President Bush’s heart surgery - 10 May 1991

Last Monday I had a six-hour flight in which to catch up on many things, and also to go over in my mind a topic, a movement that has taken fire across the campuses of this country. A curious twist on the doctrine of free speech, almost a decision on the part of many universities to prohibit whatever free speech they find offensive. A bizarre contradiction but a frightening one.

So looking down from the plane there, as we skimmed over the snows of the Sierra, I decided about four days earlier than usual what I'd talk about now. Alas it will have to wait, because, when I got here to San Francisco and was installed in my hotel, I picked up the evening paper and was startled to discover that while I'd been in isolation at 30,000 feet, something had happened that had in one day it says here, "frightened whole nations". Here were headlines and leaders, editorials, all on the same American topic and all shivering with apprehension or groaning with lamentation. Imagine, Spain's leading daily headlining, "Alarm In the United States". Libération, a Paris daily, "Could Make All of America and the Rest of the World Very Nervous". A famous London daily, "US Agonises". "The possibility," wrote a Spanish correspondent in Washington, "sends a chill running through the United States."

Well at the airport up in the plane, out on the streets I hadn't noticed any agony, any chill. Of course it's difficult to check scientifically on an attack of nerves around the world, or a chill that runs throughout a whole country. Moscow at any rate gave us a yardstick. Soviet television said, "It has caused if not panic, then at least disturbances on the US stock exchange." Well that you can check on at once, I did so. Something close to panic remember in 1987 produced a slump, a loss of over 500 points. So, last Monday, evening in San Francisco, business news coming up, quick, Jane, the beeper. Ah, there it was the Dow, the main industrial average stocks up, a modest two point seven eight. The trading activity was called, sluggish, down from the previous Friday when there was no cause for agony. Down to a mere 128 million shares traded. Wall Street itself unlike the Soviet correspondent recognised no panic. The market was said to have idled in neutral and – here it is finally – showed little reaction to President Bush's heart problem. So that's what it was all about.

If I'd been up in the air for several days on that Discovery space mission, say, and landed and heard that Mr Bush had had a fibrillation, I'd have said, so? I have a friend who's been fibrillating on and off for 20 years, another in Vermont who regards it as a small chronic nuisance, two million Americans suffer painlessly from it, had it once myself. No symptoms whatever except I noticed the pulse in my wrist interrupting its steady beat. The electrocardiogram showed it, in the afternoon I was on a treadmill and it was back to the oom-pah, oom-pah.

But what a to-do. Only I'm convinced because whereas 30 years ago the accredited White House correspondents were about 40, 50 in number. Today there are I believe over 400 and they all have to dream up a story to write or speak to camera once a day. Consequently, the news manufacturers decided that quote "The eyes of the nation" – that means five hundred million eyes – "were on Bethesda naval hospital". And once the doctors reassured us that it's not big deal, infinitely less serious than Mr Reagan's polyp, then what's the story? Ah, then people and I grant a lot of people outside the media, thought, never mind it's not serious, suppose it had been, then there was the other story to write, a more exciting thought to explore and that thought was the one that – according to the Washington correspondents of Madrid, London and Moscow – sent a chill through this nation and caused us to agonise. That thought was the thought of Vice President Dan Quayle as President.

Once that was pinned down as the cause of European jitters, I could amuse myself briefly by reading the editorial comments of some of those European papers. "You cannot for a second talk of a new world order and pretend that J Danforth Quayle is the man fitted to inherit it." J Danforth Quayle incidentally must be the papers attempt at humour. He is never anywhere here known as anything but Dan Quayle. That was a liberal pronouncement from Britain. It was a left of centre Spanish paper that had the United States thrown into alarm. A Dutch mass circulation daily talks about Quayle's doubtful reputation and inadequate experience for the presidency.

There are many more such pieces, equally grave, equally confident, they're also equal in another quality, they are equally ignorant about Dan Quayle. All they appear to have done is to tap their mental file, and lazily pluck out the note of shock and disbelief they sounded after the Republican convention at New Orleans in 1988. Maybe also snatching at the jeering note that everybody picked up at the time, about Quayle having joined the National Guard in lieu of volunteering to serve in Vietnam.

Well could we for a while just look at some of the things Mr Quayle has done since he became vice president.

The vice presidency is not a qualifying school, there are no points to be won for proving your fitness to succeed your boss. On the contrary every vice president knows long before he's even picked that he's meant to take a back seat and to keep it. To do nothing to embarrass the president, or cajole the limelight away from him, that he will have to go to all the most distinguished funerals and also represent the president at dreary but necessary ceremonials. And most vice presidents have understood this role and stayed with it. Now, Dan Quayle has done more for the president than any vice [resident I can recall, because the [resident has asked him to. I suppose Mr Bush feels so confident of his own stature as he should from the evidence of the polls that he can afford to have Mr Quayle take on many considerable chores and delicate problems behind the scenes.

Anyway, let's remember first that way back in the 1970s Mr Quayle was elected to the House against a mocking press. Then, as now he was an uncomfortable speaker and that's what imprints the dumb image. In 1980, he was elected to the Senate, by defeating and in open debate one of the most famous liberal Democrats in the Senate. He was elected to a second term six years later and in the Senate he became respected in both parties for his accumulating expertise in space and missile policy.

Since he was vice president, he's travelled far and wide in Europe, the Middle East and Asia not for ceremonies, but for steering contracts in such unglamorous but vital products as Airbus jets, telephone lines, automobiles, transmission equipment, to American companies. As chairman of the president's National Space Council he always has an influential say in space policy. He's probably the most unflagging spokesman in the administration on behalf of Israel. He always sat in with the small circle, eight in all that decided policy towards Iraq. Before Saddam's invasion he warned that he might have to be fought. And in October Mr Quayle urged the president against the advice of most of the cabinet to strengthen his hand both at home and before the United Nations by going before Congress and fighting for a resolution that would authorise him to use force if need be. In January the president did it. And the first unanimous security council resolution followed.

He has been from the first heady reforms of Mr Gorbachev wary about him, but believing for now at any rate that he might be a better anchor of American Soviet policy than his impressive rival Yeltsin. While doing a great deal in a quiet way for American commerce and for the constituency interests of Republicans in both houses the vice president is always consulted by Mr Bush, on space matters, and on every aspect of foreign policy. All this is widely unknown.

Now I'm not saying that Dan Quayle is an under-rated statesman or that he built the Panama Canal single handed, or even that he's fit to be president. We don't know, I am saying that nobody outside a few presidential intimates, not even those editorial writers in Madrid, London, Moscow and Amsterdam, can even guess whether Dan Quayle is or is not presidential material. You never know about vice presidents, if Franklin Roosevelt had had his fatal stroke a year earlier than the spring of 1944, and then if they'd taken polls, I'll bet 90% of the people would have confessed to feeling severe chills bordering on panic. For Roosevelt's successor was less well known than Dan Quayle, he'd been the chairman of a Senate committee, looking into fraud in defence contracts and he was said to have done a good job. But there was no way of publicising that since in wartime you don't publish the names of the patriotic contractors who are robbing the till. Otherwise we knew he'd been chosen to run for the Senate by the malodorous boss of a corrupt big city political machine.

I'll never forget his first press conference in the Oval Office, we all went in, tut, tutting at the replacement of the mighty Roosevelt, by this unknown midget of a Senator. OK, one old Washington reporter said, so he's a failed haberdasher from Kansas City, but this is no time to knock him, he's scared, he needs our help. He wasn't scared, he didn't need our help, his name was Harry S Truman.

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