The Helmes-Burton bill - 19 July 1996

When I left the United States three weeks ago, President Clinton appeared, for the first time in his re-election campaign, to be slipping seriously in his high ranking in the polls, because of three scandals which, just then, were monopolising the public media, if not the public interest.

Those scandals which I will simply name without again going into are the muddle, and perhaps worse, over the Clintons' land deal in Whitewater in Arkansas. The alarmingly graphic account, wonderfully imaginative, if untrue, of Mrs Paula Jones about a meeting with the then Governor Clinton, years ago in a hotel suite, and the gross sexual approaches she alleged he made to her. Mr. Clinton's masculine image, incidentally, was never Simon Pure, as President Kennedy's was, when he went into the White House. It was only years after the assassination that the whole nation learned that he, Kennedy, was, in the words of a former ambassador to Britain, sensitive, ruthless and very highly sexed.

Well by now, at this stage of Anglo-American history, I think the public, in both America and Britain, have grown to be more tolerant, or perhaps just more resigned to sexual shenanigans among their rulers. But it was the third scandal that seemed to affect more directly Mr. Clinton's popular standing. The revelation that the White House, somebody in the White House, and the president is always held responsible for anybody in the White House, had quietly got, from the FBI, confidential files on about 600 people who formerly had had the privilege of a pass to enter the White House. Of course, among them were hundreds of Republicans, season ticket holders so to speak, from the Reagan and Bush days. The White House has no authority to do this. And you don't need a vivid imagination to realise what any administration could do with a file on the private life of anybody with political clout.

Well, that was three weeks ago. When I got to England, I found that not only Britain but the whole of Western Europe was absorbed by something quite different. Was up in arms about a bill that had gone through Congress which I'm sure the average American voter had never heard of. It is the Helms-Burton bill, which astonishingly penalises all foreign companies doing business with Cuba and which, more astonishingly still, President Clinton has signed.

The chief author of the bill is a famous Republican, Senator Jesse Helms. Does the name strike a chord? We've talked about him several times down the years and he's an interesting and engaging man. A courtly southerner whose personal manner, his humour and courtesy, belies his public belligerence as an inveterate old-time southerner, whose great hold on his state of North Carolina - he's been in the Senate since 1972 - is his unapologetic devotion to the hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians whose livelihood depends on the state's main crop. Tobacco. Few industries in the United States have taken such a battering as tobacco in the past few years. The news is never good for its trade association, the Tobacco Institute which soldiers on through many congressional hearings trying to arrest the flood of overwhelming evidence, from many nations, about tobacco's ill effects on the human.

It all started 30-odd years ago with the Surgeon General's first report, which led to medical warnings on cigarette packages. And then the banning of tobacco advertising on television and radio. Then suits, legal suits, by flight attendants on airlines about how chokingly at risk they were being cooped up all day in those smoke-filled flying coffins. Which led the airlines, this country's airlines, all of them, to ban smoking anywhere in, above, the continental United States. This complaint spread to wives, business associates, factory workers who didn't like smoke. And that spawned a widespread concern about what was called "passive smoking." Statistics, not frankly immensely impressive about the numbers of people who had contracted emphysema or lung cancer from living in the same house, eating in the same restaurant with a smoker.

Congress held yet more rounds of hearings and scientists were called on both sides to determine exactly how lethal was this passive smoking, which is not smoking at all, but being in the vicinity of a whiff of the stuff, which I remember the late, the very late, King James I, 392 years ago, called: "This filthy and noxious novelty." On passive smoking, by the way, King James said: "Shall not the husband be ashamed to reduce thereby his delicate, wholesome and clean complexioned wife to that extremity that she must also corrupt her sweet breath or else resolve to live in a perpetual stinking torment." It was a rhetorical question but it gets a lot of indignant answers today from wives, fellow workers and, of course, lawyers.

And now evidence for the prosecution without end. A serious scientific study has just been published which concludes that what makes cigarette smoking at least as addictive as cocaine or heroin is exactly the same chemical element. Does Senator Helms recant and bow his head? Not on your life. He doesn't apologise, he never explains. He recently received some Vietnamese merchants - he, the lifelong communist hater – to promote a handsome tobacco deal. Now so far as Britain and the European nations and Canada and Mexico are concerned, the most significant, some say the most sinister fact to remember about Senator Helms is that he's the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It is a very powerful position. The chairman can stop, and in the person of Senator Helms, has stopped, the Senate confirming ambassadors that the president wants to appoint. You know the Constitution says that judges and ambassadors nominated by the president may take up their appointment only with the advice and the consent of the Senate.

As late as this year, there were I don't know how many countries which have lacked an American ambassador since Mr. Clinton's election. Because Senator Helms didn't like the nominees for one reason or another. So he just never called hearings of the proper Senate committee.

Now what's his bonnet bee about Cuba? He knows of course the president supports legislation about discouraging youngsters from smoking. And yet is eager to get as many votes as possible from the South which once used to be the Democratic stronghold but which since Eisenhower and Nixon has become the solid Republican South. Mr. Clinton, most of whose energies and insights are given over these days to the electoral count in November, has two regional preoccupations. He knows that if he is going to win, he must take the state with easily the largest gift of electoral votes, California. So that's why, since he was elected, he has visited California, I think close to 30 times. The other anxiety's the South.

There's one state whose inhabitants are, over the long haul of say 70 years, the one state that is said to be in the South but not of it. And that's Florida. It could be a mighty help to Mr. Clinton's re-election. Now what is the prevailing concern of Florida politics? There are two. First, old folks. Florida, for 60 more years, has been the favourite state to retire to. The headquarters of the American Association of Retired Persons is in Florida. It is one of the largest and heavily funded lobbies in the country. It's naturally against any reduction, any shaving gesture towards Medicare, the gorgeous, for old folks, system whereby every device of high-tech medicine and low-tech care is available to anyone over 65. At a very slight cost, Mr. Clinton has taken care of their vote by declaring that he will never reduce Medicare, unlike the cruel Republicans, who, in truth, intend to increase the budget for Medicare but by not quite so much as the Democrats.

The other preoccupation amounting to an obsession is in southern Florida where most of the Hispanics, the immigrant Latin-Americans, live, and that is to bring down the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro, the dictator, who, hailed as a splendid liberal 36 years ago, promised early elections which have never been held. So just as Europeans play up the remarkable achievements Castro has made in public education and health and don't mention, shall we say the regime's disciplinary system, so Americans play down health and education and play up the banning of dissent, the imprisonment and torture of political opponents and the rest. And Senator Helms is, of course, a ferocious anti-Castro-ite.

The most politically active of Hispanics of southern Florida are refugees from Cuba. Or sons and daughters, by now grandchildren, of men who fought against Castro and escaped to Florida. It's a powerful and very vocal group and it votes. I'm sure Senator Helms knew that he was giving a helping hand to the limping Senator Dole when he dreamed up this amazing bill, The Helms-Burton bill, which would punish all the foreign countries that do business with Cuba and proposes to forbid entry to the United States of certain companies and their members that use formerly American property that was confiscated by Castro. That proposal has outraged Europeans, and Canadians and Mexicans, more than anything. So what is the president to do?

He once denounced this bill and then signed it, when I suspect the effect on Florida's Hispanic voters was pointed out. I don't think the president anticipated the noise of the outcry in Europe. So what to do? How to get the best of both worlds?

He's decided to postpone enactment of the confiscated property clause for six months. By which time the election will be over. And if he gets back in, he can then, I guess, veto the whole bill. However, for journalists looking for real, deep motives, I wonder if Senator Helms thought up his bill after he heard that Fidel Castro has given up cigars.

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