The credibility gap

With keen memories of Watergate in mind, I don't propose to go on this time with the White House story because this talk is being recorded before a trip to the west and I've found before now a 24-hour gap between talking and being heard, can span the difference between a topical running story and ancient history.

Whatever revelations you're up on now, there's no doubt that tomorrow, the day after, next week, and on and on, there will be more to come. As a Republican congressman said the other day, 'This thing has legs. It's going to keep on walking'.

So far, it seems to me the most generous, the most statesmanlike comment has come from Sam Nunn, a Georgia senator, a Democrat who's a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has started looking, in closed sessions, into the whole train of events and the characters involved. A subcommittee of that committee, known as an oversight committee, must, according to law, be told of any covert actions planned by the executive branch. This time it was not told. Nor was either party leader in Congress, or a whole flock of people who should have been told that the administration was secretly conducting a policy for which, the other day, eight Americans were led off to long prison terms, shipping arms to Iran.

Senator Nunn said, 'We have to do everything to help the president restore his credibility. We cannot have a crippled presidency for two years.'

Seven other committees are interested, but the one that has the most power is the House Judiciary Committee and, in issues of the present kind, questions of whether a president, a vice president, a federal judge or any civil officer of the United States, whether any of them have committed crimes or misdemeanours or otherwise violated their constitutional oath, the House Judiciary Committee is it, the one and only body which can draft articles of impeachment and did so to bring down Richard Nixon.

So while the Senate Intelligence Committee will be looking into all the people who may have been involved in the covert Iranian operation that it wasn't told about, the House Judiciary Committee will ultimately have to judge whether anyone, the president or anyone employed by the president, behaved illegally or went beyond the president's constitutional powers.

The committee's always recruited from members of the House who know a good deal about constitutional law and the separate powers of the separate branches of government and I well remember from the televised Watergate hearings that no matter what the balance of Democrats and Republicans on the committee – and there was a majority of Nixon's own party, the Republicans, in the Watergate hearings – in the end, partisanship, even friendship with the accused gives way to a fair, and in that case, became clear, an inevitable verdict.

Well, on a flying visit to Europe – of course, it was a flying visit, that's one idiom we'll have to change – on a flying visit, I read a fascinating case brought before a court in a country of Western Europe. To make it as simple as possible, let's say that a Mr Schmidt had lived in his house a long time minding his manners, doing no harm to anybody. One day a bunch of rockers or punk-proud youngsters moved in next door and, from then on, poor Mr Schmidt had no peace of mind or body, what with the thundering music, so-called, and the fairly constant hullabaloo going on next door. Mr Schmidt thought of selling his house, but he found that the news of the rockers had travelled far and wide and the value of the Schmidt property had declined in inverse proportion to the rise in the decibel volume of the nuisances next door. He went to court. He wanted his rates drastically reduced.

Well, said the judge, wait a minute. Mr Schmidt is a sensitive man but we mustn't judge the neighbours by Mr Schmidt's sensitivity. Let's imagine another man, say, a Mr Muller. He isn't so sensitive. He doesn't mind if the rockers rock all night. He wouldn't be here complaining. So, Mr Schmidt will have to pay just a little less than his usual rates if he wants to stay in his house. That's the story as I disentangled it from a wad of legal jargon.

I asked a couple of American lawyers how they felt about the adjudication of the case of Mr Schmidt. They were aghast. That couldn't happen in England said one because our law is rooted in English law and whether Mr Schmidt is hypersensitive or not, the only analogy an American judge would make, would be compelled to make, is that of an ordinary, reasonable man, not one who was deaf or impervious to rock or didn't mind hell breaking loose in the middle of the night. What would be the effect on a reasonable, ordinary neighbour? That's the test.

Well, I'll leave you to serve as a court of appeal if this case ever goes there, but it reminded me of two similar cases. One very similar and brought to court, the other an hilarious episode in the film career of the late, but immortal, Sam Goldwyn.

