Shipbuilding In California - 17 August 1990

I used to wish that I had a cottage in Jamaica, or somewhere in the Bahamas – Bermuda, even – so that friends would never wonder why I went there.

"He's gone off to his cottage in the Bahamas", which is an obvious place for a regular holiday. As it is, even old New Yorker friends say, "Why do you keep going off to San Francisco?" And I tell them it's my holiday town which is only a half truth. I can't remember when I last took a holiday.

I've gone along for some time on the principle that a journalist who takes a holiday is a man going into temporary retirement. And I've noticed journalists who retire tend to suffer the fate of active businessmen who keep promising their wives that come 65, or some other arbitrary date, they'll pack up and start a trip around the world. They do pack up, and relax, and take off. And drop dead in Singapore.

The true reason is much less alarmist and making this a letter from America, and not from New York. Mind you, New York is nowhere but America but it is not, or it is no longer, the hub or characteristic centre of American life, in spite of the absolutely settled belief of native New Yorkers that, as an old radio comedian used to say, "Everywhere outside New York, is Bridgeport, Connecticut".

I began to make a point of coming out here regularly to San Francisco after I spent a couple of days with a California politician over 20 years ago. The date was Christmas time 1967. And this, in part, is what I wrote for my paper, "Quite suddenly, California is, in population, in economic power and in its variety of political troubles and challenges, the first state of the union.

"Whoever is running the state has to do something now about the jungle growth of the cities, the turmoil on the campuses, the conflict about compulsory unionism between organised labour and a freewheeling labour force, the unceasing inflow of 1200 new settlers a day, loading the relief rolls and straining the welfare budget. Not to mention the bewildering mobility of hundreds of thousands of part-time workers, deadbeats, runaway hippies, suitcase farmers and the shuttling agents of the Mafia.

"A California governor's handling of these troubles is more significant than it would be in little Vermont, or for that matter in big Ohio, because in only 25 years California has developed from a huge, lush fruit bowl – half the lettuce in the country is grown in the single, vast Salinas Valley – from a film studio and the sunny haven for retired Midwestern farmers, into the first state of the union in more things than numbers.

"All the chronic social, industrial and rural problems of America are here today in acute form. A man who can administer California with imagination and good order is one who, as much as any other American executive, would hold powerful credentials to preside over the United States."

Well, the man I was talking these things over with 23 years ago, was in fact the governor of the state and when he left office, over 60% of Californians thought he'd done a good job. It was an omen which went unnoticed by the Democrats, who even 12 years later basked in the popular delusion that the man they had to beat was simply a retired, B-film actor. You'll have guessed, by now, that that governor who did, indeed, come to preside over the United States, was Ronald Reagan.

Every journalist remembers certain stories he covered, moments with certain men and women which stay with him more sharply than the usual catalogue of events he watched, which go into the books as being memorable, or decisive points in history.

And, driving back that Christmas time to San Francisco, from the state capital Sacramento, I remember going over in my mind – I never wrote it up – how California had changed from the first long, rambling drive through its 800 miles in 1933, until that day, goodness, 35 years later.

I won't bore you with a chronicle but say simply that when I first knew this state, and because of the great variety of its physical beauty I covered thousands of miles of it, it was the great exporter of fruits and vegetables.

It was the import-export shipping base for the countries of the Pacific and, of course, it was known to all of us as the manufacturing centre of the world's myths and romances. In that hilly place in southern California which went in, no more than 20 years, from a sheep town with no post office to the motion-picture capital of the earth, Hollywood.

Came the Second World War and came into California a man named Henry Kaiser, a more-than-life-size bullfrog of a man who decided to make freighters for America at war. A preposterous idea man. He was preposterous to the old shipping firms. He even talked about the "front end" of a ship, but he built huge shipyards here, distributed all the parts of a ship into separate piles on squares marked A, B, C, A1, A2 and so on.

Hired thousands of men who also didn't know one end of a ship from another. Got them, with great cranes, to whisk these parts through the air, with the greatest of ease, down to the ways where teams of welders rushed in.

And, in no time, Mr Kaiser was producing a Liberty Ship every two days. He solved the problem of supply for the biggest naval war there had ever been, over millions of square miles, the American battle for the Pacific. He'd built steel mills in California which had never seen steel except coming in on a train. "Where will he get his ores?" they cried. He found them in Utah. And from then on, California became an industrial as well as the agricultural state.

Today, its industries take in aerospace, fabricated metals, machinery, chemicals, electronics equipment more than anywhere, and, of course, its huge production of food. We used to say, long ago, "Watch out for what's happening in America because tomorrow it will happen to Europe".

Today, we had better say, "Keep tabs on what's happening in California. For tomorrow it will be happening to you, wherever you are, in the western world".

And that goes for the state of the economy, the health or ill-health of home building, the handling of crime, the drug traffic, motorcar sales – which are today a barometer of prosperity or recession, as once it used to be railroad freight rates. How many schools to build, every week, to accommodate the bulging population of the young, from several countries.

How to absorb Asians and Latin Americans into the system and somehow recognise, for the time being, some of us hope, their daily use of 34 languages. How to keep the ever-expanding welfare rolls within the limits of a state budget that the Californians are willing to be taxed for. And on and on, including the pressing, grim fact of a population of Aids victims higher than that of New York.

So when you arrive here, before you weigh yourself down with these problems, I must say there's the blessed fact that July and August in San Francisco are two of the coolest months of the year, the average high temperature in this city being only 7F higher than the average temperature of December and January.

So I drove into town, an escapee from the drenching, abominable heat of New York, under a grey sky, 60F, with a mild sun winking lazily through the fog. And I pick up the morning and evening papers to see how things look from here.

Things, of course, most of all mean, as they do everywhere, Iraq. The only local item that edges up on the columns of despatches from the Middle East is the closing of Yosemite National Park after 22,000 acres of forest have gone up in the summer smoke of the long drought. The good word from the forest rangers and the firemen brought in from several states is that Yosemite's great stand of redwoods that has been there since Moses, the towering sequoia sempervirens, has been saved.

As for any markedly California response to the president's management of the Persian Gulf crisis, it is at the present masked by popular approval that is general throughout the country. But two anxieties have already been quick to surface here. One is from the environmentalists who are very strong in this state. The Sierra Club was a pioneer in, what you might call, green politics.

It's been quickly noticed that in the congressional sound and fury over Sadam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait on the night of 3 August, a senator from Alaska slipped an amendment into a defence authorisation bill. The amendment was passed in casual acclamation. It would open protected federal lands for oil and gas development, an old, tenaciously-fought issue here.

The other fear or protest is noisier and has sprouted boycotts of petrol stations across the whole state. The sudden rise in the price of petrol, while setting off a suspicious of price gouging, is also seemed to have doomed the prospect, this year, of a federal tax on petrol.

And that, in a state that has more automobiles than human beings, could shrink consumer spending, encourage inflation and achieve what may well have been one of Saddam Hussein's minor aims, a slide into an American recession.

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