Haig questioned by Senate committee

We're all notoriously forgetful about the weather, except the weather that's plaguing or delighting us at the moment. Ask a hundred New Yorkers what is invariably the rainiest month of the year and 99 of them would not even know there is such a month. The hundredth would be a keeper of records in the weather bureau who would tell the rest of us that, over the past 50 years with few exceptions, May is the wet month.

I don't know what the record is for maximum sunshine over any extended period but I don't remember a stretch of three weeks like the one we've just gone through since before Christmas, when the sun came up at its appointed time, dazzled us till five, five-thirty in the evening and went down like a blood orange without ever having been threatened by a wisp of cloud. Diamond-bright days, which make people on the streets look good and feel good.

I hasten to say that, in this country, looking well and feeling well have vanished into the Victorian dictionaries. The sports commentators have seen to that and sportsmen, in their post game interviews, even such as Tom Watson, the number one golfer of the day, a university graduate in psychology no less, now says without a blush, 'I drove good, I hit the irons good, I putted good'. To say, at this late date, I played well, I putted well, would sound almost as prim as rewriting the lyric of that old song of the 1920s and warbling, 'Isn't she sweet?'.

What I haven't mentioned is that the diamond-bright days were accompanied by icicle-cold temperatures. New York at, say, 20 degrees with a Canadian wind whistling in from the north-west, can feel like the last days of a polar expedition but while that's been the prevailing wind, it's been mercifully gentle. The pain for many people, for the old and the poor especially, has come indoors. It's one thing to walk around briskly in eight or ten degrees which has been frequent; it's another to come into a house or a flat which has no heating. A fire in a grate would be about as much help as a lighted match on an iceberg and partly because landlords are hoarding scarce oil against the worst of the winter which is yet to come, partly because too many niggardly landlords are saving money, there've been some grievous stories of old people stuffed in their beds with all their clothes on and wishing they were dead.

Since Christmas time, the city's complaint bureau, a regular institution of the city government, has had nearly 200,000 protesting calls about lack of heat in spite of a fact – which the mayor has boasted about – that New York City has a budget of $7 million for its so-called 'heat emergency', a far more generous provision than that of any other city in the country.

As I talk, grey days have taken over again and a near heatwave of 30 degrees, only two below freezing, which means that snow is on the way, which also means a happy thing at this latitude since snow signifies warmth indoors and out.

We're all wondering and guessing just now what sort of weather Mr Reagan will have for his inauguration on Tuesday, the famous 20 January. I remember the first one I ever attended in 1937 when Washington was drenching with rain and the only face that could be seen emerging above the lily pads of a thousand umbrellas was that of President Roosevelt and the only sound, rising like a clarion above the stair rods drilling against the umbrellas was the emphatic high tenor of Roosevelt himself carolling, 'I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.'

Kennedy hit the coldest January 20 in the history of Washington and I have an indelible picture in my mind of him standing there with his hair looking frosty, his nose red, his breath pouring out like an exhaust while old Robert Frost, the ageing New England poet, fumbled with the manuscript of the poem he was reading, the sun stabbed at his failing eyes, the wind slapped at him, the white light from the snow was too much for him and he finally gave out and tried to recite, stumblingly, what he could remember, his white hair blowing in sloppy waves against his forehead.

This memory is stronger far than anything that Kennedy did or said and, for inquisitive reporters like me, the excitement of anticipation in Reagan's inaugural will not be the number of the Cadillacs, the glitter of the cavalcade, the high-stepping thighs of the drum majorettes and all the rest of what promises to be a Hollywood production, but some, small, unscripted incident. The sort of thing that only an imaginative film director, a Chaplin or a Hitchcock, would zoom in on and make vivid for life at the expense of the grand, the predictable, spectacle.

I've said nothing so far about the essential preliminaries that have been going on which every president-elect watches with anxiety. Most of all the hearings of the appropriate Senate committees held, as the Constitution requires, to listen to the testimony of all the cabinet appointees and decide by a majority vote whether they are or aren't fit to be confirmed in the office the president-elect has nominated them for. I've not done this because I'm going to try and hold to my promise to ignore the rumours and the fears of many Democrats, in particular, about how an incoming cabinet office might behave. Let us wait and see how they do.

