in 1948, he could not run in 1952.

One of the by-products of this amendment – we're now slightly shocked to realise – is that General Eisenhower was the last two-term president. Before that, and saving some catastrophe like the Great Depression, two terms was a regular thing but since Eisenhower, it's worth a moment to recall, we've had a president assassinated; followed by Johnson, a president discredited; followed by Nixon, a president disgraced; followed by Ford, an emergency president defeated in his first try and now a president defeated by his own record.

We noticed four years ago – and are now kindly forgetting – that Jimmy Carter got to Washington by deriding Washington as the seat of a huge and wasteful bureaucracy, a nest of chattering and incestuous pros who couldn't see the woods for the cosiness of their own little tree, people cut off in their compound from the people and the country. He came in proudly as an outsider, as one of us who would drive the money changers from the Rialto.

This was very... very stirring at the time. It brought to life the old Frank Capra movie, 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington' in which Jimmy Stewart played Jimmy Carter, appalled at the size of the federal bureaucracy and shocked to his simple marrow by the wheeling and dealing of the senators.

Incidentally, I once discussed this movie with a veteran speaker of the House, Mr Sam Rayburn of Texas. 'Disgust' is not quite the right word, the veins of his neck swelled like snakes as he thought of it and his outrage seemed to flash searing signals from his billiard, bald head. 'It was,' he said, 'an abominable libel on all the fine men in the Congress. Anyway,' he concluded, 'what could you expect of actors? Men who,' he said, reaching for the old southern word for a wig, said, 'they get their teeth done over with blue-white caps and wear a scratch.'

I wonder how he'd feel about the arrival as president, God help us, of a genuine professional actor? I should guess that he'd feel a whole lot better about Ronald Reagan than he would about Jimmy Carter because, by a wry irony, it was Jimmy Carter who acted like Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan who's been acting like a professional politician respectful of other professional politicians.

Mr Carter, I remember commenting at the time, alarmed us pretty soon by carrying his suspicion of Congress into practice. In the first few months he would have almost nothing to do with it. He even made appointments and drafted bills without ever consulting his own party leader in the Senate, let alone the opposition leaders, which is the first thing a president must do if he's going to get any bills at all through Congress.

Well, as I say, Mr Reagan has surprised everybody by coming to Washington at once not with the demeanour of a new commanding officer, but with the modest air of the new boy, eager to learn the ropes. Not only did he pay courtesy calls on every branch of the government and sit down with his majority leaders in the Senate and the House, he saw and talked with the new – Republican, that is – chairmen of the important committees and the outgoing Democratic chairmen, he had Senator Kennedy of all political enemies, over to the House. He suggested the guest list for a private dinner given for him at the home of a conservative columnist, the brilliant George Will and, though you'd certainly expect that to be an occasion on which, after all these courtesies, he'd want to relax with his own cronies, who should have been there but Robert Strauss, the national chairman of President Carter's election campaign.

He also went off to various departments of the government to see how they worked and to thank the doomed and departing Democrats for their efforts in smoothing the way for his own men. When it was over, a tough old Democrat who had taken a steadily baleful view of Reagan and his candidacy, said the whole performance was one of 'nothing but grace and civility'.

We must, of course, enjoy this while we can. Already there are rumblings of disillusion, grunts of resentment, from... who do you think? From those far flung evangelicals who command, or intimidate, a vast nationwide television audience and call themselves 'the moral majority'. Much was made in the European press and television of the power and threat of this old-time religion, of its gaudy showbiz preachers who define their own political prejudices as the only true Christian positions and who hint at fire and brimstone not merely for unbelievers, but for Christians who don't believe in their own hot recipes for salvation.

Unfortunately, Mr Reagan who has shown a disposition toward off-hand cordiality with strangers said, at a rally of evangelicals once, that his view of the Creation was that of Genesis. He didn't say which of the two versions in Genesis he preferred and the evangelicals took this as a resounding confirmation of their hope that Mr Reagan was a man after their own heart and mind who would reign and rule as a born-again evangelical Christian with a bias against all others.

Of course it was a preposterous assumption and dangerous only if these many millions of primitive thinkers could mobilise great political power. Well, Mr Reagan has been busy backing away from them and from any other group, right, left, centre, religious or secular, that claims to be his main constituency. So far he's given healthy signs that he regards his constituency not as the conservative right or the Republican moderates, certainly not as the 26 per cent of the people who voted for him, but also as the 25 per cent that didn't, not to mention the 48 per cent of the citizens who, to their shame, voted for nobody.

The moral majority, in particular, got a firm but private word last week from some of the president-elect's top advisers. This is not YOUR administration.

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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