Oil rationing threat

I suppose the people of Coventry were long ago resigned to tourists who've never heard of the cathedral or the shattering Blitz of November 18 1940, but who would love to walk the route of Lady Godiva's ride.

More than most American cities, Chicago continues to suffer from the stigma of a single scandal. One Chicagoan has just told about being on a Mexican holiday when he was going through the Mayan ruins of the Yucatan. He was staggering up one of the steep aisles that slice the incline of a pyramid when the guide casually asked him where he was from. At the mention of Chicago, the guide cocked his index fingers, made his lips stutter in mimic gunfire and cried, 'Chicago! Al Capone!'. 

I'm not claiming any superiority to this Indian guide. My first flight in an airplane was from New York to Chicago and when I wrote to my mother to mention the approaching thrill of it, she sent me an immediate reply begging me to get out of town before it was too late. From that first visit and on through many more I came to enjoy what Americans call 'the second city' for the many things that make it an exciting and rewarding place to be: the splendid lake front, it's the birthplace of modern architecture, it was the workplace of Frank Lloyd Wright, there's the Science Museum, the fame of its medical school, the university where Sir William Craigie repeated his method on the Oxford dictionary and completed the huge and incomparable History of American English on Historical Principles. There's the Institute of Art and Chicago is the home of the best orchestra in the world. Not to mention the pleasures of its native literature, the work of Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser and Nelson Algren, and the Nobel prize-winner, Saul Bellow. 

But most of these glories are scarcely known to the rest of the world and last Wednesday, I'll bet that in newspapers and magazines around the globe, there must have been a flock of articles commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the St Valentine's Day Massacre. 

It has been celebrated in at least a half-dozen movies and though I haven't seen any of them for years, I can still recall either Edward G. Robinson or Rod Steiger or Jason Robards impersonating Capone wearing a dressing gown, lounging by a swimming pool in the safety of Miami Beach, cradling a telephone against his shoulder and hearing, in great glee, that his orders had been smoothly carried out. Namely, that his loyal subordinate, 'Machine Gun' Jack McGurn, had disposed of his main enemy, the gang of Bugs Moran – the disposers being Capone men disguised as policemen who lined up their rivals against the wall of a garage and let off two salvos of machine-gun fire, one aimed at knee height, another at the shoulders. The man on the telephone spared Capone the pain of knowing that while the massacre was happening, Moran himself was sipping a cup of coffee a block away. 

Although the whole of Chicago, and soon most of the world, was shocked by the news of it, the only evidential proof that Capone was the instigator came from Moran himself, who forgot for the one and only time the gangsters' oath 'never to rat on a friend or an enemy'. 'Only Capone', he screamed, 'kills like that!' There were many shaken eyewitnesses who could have identified the mock policemen as they climbed into their Cadillac which was disguised as a police car. Still, nobody ever came to trial and, as everybody in my time knew, as well as they knew that King Alfred burned the cakes, the federals got Al Capone in the end on his income tax. 

I remember, shortly after the Second War, going down the bay in New York in a coastguard cutter with a bunch of reporters to greet Winston Churchill coming in on the Queen Mary. When we got him in the Verandah Grill and asked him where he was off to, he said, 'I am to be the guest in a house in Miami Beach. I believe it is close by the house of a former, distinguished citizen of Chicago.' Everybody knew who he meant and everybody chortled. 

Well, on Wednesday night, there were high times in saloons and nightclubs patterned after the Prohibition speakeasies. There are such places, one in New York, others I remember, there's one in France which, if they're not actually called Capone's Place, plaster the walls with photographic blow-ups of Capone and Moran and the rest and of the elaborate funerals they gave each other, the most theatrical of which was that of an Irishman, Dean O'Banion, another bootleg emperor, who became a nuisance to Capone and Capone disposed of him. But out of his great fellow feeling and compassion for a loser in the same trade, bought the dead man a casket of bronze and silver and marched behind it with a motorcade bearing $50,000 worth of flowers contributed by the firm of Capone and his partner, Johnny Torrio. 

