A Precautionary Bit of Advice - 26 January 2001

A short, despairing note from a friend in London, asking simply: "How are you bearing up under the strain of having Bush for President? We watch appalled from this side."

Well you don't have to be Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes to deduce two certainties from this note.

One: The writer is a liberal.

Two: He/she doesn't listen much to my talks - certainly was not paying attention to the last talk of the old year, which was a kind of salute I give once every four years to the new man - whoever he is - and a precautionary bit of advice, offered chiefly this time, to liberals: Don't groan, don't predict, wait and see.

I then reminded the "appalled" of how they would have felt, along with the liberal press, the morning after they heard of the nomination at the Democratic Convention in 1932 of the governor of New York.

Edmund Wilson: "A boy scout."

Walter Lipman, the most revered commentator of his day: "He is an amiable man who would like very much to be president but has no discoverable qualifications for the office."

He was Franklin Roosevelt.

I mentioned also the groans which were delivered by many more types than liberals in 1980 when a B film actor became president.

That was the European label for him among the intelligentsia and shows only how unintelligent the intelligentsia can be.

Let me read you a bit I wrote about this B film actor years - 13 years - before he ran for president. I was in California.

"In this the first state of the union in more than numbers all the chronic social, industrial and rural problems of America today are here in acute and aggressive form.

"He has handled them against howling opposition with such imagination and good order that he good fairly claim powerful credentials for presiding over the United States."

This was the man who, quite apart from turning into an A film actor, more than any other single human being - according to the Soviets' Mr Gorbachev - set off, at Berlin and Reykjavik, the charge that blew up the Soviet Union.

The name was Reagan.

He sits today in the hills of California in the dark night of dementia, never having heard of Berlin or the Soviets or indeed of the people who live and care for him.

There was one other most dramatic example I couldn't get in last time of an undiscovered great president who appalled, or at best bewildered, most Americans on the day he raised the hand and, with the widow of Franklin Roosevelt looking on, became president.

"A day," he later wrote, "when I thought the sun and the stars had fallen in on me."

No wonder, it was the second week in April in 1945, on the brink of victory in Europe.

The crippled giant who for almost four years had run the war, with the transatlantic giant Churchill, dropped dead in Georgia and in his enormous shadow tottered in this small, wiry, unknown man with thick Dr Strangelove glasses.

All we knew about him was that he was a Missouri farmer who'd gone into haberdashery and failed, and been wangled into the Senate by a malodorous Kansas city boss who later went to jail.

True, the man was chairman of a Senate committee, but since its job was to investigate fraud in defence or war contracts its meetings were closed and not allowed to be reported - one of the last things Roosevelt wanted was the identities of war profiteers and criminals to be publicised while the war was on.

I was at the new man's first press conference that April and on the way into the Oval Office I joined the disparaging murmur of other correspondents.

"What a disaster for the country - a failed haberdasher - after the awesome, the majestic, Roosevelt."

A man from Time magazine, as I recall, snapped at me, quite rightly: "This is no time to knock the guy. Lord knows he needs to be built up - right now."

Well three quarters of an hour later it was we, the press corps, who needed to be built up and injected with a little adrenaline.

We were bowed and bent and drenched from a hailstorm of sallies, rebukes, taunts, mockeries and forthright corrections in a very boisterous press conference.

There was for instance some scandal brewing which might require the president's testimony and a reporter wondered if the president would accept a subpoena.

The President snorted: "You'd better go and read up what Mr Jefferson had to say when they offered him a subpoena. Next!"

He gave quick, direct, snappy answers to everything, never hesitated to say "No comment" or "None of your business".

By the time we swooned out, we left not a little, failed haberdasher but a rather terrifying sergeant major.

It took us a year or more to recall or learn that he'd been a strict captain in the First World War and survived the nightmare slaughter of Passchendale.

Many years later, when he'd left the White House to another soldier, his secretary of state told me that before the outbreak of the Korean War the president recited a long history to prove to his cabinet, from the earliest Chinese warlords to the League of Nations' failure in Ethiopia, why the United States must take the United Nations into war.

