The Clinton re-election campaign - 11 July 1997

“What did the president know and when did he know it?” has become an historic American line almost as famous as Patrick Henry’s, “Give me liberty or give me death”, or General MacArthur’s announcement that the Second World War was over, “These proceedings are closed.”

This past week there opened in Washington another senate investigating committee, which might well come to put the same challenge to the president: what did he know and when did he know it?

It’s an investigation that will decide whether this year, next year or any time before the next presidential election, whether Mr Clinton will still be President of the United States.

This is not the investigation into a badly-fumbled real estate deal that Mr and Mrs Clinton were involved in years ago when he was governor of Arkansas, an investigation that’s been plodding for two years or more through a maze of documents, bills, records, memos, depositions, testimonies, which has sent two close friends and Clinton colleagues to prison – colleagues who were in on the deal.

The prosecutor’s tireless efforts to pin a criminal act on the Clintons has become a joke, a sort of American parody of Bleak House. And in truth, it has seemed to rebound and give a lift, if anything, to Mr Clinton’s popularity.

But the senate investigation that opened last Tuesday is quite another and graver matter. I’ll tell you very briefly what it’s about and then skip the ocean and talk about something else, since I was not in the United States last week but busy scrutinising other international affairs whose leading performers were not Clinton, Chirac and Blair, but Hingis, Sampras and, briefly, Henman.

Back to Washington for a moment and the investigation that could be the most damaging to a president of the United States since the dreaded Watergate, which we talked about a month ago on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of that silly burglary that caused, for the first time, an American president to resign in disgrace.

This new Senate investigation finds in the chair a man and a name you’re going to get to know very well. Some of you may already know his face since he’s appeared as an actor in three movies and been in a television series. But Fred Thompson is not there impersonating anybody but himself. He’s now Senator Fred Thompson. He was elected last November from Tennessee.

It’s very rare for a freshman senator to become the chairman of a Senate committee, but the old rules of seniority no longer apply whereby whoever’s been in the Senate longest, usually southerners, automatically become committee chairmen when their party takes over.

Mr Senator Fred Thompson was chosen because of a distinguished legal background and, uniquely, one made in the most famous probe of modern times: namely Watergate.

He was the Republican legal counsel on the committee who not only was in charge of gathering the evidence, but also of doing much of the questioning of the White House gang – excuse me – staff. He is at once a freshman senator and a veteran investigator of very serious matters involving the President of the United States in financial wrongdoing that may turn out to be criminal.

Briefly then, the job of the committee is to trace the source of many millions of dollars illegally contributed to the last presidential campaign, especially looking into the huge contributions to the Clinton campaign that were solicited or were illegally, quietly contributed by overseas (mainly Asian) businessmen and banking groups.

Also how and why did so many people get a flight on the presidential airplane in return for hefty contributions to the Democratic Party – money, it’s alleged, secretly transferred to the president’s reelection campaign? Now that was the first and crucial charge against President Nixon. Not the plane ride, but the use of large monies not reported by the Nixon’s committee to reelect the President.

The most glaring bit of sleazy publicity, which the White House has had a very blushing time denying, is the great numbers of people, White House guests they were called, who accepted an invitation to sleep in the sacred Lincoln Room at the White House at $50,000 a throw, or flop.

Of all the charges, this is the one that is least sinister, but one that has most shocked the ordinary citizen and most delighted the columnists and cartoonists.

Well there’s going to be lots of time, maybe a year or more, in which to follow the Thompson committee in the search for evidence to charge and doom the president.

From this sombre scene, let us now fly 3,000 miles in retrospect to sunny Wimbledon. One day I was there; two days. There was an overall illumination which could be ascribed to Old Hannah. There was an old negro – sorry, African American – work song I picked up and recorded once on a Florida fruit farm where the pickers bent for hours in a blinding sun, looked up and sang for me (magnificently) “Go down Old Hannah, don’t you shine no more.”

It’s a song rarely heard last week at Wimbledon, but there was the last splendid Saturday when the pretty, 16-year-old Martina Hingis proved that nobody in tennis whom Chris Evert says she can recall, can lose a set with more aplomb when she appears to be asleep but is actually testing out her opponent’s game, and then quietly reassembles, revises her own game, takes over and wins 47 times in 48.

I know she sets some people’s teeth on edge with what looks like a cocky little smile, her occasional mini tantrum and general pink-cheeked chirpiness. She sets my brain cells awhirl with her well-disguised genius.

What has this to do with a Letter From America? Just, just trying to help solve a problem that baffled many Brits who hadn’t seen her before Wimbledon. But in a Letter From America, there’s another, a very big point that is relevant. It’s the astonishing and lamentable behaviour of the crowd during the Henman matches, most particularly against the defending champion, Richard Krajicek.

There was a time when most of the audience would have shushed into shame anyone who cheered a fault, an error on the part of the opponent of the man you were rooting for. In the Henman-Krajicek match, there were as many thumping cheers for every mis-hit of the Dutchman as there were for every point young Henman scored.

This, I think, is something sad and bad, and nothing can be done about it. It just shows that a lot of fans have come into tennis whose jingoism exceeds their knowledge of the game.

On the other side of the ocean, a similar wave of nastiness has fallen on any golf tournament in which the young Tiger Woods is playing. Something we never expected after this new talent arrived on the professional golf tour was that for some unexplained reason – he’s black, he’s young, he’s modest, he’s amazingly talented – for some reason, he has attracted the gaze and the Sunday afternoon's fixed attention of many thousands of people who know nothing about golf but marvelled at the sheer winning-ness of his performance at Augusta and go now expecting him to win every week, which nobody in history has ever done, or every month or more than half a dozen times in a season.

Now playing along with Tiger have been fine and famous players who have suddenly had a new and unpleasant experience of hearing themselves joshed, if not mocked, and their errors slightly applauded.

This is weird and new in America where golf is, by the way, a game of all classes; 90% of golfers play on public courses. Nevertheless, the etiquette of golf has been as well observed as it is today in Scotland. But now it’s beginning to be simply defied, wherever Tiger plays, in very small outbursts of boos, not quite the roaring cheers against Krajicek, and it’s come as a shock to such notable victims as Colin Montgomery and Greg Norman.

What can be done about it? Again, I believe nothing. If that’s the way human nature in the mass is beginning to behave, we have to go back to Edward Gibbon to lament the time when the same roaring boorishness set in during the annual Roman games.

But here, in America anyway, I am reminded hearteningly of one place where something was done.

Down in beautiful Augusta, Georgia, at the Masters, ooh, 30 more years ago, as some of you know that tournament was invented by Bobby Jones, and when he died the spirit presiding over it was his, the only golfer in history (except now Tiger Woods) known and idolised by millions on both sides of the Atlantic who didn’t know the difference between a midiron and a midwife.

One final day at Augusta, the deciding contest was between Arnold Palmer, the idol of millions, and his then fat, un-idolised young opponent, one Jack Niklaus. Came a hole or two where three or four, no more, of Arnold’s army shouted discouraging remarks – “Miss it, Fatso” was one – at Niklaus. Nobody had ever heard anybody shout anything over the hallowed ground of Augusta.

I was sitting in with the ageing and crippled Bobby Jones in his cottage, watching on television. He was greatly hurt. The following year he dictated a sentence to be printed on every ticket of admission to the Masters. It said, "Applauding the mistakes of any golfer is no part of the tradition of the Masters. We hope not to see any repetition of this stage behaviour and that the guests at Augusta will retain their reputation for knowledge and good sportsmanship."

Every year, every ticket of everyone entering the gates at Augusta bears that reminder. And so far, it has made people mind their manners.

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