Revenue enhancements and the Nixon files - 10 February 1989

For once I don’t know where to begin.

At my elbow is a pile of newspapers up to my chin, an inventory of news on everything from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, from abortion to Zaire, from the huge public outcry which defeated the 50% pay rise that Congress was about to give itself – without the embarrassment of a vote – to the coming automatic, but genteel, row over the new president’s new budget, from the war diaries of a Japanese marshal who was close to the Emperor Hirohito, to the private memoranda President Nixon addressed to his family and advisers, from the heart-breaking complexity of treating AIDS to a man who is suing a medical researcher to get back from him as a valuable piece of private property, his spleen, which was removed in 1976.

This treasure trove of news and comment is nothing new, especially when I am as I am now, in San Francisco, because I can get up in the morning and find on the mat outside my door not only the San Francisco Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal but also America’s two best and fattest newspapers, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and – because of the eight-hour time lag with London I can have, if I want them, that day’s London Times and The Independent and The Economist.

As I say, the temptation to go on a news jag or bash is always there. Mostly I resist, because this is my holiday town and only once a week do I feel obliged to scrutinise rather than scan the American news. The purpose? None other than to help you, shall I say, know what to think.

However the reason I found myself for three days this week holed up in my hotel with a sniffle was a rare reason, nay it was unique. It began the morning I woke up and saw the banner headline on the Chronicle: “Bay Area Gets the Big Freeze”, and the story began “A numbing gust of cold air from the Arctic ice box set record temperatures through northern California yesterday".

I should say at once that the San Franciscans use the word ‘Arctic’ very much as Londoners do since they have a mild climate, in fact a Mediterranean climate, and just now it should be around 60 degrees. So Arctic to them means any weather below freezing, 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

This time the word was inevitable because the whole country is still reeling from the news from Alaska which in the last week or two has endured temperatures lower than any ever recorded on this continental land mass.

A high-pressure system sweeping in from Siberia, which is not an uncommon thing, got however trapped over Alaska and intensified with the result that some northern villages registered 88 below zero Fahrenheit, that’s to say 120 degrees of frost.

This appalling Alaskan system moved quite suddenly east, across the top third and the middle of the country, so that one night we saw people sunbathing in Montana and Nebraska in unprecedented 70 degrees temperatures and the next night they were muffled to the eyebrows in 20 below freezing. On the west coast here the system ended to the north in Oregon but the 800-mile vertical stretch of California to the south got a whisk of its petticoats as it flounced east.

So what do you think? Last Tuesday was the coldest February day in San Francisco ever – and their idea of total frigidity is 31 degrees, one below freezing. That is, however about 30 degrees below normal. I don’t remember ever coming out here in February and not playing golf in the low 60s though the hazard in February is rain, but there’s been very little of it and three times on brilliant days my gang and I called the club and the pro said "It’s 37 degrees with a 25-mile-an-hour north wind – there are just four strapping young guys out there".

However I persuaded a doctor friend to try it and see if the pro had told the truth. He had. The doctor, by the way, is built like a lean American footballer and is a comparative stripling of 60 summers, or Februarys. We played five holes and came in.

There was an old droll fellow I hadn’t seen in a year. I extended my hand and he foolishly took it. “My God," he screamed, “The man’s a cadaver”. So after that I stayed in and the papers piled up and I read eight newspapers and two biographies, which is where we came in to find me wondering what to talk about from among 30 or 40 stories.

I’m sure about what you don’t want to hear – President Bush’s budget. All I should say is to remember that the budget for the next year is in place, is Mr Reagan’s – or rather, what the mainly Democratic Congress did to it – and however they dispose of Mr Bush’s proposed budget, it won’t take effect until 1989-90.

The only point of interest to taxpayers everywhere is to watch the president beginning to tease and bend the English language so that he can raise more revenue and yet fulfil his campaign promise, the one he gave through the weird incantation of asking us to read his lips, “No new taxes”.

So he’s getting out a raft of new proposals which this Congress is dubious about, to put a few cents on petrol, on tobacco, on alcohol provided the money is devoted to allied worthy causes. He’s also devised various forms of entrance or service fees, charging for more of the National Parks’ amenities, upping the price of government publications.

A favourite is to declare the interest on mortgages and other big loans no longer tax-deductible. Well these, if he gets them through, will be taxes, won’t they? Certainly not, the man gave his word. They will be known as "revenue enhancements" or "user fees" or – a beauty of a new one – "definitional change" or "redirection". The people are not fooled. Three Americans in four say Mr Bush will be forced to raise taxes and they seem reconciled to them by whatever name. Enough!

I have to say that of the reading I’ve done during that siege on the top of Nob Hill there are a couple of items off the newsmen’s beaten track which fascinated me, if in a rather maudlin way – former President Nixon’s "secret files", so-called. The editor of them says he went through three million pages of Mr Nixon’s special files which, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, were released for publication in May of 1987.

Can you wonder that American politicians, while roundly condemning such institutions as an Official Secrets Act, secretly wish they had one. Poor Mr Nixon – three million pages of everything from recommendations about foreign policy to little notes written to his wife about how he would like his office furnished. Listen.

“With regard to our ends” – Richard Nixon’s room, this is to Mrs Nixon – “what would be most desirable is an end table like the one at the right side of the bed which will accommodate two dictaphones. RN has to use one dictaphone for current matters and another for memoranda for the file which he will not want transcribed at this time.” How true!

“In addition he needs a bigger table on which he can work at night. The table which is presently in the room does not allow enough room for him to get his knees under it.” This could have written, I feel, by Mr Gladstone to Mrs Gladstone, except I doubt he would have written about himself in the third person.

I suppose such memoranda – of which there are thousands – have historical value but what purpose can be served, except the maniacal desire to have everybody know everything, by a memorandum he wrote to his daughters in which he instructs them how, to strangers and public people they might meet, how to relate anecdotes about him which will leave people with a benign image of him. Quote, “You can say that these kinds of events are not publically known but they have been part of the Nixon story that is to you most heart-warming.”

I’ve not often felt genuinely sorry for Richard Nixon but I do now. The compulsory publication of all these private flaws and formalities is surely one reason why many first-rate men choose no longer to run for public office. It must be some consolation to President Bush’s family, if not to posterity, that he does not keep a diary.

The other item which at first hearing sounds ludicrous but in fact sounds an alarm bell to medical researchers is the suit I mentioned of a man in Seattle, Washington who claims now that he has a property right to the cells of his own spleen, which was removed 12 years ago after it became enlarged from leukaemia.

I suppose he gave no more thought to it until he heard that his doctor at a famous California medical centre developed from the spleen a cell line and used it to make a drug that could control the count of white blood cells. A patent was issued to the medical centre.

The patient heard some time later that this new drug opened up a prospect of effective treatment for many diseases and, commercially, the court guessed, it might earn something like $3billion. The man sued for fraud, lack of informed consent, and unjust enrichment.

The case is certain to go to the United States Supreme Court on the main question of whether human tissue can be declared to be personal property and the money from its subsequent uses due to the patient and not the doctor.

So thanks to a careful perusal of the United States Constitution written 200 years ago, the nine judges have decided that Mr Nixon can’t write a private note to his daughters without its being available for future generations to jeer at, and they will have to decide whether or not a surgeon can take out an appendix without running the risk of a patient’s suing him for the benefits that his laborious research on it might bestow on mankind.

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