Peace prize for Sanchez

A close friend of mine, a newspaper addict who gobbles up everything about politics, sports, literature, opera, has just come back here after a month in England and, to my astonishment, he wanted me to tell him about Judge Bork. He said that the whole time in London, mostly, he'd seen nothing in print about what many people regard as the most important public debate of our time on the way American society is to be governed.

The only thing he'd heard was my first talk about a month ago on the significance of this debate when it was just about to begin. Well, last week, I'd meant to comment on the end of it, but luckily while I was still on the air, I remembered other times, other great issues, which appeared to be decided, but which overnight took a wholly unexpected turn, or, as I put it then, I recalled the danger of polishing off your report on a game ten minutes before the whistle had blown.

All reporters on American politics should be warned by the famous election night in 1916 when, by the time the eastern states were reporting their votes, it became very clear that the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, had won handsomely over the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, even though California had yet to be heard from. About two in the morning, however, all the results were in. A Washington reporter telephoned Mr Hughes and heard an irritated voice at the other end. It was Mr Hughes's butler who said, 'The president has gone to bed and cannot be disturbed.' Said the reporter, 'Better wake him up and tell him he's not president!'

Well, last week, I caught myself just in time. I'd just heard that an actual majority of the Senate – 53 of the 100 – had declared that they would reject President Reagan's nomination of Judge Bork to fill the existing vacancy to become the ninth justice of the Supreme Court.

There was never the slightest doubt that the vote on the Senate floor would be anything but a formality. In fact, there seemed at this time last week no possibility of the matter going to the floor at all because, when the Senate Judiciary Committee, which holds an open investigation into the fitness of a judge to go on a federal court, whenever the committee votes him down, the automatic procedure is for the nominee to ask the president to withdraw his name. When I got up from my talk, that's what everybody expected and that the thing was all over. But, I did say 'maybe'.

And within 24 hours, not only did Judge Bork not withdraw his name, but he made a short, grave appearance at the White House and said that while he had no illusions that the vote on the Senate floor would go his way, he wanted as a matter of principle to see the traditional procedure be followed. And so this week, next week, after a floor debate, then the great debate will be all over and when that happens, will be time to talk again, but this time about the conduct and the substance of the hearings, the arguments for and against the elevation of this remarkable judge and why this was and deserves to remain one of the historic American events of our time.

You'll be vastly relieved to hear that we're not going to keep a count of the men who've been tearing all over the country for months preaching to the voters and have this past week announced – surprise, surprise – that what they're running after is the presidency.

But I should mention one because certainly, and I think we can say this time, certainly, he's going to be with us at least up to and through the Republican convention in New Orleans next summer, and he is Vice President George Bush. And he is, at the moment, easily the favourite candidate of Republicans around the country as distinct, for instance, from the former general, Alexander Haig, who believes passionately that the country needs and wants him, but the wanting part has so far occurred to only five per cent of the voters.

The interesting thing about Vice President Bush, at the moment, is that he has all the qualifications which 30, 40 years ago would have been just right for a conservative Republican candidate – an easterner born into a Connecticut family of modest wealth which shrank from ever talking about money, summer house in Maine, Episcopalian, automatically off to Yale, reminded by his mother never to talk about what he'd done at sports but what the team had done. In short, privileged, well-bred eastern Establishment. Just the type which, for generations, the Republicans had looked to to carry the banner.

But, as one commentator remarked this week, 'Bush's native political tribe, the eastern Establishment wing of the Republican party, is nearly extinct today.' And it's true. The money and the power, the power to choose and elect a Republican has passed from the north-east to the south and the west and even though young Bush became a war hero as a fighter pilot and then took off for Texas and the oilfields and went from oil equipment salesman to oil lease trading, he is still, to most of the country, seen as an eastern preppy, a gee-whiz Yale man – the days long gone when that type was seen as an asset to the party.

So Mr Bush gets out in his shirtsleeves among the Iowa farmers to show he's one of them. He chews on tacos and enchiladas among the Mexicans of Florida and California to show he's one of them. We shall see as the hectic months go by whether he can achieve the feat of overcoming the liability of being what was once the chief asset of a Republican candidate.

It's not often that the Norwegian branch of the Nobel Institute, the committee which awards the Nobel Peace Prize, drops anything so garish as a bombshell. Even though the committee, like it's larger counterparts in Stockholm, is sworn not to leak its list of nominees or publicise its discussions, enough politicians, scientists, literary people and so on, have a pretty shrewd idea who is being considered for the big prizes. And with the Peace Prize, one or other of the floating rumours about the likely recipient is apt to be true.

In 1964 I recall a Southern foundation which itself sponsors prizes in journalism commissioned a television film to be made in Sweden, with a swift clip from Oslo for the Peace Prize, about the Nobel prizewinners of that year. The film was telecast only a day or two after the ceremonies. In those days there was no satellite, but what the Southerners, who sponsored the film, hoped you wouldn't notice was that they'd decided to skip the Oslo ceremony, which they figured might embarrass the Southern viewers.

And you know why? Because they'd heard that the winner of the Peace Prize that year was a black man, the Reverend Martin Luther King. And so it was. That, I should remind you, was 23 years ago.

But this year, I don't believe anybody, not the recipient for one, guessed who would get the Peace Prize. He was chosen only, I believe, during the past month, long after the February deadline for nominations. He was, as we all now know, a man very few of us had ever heard of a year ago – the 46-year-old president of Costa Rica, Arias Sanchez, who was elected only last year.

He was given the award because he was the initiator of the Central American regional peace plan which was signed in August by Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. It pre-empted, you'll remember, a plan of President Reagan's.

It takes into account other regional upheavals than the main one between the government of Nicaragua and the rebels known as the Contras. It affects guerrillas in at least two of those countries who conduct their operations from neighbouring territory. It bans such operations and bars all outside aid, calls for a general ceasefire in all regional conflicts by 7 November.

In the meantime, it asks for an end to political arrests and imprisonment, amnesty for political prisoners and the lifting of press censorship. In Washington, the impact of the peace plan has been almost exclusively partisan. There are onlookers and commentators, liberal on the whole, who say, 'Give the peace plan a chance' which means suspend new aid to the Contras for the time being. These voices do not come from people who are involved either in the negotiations or in party politics.

President Reagan is, understandably, miffed by the Nobel award because it's come at a time when he's trying to drum up support for another 270 million dollars worth of aid, including military aid, to the Contras or, as all the Republicans say, the freedom fighters against the Marxist government – which it is – of Nicaragua. He says asking the United States to stop outside aid is all very well, but how about stopping Soviet and Cuban and other Eastern bloc aid to Nicaragua.

The Nicaraguan leader, Daniel Ortega, has recently allowed the most serious opposition paper, La Prensa, to be published again. Mr Reagan says it's a mere token liberty. How about political prisoners? There are certainly some awkward provisions in the Arias peace plan, awkward because that main prohibition of foreign aid to rebel forces applies to the United States but not to the Russians helping what is – like it or not – an established, elected government. Awkward, because Señor Ortega refused to negotiate a ceasefire with the Contra political leaders.

Need I say that the Democrats are untroubled by any such contradiction. They are delighted by the Nobel award. For them it is a dignified slap at President Reagan and seems to sanctify their resolve to deny him any further military aid to the Contras.

Said their leader in the House, Mr Jim Wright of Texas, in suitably shocked tones, 'Why, I cannot conceive of providing any military aid in a time of peace!' 'Amen!' say the Democrats.

'What peace?' say the Republicans.

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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