And I'm not unaware of the merciless piece by a Washington columnist declaring it improper, to put it mildly, that Mr Reagan's appointee as attorney general, the chief law officer of the nation, saying it was improper for him to attend the 65th birthday party of a man whom the columnist calls 'a friend of mobsters' and whom the New York Times describes as 'long an associate of organised crime figures'. That man is, as you must know, Frank Sinatra; the columnist, the irrepressible William Safire, and he's no liberal but a stout conservative and a former speech writer for President Nixon.

Mr Safire went to a party at which the wounded Mr William French Smith, the attorney general-designate, accused Mr Safire of firing a cheap shot. A little later on, the unflappable Mr Safire elbowed up to a man he impishly described as 'a party goer who was recently elected President of the United States.' I mentioned in sadness that I'd felt it necessary to zap his lawyer in print. 'Yeah, I know!' Mr Reagan responded, 'We've heard those things about Frank for years and we just hope none of them are true.'

I don't think this shot would have been fired were it not that Mr Sinatra is going to be prominent in the festivities next Tuesday. What riled Mr French Smith and made him lose his customary cool was this sentence in Safire's original column: 'It was bad enough that Ronald Reagan turned to Mr Sinatra for fundraising help during the campaign, bad enough that he attended a Sinatra anniversary party last summer, bad enough that he selected Sinatra to organise entertainment for the inaugural gala on January 19, but the involvement of the designee for attorney general in the rehabilitation of the reputation of a man obviously proud to be close to notorious hoodlums, is the first deliberate affront to propriety of the Reagan administration.'

Well, certainly this is not to be brushed off with a shrug. Mr Sinatra is now under investigation by a federal grand jury in New York but he has not yet been indicted, much less convicted and nobody has gone on more than I about the mischief, a mischief inherent in the grand jury system, of condemning a man before he's been charged. Let us wait.

The other well publicised and, at times, crackling preliminary to the confirming by the whole Senate of Mr Reagan's cabinet was the five-day ordeal of General Alexander Haig testifying before the Senate foreign relations committee to maintain his fitness to become the next secretary of state. In the very beginning, General Haig made no bones about the relative power of the secretary of state under two sorts of president.

One, in which a strong president is himself the main architect of foreign policy – Roosevelt, Kennedy – and has his secretary of state on hand to carry out his wishes. And the other, a more passive president, nobody wanting to say just now a weak president – Eisenhower, Ford – who leaves the creation of foreign policy to the secretary, to John Foster Dulles, to Henry Kissinger.

General Haig made one thing clear. He expects to be the creator and the performer – the boss. This being so, he gave an enormous preliminary statement, a speech written in the amazing jargon of the Pentagon, a clanking procession of polysyllables that sounded as if it had been written by a German sociologist sufficiently unfamiliar with English as to fall back on a direct translation from the German.

When he was through, he was questioned about his views on nuclear war, 'a profound change in the nature of conflict', about the Soviets, 'they are never influenced by Western rhetoric, they are influenced by Western deeds', on the Middle East, relations with China, the defence contributions of the NATO allies which, he said, 'in manpower, at least, were far more impressive than those of the United States'.

He went exhaustively and with rattling verbosity into everything. The Democrats, who are now a minority on the committee, prodded him for days about his relations with Nixon during Watergate and tried and failed to get 100 hours of taped conversations between Haig and Nixon released. The general's view of the disgraced president was kindly. It was, indeed, that of Mr Nixon himself. He had made mistakes but no mention of high crimes and misdemeanours or the justice of his inevitable impeachment. The general would not judge the character of Mr Nixon. He left that to God.

The big liberal guns have gone from the committee, defeated in the November election. There was no one there to say, 'General, in your opinion and according to the Book of Genesis, do you think that Adam and Eve did wrong or did they just make a mistake?'

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

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.