Carter's inauguration preparations

To me, one of the marvels of our time is the nightly satellite photograph of the United States that's shown on television – taken from, what is it, 60 miles up – that shows, at a glance, the movement of the weather systems across 3,000 miles of land.

Before it came in we used to see a lonely man, or a pretty woman, standing in front of a simple map with squiggles and numbers on it, and the man, or woman, pointed with a stick to this region or that and said there was hot air coming here or rain sweeping across there. And in the late-night news we still have the lonely people with their pointers, but earlier in the evening the satellite pictures give you, in a single shot, what old de Tocqueville called 'the grand arrangement' of the natural features of America. 

Over Christmas, I sat and watched these pictures with my grandson and I'm sorry for him. He will absorb them in time, he will come to know exactly what they're showing, but never having known anything else, he will not be impressed or exhilarated. The cynics, you know, used to say that the only good thing that came out of the space programme – the only good thing for you and me – was the frying pan that didn't require butter or any other fat to keep what you were frying from sticking to the surface. 

Well, the satellite weather photograph seems to me to be a magical bonus. It's simple and dramatic and accurate. You see vast patches of cloud, or sunshine, or storm patterns, where they are and where they're going to be. However, they change from day to day and their record of long-range prediction isn't noticeably much better than it was before we knew that satellites could go outside the gravisphere and take needle-sharp pictures. 

So, this week, we had to fall back on one of the most dependable of old wives' tales or farmers' tales. Weeks ago, some time early in December I think, the word was given out that the squirrel's fur was unusually stubbly this year and what that portended was one of the coldest and fiercest winters for many years. And while the Space Centre at Houston, combined with the United States Weather Bureau, can tell us what's happening today and is pretty certain to happen tomorrow, it was the voice of the squirrel that spoke up and told us what was going to happen in the next three months and, so far, the squirrel seems to be right. 

The Chicagoans woke up the other morning to the coldest day they'd known since 1888, which is still recalled in pictures and books as 'an arctic blockbuster'. It was 11 degrees below zero and about 200 miles to the north and west, a town in Wisconsin registered its all-time low temperature of 60 below zero. That's 92 degrees of frost and something impossible to take in by, I should think, anybody who's not a forest ranger living in a weather station on the top of some howling mountain. 

A young French girl dropped in here the other evening. She's on her first visit to the United States and she had bravely padded through the snow and tied her scarf around her ears and bent into the wind, and gone off on a tour of some of the famous beauties of New York. She said she didn't know any big city could be so cold, though we've been practically basking in a sunny 15 degrees above zero. 

Well, these first massive winter storms, which usually come in from the north-west, sweep across the mid-west and blanket the north-east, have this time expanded down into the south-west and given the lie to such old folk wisdom as that contained in one line of the 'Dallas Blues', 'That Texas town,' as Fats Waller sang, 'that never seen ice or snow.' 

Now, Washington DC, what the TV and radio commentators love to call 'the nation's capital' is, by the likes of Floridians and Southerners in general, a northern city. But even though it's only 200 miles south of New York, it's on the edge of the South – Virginia's just across the Potomac River and by our likes it is a Southern city in its habits and mores and, most of the time, its weather. In a normally mild Washington winter you can play golf most days, one of the few recommendations I can think of for living in Washington. But, a week ago, Washington had five or six inches of snow and since they're not used to it and don't have the vast equipment of snow ploughs, railroad-track burners and the rest which are routine to the west, the mid-west and the north-east, they tend to go into the sort of panic that hits London when a couple of inches lie on the ground. Schools close, trains are slow, Parliament closes down, congressmen are late starting their committee hearings, terrible! 

Well, as you can imagine, there's much anxiety in Washington today about the outlook for next Thursday when James Earl Carter, or possibly Jimmy Carter, will take the presidential oath and move into the White House. By the way, I'm exceedingly curious to know what the Chief Justice will call him as he asks him to raise his right hand. 'Do you, Jimmy Carter, swear that you will protect and defend the Constitu...' – it's possible. He insisted in his heyday in Georgia on being known as Governor Jimmy Carter. Still, it'll be a shock. Imagine the first Chief Justice facing George Washington and intoning, 'Do you, Georgie Washington...!' And think of some of the others! 'Do you, Jimmy Madison... Do you, Teddy Roosevelt... Do you, Dick Nixon...'. That seems all right, somehow. 

