No Exempt Categories - 10 September 1999

The other day I had to go to that towering hospital I described recently as a majestic modern pile wittily touched up with tiny Gothic arches.

I'd been there before, in the past nine years many times - three times to undergo what we used to call an operation and now call a procedure.

Well, the other day was a short call for a brief check-up. But however brief and trivial your business and however often you've been to the place and no matter how many dozens of copies or versions of your entire medical life history they have in their data banks, every time you run into a new member of the staff - from a surgeon down to, it seems, a janitor - you have to go over the whole story all over again.

At the desk - "Can I help you?" was a small grave old black lady. Yes, she had me down for an appointment. However, "Let's begin," she said. "Name? How do you spell the first?"

That took an excruciating, I should guess roughly, 30 minutes, in truth it was about 20 seconds. And on and on.

All of which 10 doctors and five residents - interns - innumerable odd specialists and the hospital main file have on hand at the touch of a computer.

"Mother's maiden name?" asked the old lady. Well, last time I remember being asked that was 55 years ago before going off on the last Roosevelt campaign swing. The questioners then were the Secret Service. Need I say the answer was the same - Mary Elizabeth Byrne, B-Y-R-N-E.

Then, I remember, I left the White House with a new identity, my identity ever afterwards with the Secret Service. It was not given to me in any form except verbally. They said: "You are Mary Elizabeth Byrne Lusserna."

Lusserna? Well the second question the Secret Service men had asked was - "Make of watch?" Mine - not my mother's - was Lusserna. Very neat. I imagine, in fact I was later assured, there wasn't another Mary Elizabeth Byrne Lusserna in the world.

I thought of this little incident when the grave little lady at New York Hospital asked me: "Next - father's name? Mother's date of birth?"

"May 1st, 1879," I said.

"Father's date of birth?"

"November 20th, 1875."

"Your date of birth?"

"November 20th, 1908."

She wrote it - wrote it, notice - painstakingly and then asked the astounding question - "You on Medicare?" (I should say that everybody in the country over 65 in whatever condition, penniless or multi-billionaire, is on the federal healthcare system - better should be called sickness insurance - which pays, at least, 85% and sometimes all of your medical expenses.)

"You on Medicare, Mr Cooke?"

"For 25 years," I replied with equal gravity.

"How come?" she asked.

I stifled my instinct for deep sarcasm and yielded instead to superficial sarcasm and said: "Well, 65 and 25 makes 90 - right?" She fell back, almost over, in her chair and said: "Lordy, Lordy!" It was nothing but the truth.

In the same week that they gave me my date with the hospital there arrived a portentous looking document, a call for jury service - they come about once every two years, though, sometimes, I think, it was in the, I don't know, 1960s I was forever excused from jury duty as a correspondent who had covered trials and therefore might have suspicious ideas about the police.

My wife and I keep getting these duty calls and we go on filling in the long forms which go on and on before they ask why you should seek an exemption. There used to be two automatic categories - for citizens over 75, and for women who simply described themselves as housewives.

That when being a housewife - devoted to bringing up children - and the much more exhausting chore of the daily maintenance of a house or apartment, in those days housewife was, if not a saintly, at least an honourable profession.

But since apparently even the courts have decided that yes you can have it all - home, children, cooking, cleaning, an outside job - why not jury duty? So automatically they print in bold letters on the form - "There are no exempt categories." And at the end they ask you why you claim an exemption. And you write in - "Old age." And the form goes back, and that's the end of it for another two years or so.

But I'm told the courts, the state of New York courts anyway, maintain that they, as they used whimsically to put it, "entertain no exceptions". An entertainment made startlingly clear this week when a New York city jury came to the end of hearing a suit against a landlord which had been filed by a tenant who said that a sudden change in the water temperature while he was taking a shower gave him severe burns and, not to elaborate further, ruined his marriage.

The man wanted $7m in damages. He didn't get it. The jury threw out his suit and the foreman had one sentence for the subsequent surge of reporters.

"It renewed," he said, "my faith in the jury system."

