Looking good on TV

We all know that the late President Truman, the day he installed himself in the White House, put on his desk in front of him a brass plaque which said, 'The buck stops here'.

It's a memorable phrase, admiringly remembered and quoted by politicians of both parties saying, as it does, with characteristic simplicity and bite, that in all serious matters affecting the government of the United States, responsibility in the end rests with one man, the president.

I have, myself, no brass plaques on my desk, only paperweights of various sizes and substances, but in a presidential year, I keep in front of me an imaginary plaque, inscribed with that bit of advice given to me many years ago by a British listener. I like to imagine him as a P. G. Wodehouse character. He wrote to me during a presidential campaign and said, 'Dear boy, do stop going on about this election. It's bad enough learning one's own form of chess, but quite hopeless trying to learn the American form in which pawns move both forward and backwards and there is no king and queen'.

Well, the thought of this rebuke keeps me aware that the politics of other nations are complicated and often dull, unless they directly affect you and your country. I don't suppose many English people cared a fig for the Argentine generals until they invade the Falklands, and whenever I go outside this country, I'm made aware in the first few days, with the newspapers and the telly, that the politics of America to most people are like some remote storm at sea, whose movement, if it doesn't threaten your own shores, is better left to the meteorologists.

But, since there are only two superpowers and, whether we like it or not, the fate of most of us is in their hands, and so who runs the Soviet Union and who runs the United States is always, at the very least, something we had better attend to.

For the past few months, I've made a point of rationing my talk on the election. Since we have only about six weeks to go to know who is to be the lord and master of us all, this is one of those times when we had better attend and catch up with the race. But, before we do so, there is – was – another race that has absorbed, saddened and provoked the curiosity of a great many people, I should guess, in many countries.

It was the race at the Olympiad for the 100 metres, the astonishing whirlwind stride of Ben Johnson, the thundering applause, the dismay, the goggling admiration of the American Carl Lewis. Then, the bombshell of the Olympic Committee's announcement that Johnson had twice tested positive for an anabolic steroid, that his gold medal would be passed on to Lewis, that Johnson would be banned from competition for two years and almost at once came the aftershock of the Canadian government's suspending for life the monthly payment he'd been getting.

Of course, everyone interested in sports has known or heard of a well-known athlete who has been suspected of, or suspended for, taking some sort of drug. In the past few years, several star American baseball and football players have been found to have a problem with the drug which still haunts and subsequently ravages almost every stratum of American society, from the slums of New York, Miami, Los Angeles through pockets of middle-class suburbia and up into the social stratosphere of Wall Street and the Jet Set – namely, cocaine.

Steroids are a special athletic case, or menace, and so long ago as the early 1950s, there were plausible rumours that Russian weightlifters used them to build up their muscles – literally. It sounds at first hearing like one of those drugs that, from time to time, are touted to the excitement of victims and the despair of researchers as cures for cancer, but the fact is that steroids of several kinds do build up muscle mass; that they can also do several sorts of harm is something the user may not discover for a year or two.

Many athletes believe that they enhance their performance. There's been no scientific proof of this, but in nearly all sports, confidence is the key to relaxed concentration and if the sprinter, the weightlifter, the tennis player, whoever, feels that his or her performance is going to be enhanced, there's a forceful emotional reason why it might happen. So, increasingly, in the past decade, athletes of all sorts have been taking steroids.

The Olympic Committee tested 9,300 participants and found positive results from only seven. One of them, alas, the fastest man on earth. Seven culprits in over 9,000 suspects, surely they're making a scandalous fuss of the whole thing? Not so. Reliable coaches, performers, athletic doctors, including the Olympic Tournament physician, agree that something like 60 per cent of all contestants in international games take steroids at some time. Which time is the question. There are many kinds of steroids, some taken by injection, others like the one Johnson took, a water-based steroid swallowed as a tablet. The time it takes for the body to expel all trace of a steroid varies with the kind, from 48 hours to ten days. Obviously most, if not all, of the athletes who take steroids and were to perform at the Olympics saw to it that they stopped using them well before they got to Seoul.

So the first question that came up was why would an athlete of Johnson's blinding eminence be so foolish as to use a steroid so close to the Olympic competition? His manager said, as we've all heard, that he was tricked into taking a soft drink by somebody unidentified. The committee, of course, went into this – they've heard it often before – but concluded unanimously on the basis of the lab tests that Johnson had been using the steroid for some time.

The only good to come out of this miserable humiliation is the publicity that has been given to steroids and the concern of doctors about their known dangers, among which a distinguished American doctor lists, today, cancers, as also benign tumours of the liver, hepatitis, cysts of the spleen, sexual disorders. These findings will be discounted, even ridiculed, by many athletes until they day they fall ill.

The one effect that athletes talk about is what they call 'steroid rage' – the fuelling of an emotional drive, of aggressiveness and a new determination, as they say, to win at all costs. At the cost, many of them will find out, of their health. The Johnson scandal, a tragedy for him and his family, may bring home to a worldwide audience the shock of the knowledge that steroids build up many more things than muscles.

Well, to bring you up to date briefly with the race for the presidency. Since the conventions, the general public complaint has been that both candidates have merely toyed with the issues, that the national shop window of television has made them and their advisers think up snappy one-liners, clever sound-bites which can be shown and heard in the 20, 30 seconds or so they're likely to get on the networks evening news of the world.

The fact is that television, both commercial and much more so the public, non-commercial, network have had reams of discussions with the campaign staffs about the issues and the press has devoted vast space to the candidates' own discussion of them. It must only go to show that the campaign managers are right in thinking that the great majority of voters get their news, their views of events, their judgement of the candidates from television.

Last Sunday, we had the first so-called debate and the fair consensus is that they pretty well tied. Mr Dukakis was as good as he was expected to be. Mr Bush was at least twice as good as we expected. What I want to do now is not to go into all the statistical surveys of the voter sentiments in each state, which I believe will determine the outcome, but to add a note on the comparative unimportance of the issues, at least, as we've learned from the presidential debates, since they started in 1960.

The first of several debates between Senator John Kennedy and Vice President Nixon turned out to be decisive. What was it about? It was mainly about the burning issue of the day, Quemoy and Matsu, two place names that 99 per cent of the 1960 voters would now have to look up in an almanac.

Quemoy and Matsu, two tiny islands in the Formosa Strait, just off the coast of China and about 150 miles distant from the island of Taiwan which, by 1960, was the China that the United States recognised as China, nationalist China. The Democrats, starting with President Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, maintained that these two islands, which lie as close to the coast of Communist China as Long Island does to Connecticut, should be the perimeter, the farthest edge of America's defence in the Pacific. It sounds grotesque today, but the determination to challenge the Chinese Communists at such close quarters, it may turn out, planted the seed of Vietnam.

Anyway, you will find no mention of Quemoy and Matsu in the best books written about the making of John Kennedy's presidency. What everybody remembers is that in that first debate, Kennedy looked young, confident, spry, handsome and very much on the ball. Nixon looked unshaven – he was – and sinister. The contrast gave a boost to the Kennedy campaign which sustained it to the end.

Now the issues today are far more serious and insistent – drugs, crime, the environment, childcare, the prisons, the budget – but we shouldn't be too sure that the candidates' discussion of these things is what will tip the scales to one man or the other.

It has been demonstrated that people listen with one ear and both eyes. They're looking for a man who looks trustworthy, who looks like a leader, who looks, whatever the issues, as if he could handle them. We positively shan't know who that is until the morning of Wednesday, 9 November.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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