Anyway, I was talking about the fears for another, big, continental storm that might come sweeping across the country and petrify the crowds at the outdoors inaugural ceremony. In 1961, when Kennedy was inaugurated, they had brilliant, but icy, weather and this year all it would take to produce chaos would be the sort of storm that descended a week ago. For Jimmy, James Earl Carter, has invited 300,000 people to the inauguration. I mean actual engraved invitations have gone out to so many. But this doesn't get them in to any event, any of the six inaugural balls, for instance, that will go on in the evening. It's simply an invitation to go there and stand out in the cold and perish. Considering that the alternative is to stay home in a warm room, lie back and watch it all on television, including eyeball-to-eyeball shots of the people at the six big dances, that does seem like one invitation worth a regretful reply. 

However, in other ways, it's beginning to look as if the inauguration itself will be Mr Carter's first big political hurdle. The inaugural committee seems to have suffered a gigantic foul-up in the method, if any, of choosing the guest list. There are 117,000 people, all vaguely defined, except by themselves, as VIPs, who've been invited to the swearing-in, outdoors. Some of these invitations went out by cards, some by phone, some by a genial, 'Sure, come along! We'll put your name down!' But the really posh event to get in on is the big concert given on the eve of the inauguration, next Wednesday. One of the top men on the inaugural committee wasn't sure this weekend whether Mr Carter himself had been invited. 

And you can imagine the snarling and in-fighting that's going on to see that out of those 117,000 people at the swearing-in, YOU will be selected to be one of the exclusive 500 at the concert. The Mayor of New York City, for some reason, hasn't been invited to it. Hundreds of people, thousands, blacks especially, who worked on the Carter campaign and feel they did a lot to put him where he is, are angry that they've not been invited to attend what was always proclaimed as 'the people's inaugural'. In fact there's a committee been formed. It calls itself an 'ethnic coalition' and claims to represent Italians, Eastern Europeans, Japanese, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and it's complaining that the inaugural eve concert, which has an assortment of dancers, film stars, comedians, classical and pop singers, doesn't represent that diversity of American life which the people in charge boasted they intended to celebrate. 

A spokesman for Greek Americans said, 'It's very perplexing. We supported him. And I'm sure Carter would be appalled at the treatment we've been getting!' The chief representative of the Japanese-American Citizens' League is also appalled. These, and other groups, have sent protesting telegrams to the president-elect and the inaugural committee quickly decided to throw in some Japanese dancers at the end of the concert. The Japanese-Americans now complain that this was a last-minute deal, 'We got tagged on at the end.' 

Well, obviously, somebody has to get tagged on at the end, but though there is one black comedian in the concert, what all the minorities must notice is that the list of the chosen performers has a resoundingly WASP-ish ring, especially for a country where the WASPs themselves are very much a minority. Names like, in fact the names of Tomlin Prince, Chase, Sills, Cash, Newman, Woodward, Davis – even Wayne. None other than old Duke, John Wayne himself. A surprising choice when you consider he was a Ford man at the end, having been a stout Reagan man before that. 

This may all sound very petty to you and me, and we can forget the rage of mere socialites and celebrity snobs who just want to be seen in there, but the anger of the ethnic minorities springs from the hope they were given that, at the inauguration, they would be seen as visible symbols of that 'plural' America, it was called, which was so tellingly stressed in the campaign. It could put President Carter under suspicious scrutiny when he comes to declare his policies on such things as school bussing, integrated suburbs, housing, small business loans, and all the means whereby blacks and other minorities hope to take the plunge into the main stream of American life. 

And if all this wasn't enough, the clothing industry has let out a groan. They've heard that Mr Carter means to wear jeans in the White House. They recall how Kennedy's refusal to wear a hat anywhere doomed the hat trade. They see the suit, or even the slacks and coat, becoming as obsolete as ruffs and pantaloons. 

Well, from Thursday on, President Carter will live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, and if you have any complaints of your own, I'm sure he'll be horrified to receive them.

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.

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