Ford shakes up team

If broadcasting had started in Dickens's time, I imagine that by now we'd have some immortal catchphrases for certain familiar voices. The temptation to speculate what he might have called one's non-favourite politicians is so strong that I desist in the interests of avoiding several libel suits.

These bad-tempered thoughts come to me by way of self-protection. By now I fear that many of you – between yourselves I hope – are referring to me as 'the Croaker' but that's what you get when you have a regular broadcaster who has irregular habits of travel. First, in early October, we had brilliant early fall days during the week but at the weekends, ceaseless rains, so that this year the fall was more like an English autumn – ripe and russet, a season 'of mists and mellow fruitfulness', as the poet said, not the blinding light and the trumpet blast of screaming scarlet maples and gold. So, every other weekend, people started hacking away and the doctors prescribing antibiotics, people going into drugstores asking for cough suppressants and getting all sorts of coloured fluids that taste of menthol and eucalyptus but unfortunately suppress nothing but the desire to eat. 

The cough medicines that are sold over the counter in the United States are absolutely forbidden to contain the only drug that stops the coughing mechanism, namely codeine. It's an interesting point that, in England, you can buy a number of patent medicines that do contain it, maybe because October and November, in England, can be so dank and clammy everywhere that the country resounds with hackers and croakers and so releasing codeine for general consumption is no more than an act of mercy. 

Anyway, as I was saying in between pantings, I no sooner got over the first flu than we went off to Mexico City which these days rates either number one or number two, I forget which, as the smog capital of the world. It's an interesting list. I think it starts with Jakarta and then it may well be Tokyo or Mexico City, then Los Angeles and so on down the list to New York. The first effect of Mexico City on me was of a hand gripping my chest, followed by watery eyes and a rough throat. It has always had its quota of poor people but with the coming of what we unfailingly identify with progress, namely industrial development, there has appeared industrial poverty. 

There's a stretch of road, ten or twelve miles or so, on the north-west fringes of the city that begins with a two-mile line-up of factories belching steam and smoke and gases. And then closer into the city, for about twenty minutes, you go by barren tracts of ground, not a blade of grass to the horizon, piled with trash, edged with indescribable rows of hovels – the whole landscape like some ghastly overdrawn Italian film satire on Western civilisation. I found it the most depressing city landscape since Calcutta, the main difference being the people that in Calcutta are so listless that many of them literally give up and collapse on the ground. In Mexico City they are evidently infected with the common belief that industry spells progress and on those brown, bare, rubbishy fields, what in Lancashire they used to call crofts, nobody seemed depressed and the children were hopping around like fleas. 

Well, after the smog of Mexico City, next stop was down on the Pacific coast, Acapulco which is the Palm Beach-cum-Miami Beach of Mexico. Three hundred years ago it was the chief Pacific port of the Spanish for their astoundingly prosperous China trade. Then it went to sleep for three centuries or more and woke up after the Second World War when a few travel agents promoted it and then the jet set discovered it and now, in the wake of the fashionables, the rich, the not-so-rich and the package tourists, the high-rise white hotels by the water, in the town the endless stalls of arts and crafty rubbish, 'Pretty Colombian statue of Quetzalcoatl, lady? One dollar!' But even a 20-storey high-rise is a doll's house up against the towering mountains that encircle the noble bay. It's a stupendous setting by day or night. 

More to the point, for the Croaker who's just ceased from croaking, it was 88 degrees by day with drenching humidity, then you fly back to New York where you expect crisp days of late fall and get, instead, last week, days in the high 70s, humid and smoggy. All that's needed to stir the old phlegm is a flying trip to London where you come on 45 degrees and grey skies. Anon, a bleary sun weeps for an hour or two and the doormen and cheerful shopkeepers say, 'Another beautiful day, sir!' And you say, 'It is?' Give me a gram of codeine or I'll cough you out of your shop!' And then back to New York which is finally settling down to the sharp days of early winter. 

So, here I am and, in between croaks, what are people talking about? Mainly Gerald Ford and Justice Douglas. It will be no news to you that Mr Ford is in trouble. It seems an age since the mere presence in the White House of a demonstrably decent and honest man seemed like God's blessing on a greatly troubled nation. Ten days ago the president shook up his cabinet, most notably firing his Secretary of Defense and taking away from Dr Kissinger, the Secretary of State, his collateral position as chief adviser on national security. 