Well, here am I deploring the sleight we perform Chicago by remembering Capone and forgetting Sir George Solti or Frank Lloyd Wright and, at the same time, find myself caught up in the same sort of nostalgia that the saloons and the barflies were celebrating on Wednesday night. I wonder why it is that while good men and true often leave in the end only a mild impress on the popular imagination, the rogues and crooks remain immortal? 

What they did when they were alive was shocking and often disgusting but, for some reason I've never figured out, a decade or two goes by and the generation that was never there accepts without any effort the rosy, and entirely phoney, Robin Hood image which we superimpose on these scoundrels. 'Wild Bill' Hickock, the James Brothers, Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger, Capone – they're never forgotten. 

It would be a dreadful thing, but it's not beyond possibility if 25, 50 years from now, troops of orderly tourists are traipsing through the house where Sid Vicious gave himself the final fix. Maybe Robin Hood was an unmitigated crook. We know that Napoleon was a monster and a dictator but he was also immensely intelligent and a military genius and the question of whether he did more good than harm to France is left to the historians. But to the tourist, he is the supreme French hero. I see that there's the beginning of a move to rehabilitate the reputation of Adolf Hitler – a move that is not going to get anywhere with me. I leave this melancholy puzzle to you and move on to consider some of our practising heroes. 

I should say that if there is one man who, more than another, fascinates and troubles Americans today, it's the brooding figure of the Ayatollah Khomeini. A couple of months ago, few of us had ever even heard of him. Today the turmoil in Iran has been so exhaustively reported and the most vivid parts of the Iranian story, namely the immense mobs and gunfire that are most susceptible to lively television pictures, have been so unceasingly and brilliantly filmed, night after night, that even people who normally take no interest in politics, overseas politics in particular, are going around trying to decide if the holy man is a holy man or the great commoner or the latest type of dictator, or, simply, Kerensky, a seeming saviour who may turn out to be only the most desperate caretaker of a nation still in uproar. 

I imagine my reference to Kerensky was triggered by the news from Moscow the other morning that the Russian press had come out in a song of praise for the success of the great popular uprising in Iran against capitalism and interfering foreign powers, the implication being that any uprising in a country whose regime was supported by the United States must be a victory for an incoming people's republic in the communist sense. The Russian reader was left to recall, or forget, that the Shah was, for the longest time, frankly supported by the Russians themselves. 

Of course the immediate, practical effect of the Khomeini takeover, on this country and some others, is to have Mr Schlesinger, the Secretary of Energy, warning everybody that the overthrow of the Shah and the Bakhtiar government is no guarantee that Iran will soon resume the production of oil. And it's only partly a matter of whether they will be – the workers – will be loyal to the regime, though we assumed that, until we had a memorable and pathetic picture on television of hundreds of young Iranians being herded together under arrest as enemies of the people. 

They were all Marxists and they made us rethink the prospect of support from the Soviet Union for, as you may have heard, when the air force fatally split off from the army and came out in opposition to the Bakhtiar government, hundreds of thousands of young people, of all sorts, Khomeini disciples, guerrillas, Marxists, unattached radicals, footloose youngsters out for the hell of it, they were allowed to raid arsenals and today they are armed. A despatch in the New York Times in the middle of the week said that only a fraction of these distributed firearms had been returned at the begging of Khomeini. 

So, quite apart from the humdrum but vast problem of getting a government working, there's the new question of whether the majority of the people who are loyal to Khomeini can fend off the violence of guerrillas and Marxists who may quickly lose their idolatry of him once it becomes clear that he's a firm religious opponent of communism and that the punishment he's prepared to impose on non-conformists will be according to the very harsh Islamic code of summary execution, hand chopping and the rest, that we've all been hearing about. We shall see. 

However, to be cold-blooded about our own situation, it does seem that we're not going to get that eight per cent of missing oil for quite some time. To get the wells into full production means much more than hard labour on the part of the oilfield workers, it would require the expertise of technicians, all of whom are foreigners and practically all of whom have left the country. This was something Mr Schlesinger pointed out the other night in preparing us, I should guess, first for weekend closing of petrol stations and, later on, for some form of rationing. 

Great events throw little, significant shadows and one of them is that the state of Wyoming, which was about to pass a bill abolishing the national speed limit of 55 miles an hour, has thought better of it and abandoned the legislation.

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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