First case. Some years ago towards the end of the life of my guru, Mr H. L. Mencken, described in court as 'journalist, residing in Hollins Street in this city of Baltimore' – he had, in fact, lived there for all but the first three years of his life and was then in his seventies. He had, at the back of his house, a yard edged with flower beds and, approached from the kitchen door, what Americans call a dooryard. Remember Walt Whitman's elegy for the dead Lincoln, 'When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd?'.

Well, Mr Mencken had lived at peace with his neighbours for many years and was in the habit of leaning over the wall that divided his yard from theirs and exchanging jocular greetings with their two little boys. He was fond of the little boys and hated to do what he had to do when their parents gave one of them a dog for Christmas. The dog grew and flourished and became, in a word, intolerable – yapping through the day and barking through the night. Mr Mencken asked the parents if they couldn't do something about the dog. Something humane, he suggested, short of actual extermination.

Alas, at that point, the warm neighbourliness of the old widower and the people next door cooled. Mr Mencken threatened a court case. They evidently imagine that hypothetical reasonable man of which the obnoxious Mr Mencken was no longer the type. 'Go ahead and sue!' they said. He sued for disturbing the peace, creating a public nuisance and invasion of privacy.

I can't remember now which ground the court allowed, but the judge, an obvious softy, said he thought that Mr Mencken was the proper type to judge as a fair plaintiff. He thought Mr Mencken had a case. He thought the neighbours should be grateful that he hadn't brought a case against them for mental cruelty, with a psychiatrist's certificate and maybe a suit for a million dollars in mental damages. The court ordered the dog to be muzzled or replaced with a less testy watchdog. As I recall, they traded it to some carefree couple and got a big, floppy, sleepy, adorable St Bernard which was responsible for healing the bruised friendship of the neighbours to the point where Mr Mencken had to be reproved for going out and fetching home succulent morsels for the new dog.

The other recollection is of an old friend of mine, alas, also, late – the wry, very gifted humorist and extremely successful scriptwriter, Nunnally Johnson. He was making a picture for Sam Goldwyn about what used to be called a gentleman cracksman, in other words an upper-crust burglar. Something like Raffles. It might have been Raffles. Johnson, in order to endear the bounder to the audience at the start, decided to lift, more or less, the opening scene from 'Top Hat', where, you may remember, Fred Astaire, a visiting American dancer to London, goes to meet his English producer in the the producer's club, the Thackeray Club, if I'm right.

The main lounge is like a well-furnished graveyard with living, barely, well-dressed corpses. Typical stage English club men, all reading The Times. Astaire tiptoes in, sits down, unfolds his Times with a sharp crackle and the entire club comes alive with horrified members.

Well, Johnson had his man do just the same, except what he did was stir his tea, tinkling it audibly with the spoon. The entire club rose up and one old man cried, 'Who's making this frightful din?'. The shooting went beautifully and the production moved along. About halfway through, Goldwyn wanted to see the rushes of the opening. Goldwyn, the long living in America Russian immigrant, he'd been away and he missed the opening. He saw it. He was struck dumb, deeply puzzled. 'Din?' he said, 'What's this din? What's it mean, din? Din?'

Johnson remarked that if you went on saying it often enough, it made no sense or sounded like a word in Urdu. Goldwyn ordered the opening to be scrapped. They had to rejig another opening. When the picture was finished, Goldwyn, sitting one day in his office, was reading the evening paper, the Los Angeles Examiner and he came on a single column headline. It said, 'Glendale Housewife Protests Neighbour's Din'.

He walked out and beckoned his girl receptionist. 'Look at this!' he said, 'What's this word mean, this din?' The girl looked up at him, she said, 'The woman couldn't stand the din her neighbour was making.' 'You understand it, the word din?' 'Of course,' said the girl.

Goldwyn went back and phoned Johnson. 'I want,' he said, 'the opening scene shot again.' But all the actors were long gone. 'Bring them back!' At vast expense, they were fetched back and the scene reconstructed.

Years later, asked about the film, Goldwyn said, 'Nothing to write away about, I like best the scene with the din.'

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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