China's spoilt brats

In a little Christmas talk, President Reagan – I guess it was when he was lighting the White House Christmas tree – he fell back, as he always does when he's most effective, on a homely memory of his boyhood or youth. He just happened to mention that, as a boy when things were tough and they were tough most of the time in his poor family, he'd always yearned for one Christmas present he was never likely to get and never did. A toy train.

Within 48 hours, 16 manufacturers had sent trains and train sets to the White House, their best products, one or two of them being practically midget versions of those enormous freight trains that you see out west with a hundred or so cars that take a couple of minutes to thunder across a grade crossing or under a bridge.

I don't believe for a minute that the president calculated the little sigh he sighed. He's not been in the White House quite long enough to know that if he dares to confide aloud a single wish, a hundred people will rush to make the wish come true. The really funny, unconsciously funny, line the president got off when he surveyed these model steam engines and mimic diesel engines and passenger carriages and freight cars and miles of track was, 'Who am I going to share all these with?'

Not, 'Who's going to get them? or 'Where shall I send them?'. I'm sure that some sharp aide jumped in to remind him that he wasn't going to share them with anybody. He was going to give them away to some home or hospital for disabled children and, of course, that's where they went.

There's a rule about presents that go to any member of the executive branch, that is to the thousands of the president's staff and his appointees, including ambassadors and the like. The present must not exceed in value $50. There are, of course, ingenious ways around this.

I once had the honour to present to the American ambassador in London – not the present one but an astute and charming lady – a copy of a book of mine. It was not the ordinary, hardback version that you could buy and should buy in any bookshop. One of those small presses that get out luxurious, limited editions, bound in red morocco and glittering with gold leaf, had the idea, on the 200th anniversary of American Independence, to get out 200 luxury copies, a special edition of my book, and since it was, not to put too fine a point on it, a book about America, the publisher had the handsome idea that the copy marked Number 1 should go to the American ambassador.

So the publisher turned up – so did I – at Grosvenor Square and we prepared for this gallant little ceremony. The ambassador received the book and fondled it with the required grace. When the publisher had bowed out, the ambassador said to me, 'You know this book costs more than $50 and so I'm going to have to turn it back or give it to the Library of Congress or whatever.

'Now,' she said with a twinkle, 'if this were a personal gift, a present from you and not from the publisher, it could remain my very own.' Well it was a matter of 50 seconds or so for me to inscribe it with undying affection to the lady with no mention of her present post and, so far as I know, there has been no lawsuit, no suggestion that the lady was guilty of a conflict of interest or receiving a bribe. The matter rested there.

The strict rule about the $50 limit came in shortly after the reign of Franklin Roosevelt. 'Reign' may be a Freudian slip but he was in the White House for 13 years and we did come to look on him as a permanent institution, like Queen Victoria. I have to cover the tracks of my fuzzy memory about this but the rule may well have come in a year or two before Roosevelt died, shortly after, anyway, a visit that the president's personal lawyer paid to the Roosevelt mansion up on the Hudson. Sam Rosenman was the lawyer's name and he'd been a close friend of the family for many years. He told me once about this particular weekend that he spent with the president and Mrs Roosevelt.

One evening after dinner, three or four of them were sitting around in the library and got to talking about the visits of heads of state, prime ministers and such and the presents they left behind them. All visitors of any grandeur do leave presents and nowadays the custom, the rule, is that anything given to the president as president becomes the property of the government or of any museum or library that is set up, after the man leaves the presidency, to house his papers and other relics. In fact, it was as a result of this evening at Hyde Park that the idea sprouted of having ex-presidential libraries.

Roosevelt, during the after-dinner talk, mentioned that the Middle Eastern sheikhs and kings tended to come bearing presents of alarming magnificence. He cited a sword, a bejewelled sword given to him by a Persian or Indian prince. He sent somebody off to get it and it was displayed before Sam Rosenman with much oohing and aahing over its splendour and its incalculable worth. 'Do you have any more of these things around?' asked Rosenman. 'Why Sam,' said the president, 'the basement and the barns are stacked with caskets and cabinets and god knows what all!'