"He had forgotten," said the secretary, "more history from the Mediterranean basin to the peninsulas of Asia than all of us together had ever known."

I hope it's unnecessary by now to tell you his name was Harry S Truman.

On the other hand I'm happy to think I was not alive during the presidency of the first of my American heroes.

George Washington may have earned the title of father of his country but James Madison was the true father of the American system of government of the Constitution.

His vast scholarship about forms of government - their merits and their flaws - his unique gift for guessing how far human nature could yield to how much discipline, his insight into the nature of government:

"Government begins," he declared, "with the recognition that men are born to disagree."

Therefore it's no tragedy, it's a challenge, to see the conflict of different factions, all pressing to have their way, but yielding to a liveable compromise.

Government, he said, is "ambition countering ambition."

"Is Mr Madison saying," asked one delegate to the constitutional convention, "that the basis of good government is human frailty?"

Mr Madison replied: "I know no other."

The Constitution of the United States laid out the separate powers of the states, of the judiciary, of the president and of the federal government, and it can be made - with a lot of wrenching - to apply to all the problems of today because of the foresight and commonsensical genius of James Madison.

He was a pathetically bad president.

And how about the departing president, Mr Clinton?

The first thing to notice about him is that he refuses to depart.

There is a tradition, reaching down to the beginning of the republic - a tradition, you might say, of manners simply - that having seen the new man sworn in the ex-president quietly leaves by a side door, takes a flight, or is driven - he still has a bodyguard - usually to his home town, goes into decent and silent retirement.

Mr Clinton broke the tradition by making a public speech in Washington after the inauguration of President Bush.

He then held a two-hour rally of friends at the airport and then flew to New York, having invited 10,000 Democrats - cronies, backers - to gather at Kennedy airport. Because of atrocious weather only a thousand showed up.

Mr Clinton introduced them to his wife - the new junior senator from New York - and while the inauguration parade was going on in Washington and was being televised all over the country, she stood before a microphone and made a political, almost a campaigning speech.

This whole performance was called by some people "feisty", by others "tasteless" and by restless Democrats, a necessary sign that Mr Gore's failed campaign had led him, unwillingly, to forfeit his title as titular head of the Democratic Party.

Another tradition of failed candidates but made necessary for Mr Clinton as soon as possible, even during the inaugural parade, to give a public sign that he was going to be around the enliven and lead the Democrats.

And after all he'll be living in Washington with the senator in the Georgetown mansion he - or a friend - has just bought and so he will always be on hand to bring advice and good cheer to the Democratic Party in Congress.

His last official act was to sign over 170 pardons for various miscreants, who had either served their time in jail or otherwise deserved to be lifted out from under the threat of further legal action.

The most conspicuous of these lucky ones was a Mr Mark Rich - the victim of 40 counts of fraud, tax evasion and dealing in oil with the Iranians during the hostage seizure which could constitute a violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act.

He was indicted here and summoned for trial but he's had the prudence to stay in Switzerland for the last 17 years.

Both political parties and the entire press were boggled by this particular pardon and searched for a possible justification until the fact was recalled that Mr Rich's ex-wife gave over a million dollars to the Democratic Party and Mr Rich's lawyer is a former White House Clinton lawyer.

It's said that Mr Clinton stayed up night and day during his last week exercising this legal power, which very few presidents do.

It's a power that's allowed in between administrations to issue executive orders having the temporary power of law.

Most of them will fall on the shoulders of President Bush to overturn, with the help of his party, in the new Congress.

It will be a very tedious job, taking away valuable time from new crises that have arrived, like California's electricity shortage.

The decline in the economy, which under Mr Greenspan's prodding, has made the Democrats decide on the tax cut they scorned throughout the past year.

Once President Bush can lift this new and previously unknown burden he can then give full time to the burden of his own presidency and then we can truly report how we're "bearing up".

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