Surely this remark sounds extremely pompous. So it does until you learn who the foreman was - he was the mayor of New York City.

I hope, at this late date, it's not necessary to say, but I'll say it anyway, that the mayor of New York is not a ceremonial position. He's usually described as the second most important executive in the nation - the first being, of course, the President of the United States.

Indeed he has some powers - of veto, of initiating legislation by decree, of blocking the city council - which the president wishes he held over Congress.

Nobody can remember a time when a sitting mayor of the city had been called for and responded to jury duty. Bully for Rudy Giuliani, some people cried - notably people who mean very much to vote for Mr Giuliani next year when he runs for the coming vacant Senate seat from this state.

Mayor Giuliani has not positively said he's going to run nor has his likely opponent - Mrs Hillary Rodham Clinton. But she may do so any minute because the Clintons have just bought, with a close friend's money, a house in a leafy suburb.

They're about $5m in debt to lawyers for various legal procedures you may recall. So they don't exactly have cash floating around with which to buy houses.

How they meet the $9,000-a-month mortgage on the Dutch colonial house they live in is not explained. But they do have a lot of loyal friends - both in Wall Street and Hollywood - where friendship puts its money where its mouth is.

Anyway we expect Mrs Clinton to declare she is the United States Senate candidate any moment, now that she has fulfilled the necessary qualification in running, either for the House or the Senate - namely, you've got to live in the place you represent. No such thing ever in this country as the "safe seat" to be installed in.

I suppose Mayor Giuliani, busy as he was with a hundred city problems - not the least of which is contriving a budget of $30bn annually - could easily have claimed exemption from jury duty. But on the contrary I shouldn't be surprised to hear that he'd contrived it.

Mrs Clinton, who has been whirling all over this state - which is the exact size of England - to show how much she knows about its problems, she is, at least, not yet eligible to serve on a jury. Mr Giuliani was just making the most of his privileged position as a New Yorker born and bred.

All the jurors said afterwards that he was unpretentious and friendly, never took charge.

"When we took breaks he took a break, when we drank coffee he drank coffee.

"He acted not like the mayor," one man said, "but like one of us - a regular citizen."

Golden words which, of course, got out on all the media. And it gave his supporters and the media a fair occasion to recall that during his reign crime in New York City, of every kind, has decreased dramatically - especially homicide, down almost 20%.

Now this may not to be the credit of the mayor, just as the state of the economy may have very little to do with the man in the White House. Nevertheless it is the public perception that the man in charge is responsible for every good and bad thing that happens on his watch. Just as there's an iron rule of American football - every time a team loses it's the coach's fault.

Talking of crime, two happenings in the past month or so. While the voters are already, 18 months early, being asked to guess whether or not Governor George W Bush of Texas is most fit to take care of the federal budget, in his own state he's being asked to explain the massive figure in the Texas state budget of $240m that was spent, last year, on the medical care of criminals in Texas jails - including, it was pointed out, double by-pass heart surgery.

When I read some of these astounding American statistics I often wonder if the listener says to herself/himself - "I wonder what the figure is in my country?" In British jails how much do you spend to renovate the hearts of first class criminals?

And in the Middle Western state of Iowa quite another criminal problem. About four inmates who belong to the Amish sect - the Amish, who I know have always greatly interested the English, are a religious sect of Mennonites who became independent in the 17th Century and first arrived here, in Pennsylvania, in 1714.

They are there still and have small country settlements in 14 other states. This happened in Iowa. They are more ascetic even than strict Mormons. Of course no alcohol, coffee, movies, they ride horse-drawn buggies - no automobiles, no electricity, no telephones, water from wells, no buttons - only hooks and eyes. The men all wear beards but not moustaches which is considered a badge of the military.

Well four of them were jailed as vandals of a neighbour's farm. They arrived in prison in May but early last month the warden begged to have them released and so they were, two months before their time was up. Because they came to enjoy the place - the electricity, the telephone, the running water, the television.

"I thought," said the warden the day they went home, "we'd better get them out of here. We were beginning to ruin them."

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