'Well,' said Rosenman with a worried brow, 'you'd better get rid of them quick!' 'How so?' 'If', said Rosenman, 'you die before Eleanor, the federal appraisers will come in and set a value on them.' I've never forgotten Roosevelt's response. His jaw dropped, the jaw of the mighty Roosevelt whom his enemies accused of having taken over the whole power as well as the glory of the federal government. 'You mean?' said Roosevelt?' 'I mean,' said Rosenman, 'the internal revenue service will stick Eleanor with a tax on the value, the retail value of everything. She'd be ruined!' Roosevelt said, with awesome simplicity, 'Can they do that to you?' 'Yes, indeed, Mr President. They can and they will!'

So it was then that they cooked up the idea of a Roosevelt library which would be open to the public and maintained by the National Parks or Monuments Division or by the state it was housed in and which would put on display the life and times of the president through photographs, paintings, cartoons, state papers AND gifts from foreign dignitaries.

It was done. Expanded after Roosevelt's death and opened to the public. It's a splendid and moving museum and nobody paying a visit to New York who takes Lord Bryce's advice to see the incomparable beauty of the Palisades and the Upper Reaches of the Hudson River, nobody who goes so far should miss a visit to Hyde Park.

Next thing we knew there was, and is, a Truman library in his home town of Independence, Missouri. Mr Nixon is still trying to find a town somewhere that will accept his papers and set up a Nixon library. Several states turned him down but as time, that well-known gentleman, softens the memory of Watergate and brightens the memory of Mr Nixon's initiative in suppressing a lifetime's hatred of Communism and starting up diplomatic relations with Communist China, by the time we all come to the conclusion that this was a good thing, I have no doubt that a Nixon library will be established and become as respectable as any other.

Talking of China reminds me of a very interesting problem they have, for once, had no silly scruple in hiding from us, the West, the capitalist imperialist opposition. The Chinese government is deeply concerned about its rising population. This is nothing new in a nation which, long ago not only sanctioned birth control, but imposed it to the extent of forbidding any couple to have, or to bring to birth, more than two children. The new law, which has been in force for some time, is that the limit must be one child. They calculate that by 2000 AD the way things are going, the population will be rising one billion one hundred million. They're determined to keep it as close to one billion as government decree can make possible.

Well, the 'One child, one family' rule has been going on long enough for their paediatricians and psychiatrists, and I imagine that there are such people no longer regarded as they were in the early days of the Soviet Union as pernicious diversionary citizens, it's been going on long enough for these specialists to be confronted with a problem familiar for centuries to us, with, in a word, the problem of the spoiled brat. Worse, the one child is, you can bet 50-50, often a boy and the Chinese have been frank enough to recognise that that is a variation of the problem. In other words, the danger of the family of three, with one son, who tends to be suffocated with adoration, to be encouraged to believe himself the smartest brat on the block and who can emerge either as a nervous recluse or a smart aleck.

This problem is aggravated in China, we can see, by their ideology, by their extreme insistence on individuals being one of the flock learning to plane down his individuality and ride between the shafts of the team. So they're thinking up ways of periodically throwing lonely sons in with other only children so as to have some of the smart-aleckry knocked out of them.

I must say it's nice to think that the Chinese, on their way to the perfect society, have stumbled on such a good old, bourgeois problem as that of two moppets with bloody noses screaming, 'My father's bigger than your father, so there!'

One quick, happy development in American culture. Of all the retail items that lost their popularity this Christmas, nothing can compete with the disastrous slump in the uniform of the urban cowboy, the fad that exploded with John Travolta, the lizard-skin cowboy boot at a thousand dollars a throw is to be discontinued. The whole ridiculous rig, worn in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and New Orleans discotheques by people who wouldn't know a dogy from a doggy is passing away. The industry lost 30 millions this Christmas.

Soon, let's hope, the only people wearing the broad-brimmed hat and the wool shirt and the old, non-designer jeans and the ankle-high boots will be the cowboys themselves, going about their calfing and corralling and riding the long trail from Texas to Iowa.

Again, may I wish everybody a Happy New Year with as little anxiety as humanly possible!

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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