Everybody and his brother knew that Dr Kissinger and Mr Schlesinger had been at daggers drawn over not so much the amount of arms we should pile up against the worst happening with the Soviet Union, but you might say the public belligerence with which the arms build-up should be conducted. Dr Kissinger found it difficult to arrive in Moscow with the dove of peace tucked under his arm while Mr Schlesinger, in Washington, was, so to speak, breathing fire and smoke. Everybody knew this. But when Mr Ford fired Mr Schlesinger, he practically wept tears over the beauty of Mr Schlesinger's character, declared that Dr Kissinger, the apostle of détente, retained exactly the power he'd always had, which was blatantly untrue and, in effect, gave no reason whatsoever for the shift. 

And then, to any Anglo-American – that's to say anybody with a lively interest in both countries – there was another fascinating question, 'What about Mr Elliot Richardson who, after the shortest term ever known, I suspect, as ambassador to Great Britain, was being recalled to become Secretary of Commerce?' An intriguing shift. It's been hinted in the past that Mr Richardson, who'd enjoyed the distinction of being fired by Mr Nixon, was himself ambitious enough to seek some day in the future the presidency itself. This rumour was scotched when Mr Richardson went to London for while there are these days several springboards into the presidency where formerly there was only one – the governorship of a state – the big white building in Grosvenor Square is not one of them. 

So maybe people surmised Mr Richardson had been given the nod to come home, take over commerce for a while and see where he went from there. Judging by Mr Ford's now raging determination to stay in the White House, I shouldn't judge that Mr Ford thinks of the commerce department as a presidential springboard either. So why is Mr Richardson leaving London? To this fascinating question Mr Ford, at a press conference, gave what has now become a standard reply to all precise questions – a loose string of phrases about ability, decency, competence and how to qualify for the presidential team. The answer was that Mr Richardson, like Dr Kissinger and the kicked-out Mr Schlesinger, is also a splendid type. 

It makes you yearn for the days when Harry Truman told Henry Wallace to keep his trap shut or else, and then fired him. Or when he got out that order to the last Roman general of the United States and announced that MacArthur was stripped of all his commands. Asked why he'd done this, Mr Truman told an aide, 'The son of a... so and so thinks he's Genghis Khan. Well, he's the United Nations commander, or he was.' 

Where does Justice Douglas fit into all this? William Orville Douglas is, I'm sure, not a name that you've conjured with. Forty years ago he was one of the youngest men ever to be appointed to the Supreme Court – 36 years ago, to be precise. He was one of the rip-roaring, young liberal lawyers that Franklin Roosevelt brought to Washington – a learned, courageous, irascible, unrepentant liberal as the word was understood and enacted into law in the battling days of the New Deal. Throughout his time on the court, he has been 'the' champion of a liberal interpretation of the constitution. So liberal, in fact, that he has refused to define obscenity, has given the greatest possible latitude to public dissent, at all times, trusted the individual citizen, however bland, however wild, to act in the best interests of the republic. 

Well, today, Justice Douglas is a broken man. He'd been on the court longer than any man in history. Last year he had a severe stroke and, this term, he's been wheeled to the court sessions and while other judges asked questions of lawyers, he was seen to sit, listless and frozen, as if off in a trance. Was it vanity that kept him from resigning? It was not. From his point of view, the court was already too heavily loaded with conservatives, appointed either by Eisenhower or Nixon. If he could hold out till next November and see Gerald Ford defeated and a Democrat in the White House, then the new president might replace him with another liberal. But he couldn't hold out and the flesh couldn't hold out and this week he resigned. 

Now Mr Ford has the chance to appoint a new man. Being, however, the new Ford, the president whose every thought and move looks to his popularity next November, he's said to be thinking of corralling the women's vote by appointing the first woman justice. He'll also see how the country takes the infamous anti-Israeli vote in the United Nations. Maybe appoint a Jew. Maybe appoint a Jewish woman. Maybe a Jewish woman conservative from California if all the polls show that the women's vote, the Jewish vote, the conservative vote and the California vote are in peril. 

This is the way government of the people is thought of one year before the next opportunity to get yourself back in the White House.

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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