President Bush's broccoli - 30 March 1990

Poor President Bush. For that matter, poor President Reagan. And poor ex-presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter.

Now it strikes me each of them, at some time during his term, must have envied every president before Eisenhower. It was nobody but honest Ike, new to politics, who changed the rules about presidential press conferences and thereby compelled all subsequent presidents to testify in public about anything and everything any reporter cared to bring up, from his personal feelings on foreign policy to his tastes in food and drink. Let me explain.

For 20 years before Eisenhower, the president and the press followed the rules laid down by Roosevelt in 1933 during his first month in office. They were observed throughout almost a thousand – 998 to be exact – Roosevelt press conferences, without question or violation.

Roosevelt said simply at the start that in his twice-a-week conferences he'd talk about everything and anything relating to government policy but nothing could be directly attributed to him in print, except with his permission.

You could write that the president was understood to be about to do this or that, you could announce a new policy by saying "the White House has decided that", the president would fill you in amply with what was called "background". But once he said, "This is background", it was to be kept at the back of your mind and was not to be used in print.

Once in a while, the president would say, "That's for direct attribution" which meant you could attribute it to him but not in quotation marks. Once in a very great while, possibly twice a year, the president would say, "You can quote me" at which point the reporters couldn't wait to get out of the Oval Office, rush to the telephones and goggle over the prospect of seeing in print next day the actual words of our leader.

Because of the rarity of a permitted quotation, the effect was that of the oracles being brought down from the mountain. The president retained one other right. When a question was asked which would require him to talk about a policy he was still mulling over, or an appointment he wasn't yet ready to announce, or anything else he'd rather keep to himself, he would say, "No comment".

For 12 years of Roosevelt and seven years of Truman, these rules were faithfully obeyed. Astonishingly, it now seems to me, never, during all that time, did a reporter, even on the papers whose editors loathed Roosevelt, and there were many, did a reporter use or leak the background information.

Looking back on 50 years of gathering news from the lips of presidents, I'd say that we learned more from Roosevelt about what was going on and about the president's intentions than we've learned since. The background stuff was most valuable of all. It helped you not to write nonsense about the administration's intentions.

Then came Ike. He changed all this from the most praiseworthy motives. He thought it would be more democratic if the president opened up his press conferences to the public, no less. Not literally. They were still to be attended only by the White House press corps. But heavens – they were to be broadcast, first on the radio and then, television. Surely, very democratic.

What it did, however, was to throw the president at once on the defensive against the havoc he might cause by seeing everything he might blurt out appear in print. The new system compelled the president to be cagey, to hedge every plain statement round with reservations, with hemmings and hawings, and hints about what he didn't mean, as well as what he did.

To look back on them now, the transcripts of Eisenhower’s conferences are a mine of elaborately explained non-information. And most fatal to a candid relationship with the press, the President could no longer say "No comment" when he yearned to hold something back, he would have to go off into long stretches of doubletalk and contorted syntax which, once you tried to unravel it into simple English, said nothing at all.

After Eisenhower, no president could go back. More than anybody since, perhaps Kennedy, in fact – Kennedy handled the new openness with skill and humour, and always found a droll way of sidestepping his intentions or the true fact.

After Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson's solution was simple and barefaced. He appeared to be answering everything. He seemed to be baring his soul, but he told us no more than he meant to. And he had one gift that no other president could exploit so easily, or movingly. It was the gift of looking you in the eye and, often with great charm, just lying. Later, as we all remember, President Nixon tried this but wasn't so good at it.

Well, by now, everything the president says, anywhere in public, at a press conference, on his plane, walking in the Rose Garden, on the golf course, everywhere a microphone or a reporter looms.

And they loom in the most unlikely places. It all comes out in the first place as a sound bite on the evening news and next day in the papers. Do you remember when President Ford was on holiday in the mountains in Colorado? And in the evening, over a drink with a newspaper friend – a newspaper friend of a politician is, these days, a potential betrayer, a snake in the grass – Mr Ford said that out there in the Rockies, he liked to spend all his time outdoors, "fill my days," he said, and keep on the hop. Eating and drinking, he said, I quote him, "Eating and drinking are a waste of time".

Whoops! The newspaper friend confided this engaging thought to his news agency and by noon next day hundreds of telegrams and letters descended like a parachute invasion on the Rockies. From restaurant proprietors, food chains, food guides, supermarket presidents. One corporation chairman summed up the general charge. "The President had dealt," he wrote, "a wounding blow to the food industry of the United States".

Well, because Mr Ford was such an amiable and guileless man, the uproar quieted down and Mr Ford learned never again to express a personal distaste.

At the same time, the president's wife agreed, as she must these days, to a television interview to talk about her family. One interviewer playfully asked, "How would you feel if your daughter, Susan, came to you and said, 'Mother, I'm having an affair'." Mrs Ford said "I shouldn't be surprised. After all, she's 18, she's a human being, she's a big girl".

That did it. A Catholic bishop said he was stunned. The head of a Protestant denomination declared himself to be aghast. Aghast! A Republican politician in Boston, the heart and soul of the New England Irish Catholics said, "Bang goes the Massachusetts vote".

Well now President Bush, who's had 20-odd years experience of not being downright, except on such universal prejudices as being for Mother and against taxes, walked the other day into a blow-up with another food industry.

It's been obvious for some time that Mr Bush is getting very comfortable with the press. He's found he does best with his natural, freewheeling, informal style. He may have to watch it from now on. It caught him out the other day.

Somehow he got to talking about food at the White House. He deplored the frequency with which he was served broccoli. "Listen," he said, "I'm President of the United States. I don't like broccoli." A happy tidal wave of laughter from the press.

But not, next day, from the broccoli industry. The remark has caused hilarity across the nation and undoubtedly done Mr Bush a lot of good among people who thought he was so prudent, so diplomatic about everything, that he had no human prejudices at all.

But the remark was no joke to many regions of the United States, to all the big-time growers of winter vegetables, to the Gulf Coast and the Florida Peninsula, to the Lower Rio Grande Valley, to the Los Angeles Basin and the coast of southern California, to central California, to, believe it or not, the Great American Desert.

It comes down to the old hazard of any politician who feels the urge to express a personal dislike for anything manufactured or grown in the United States, they constantly have to tell themselves that this country is a continent which grows everything. And grows particular fruits and vegetables, not in one spot but in many regions. So that when you criticise one crop, you're picking on the livelihood and the voters of four or five big regions.

Food, as much as anything, can be used here as a political tool. Who would have thought that a month ago abortion and potatoes could be so damagingly linked? Well, you may have heard the far western state of Idaho has just passed a bill banning abortions anywhere in the state, except in cases of rape, incest or where the mother's health is imperilled.

The abortion fight is the most tense, widespread, unflagging public issue now before the legislatures of the 50 states. The so-called "life people" are determined to overthrow the Supreme Court ruling of 1973 which legalised abortions everywhere in the country. The abortion, or Pro-Choice lobby is equally determined to uphold it.

The new law in Idaho, which awaits the governor's signature, is the strictest anti-abortion law so far passed. One or two other states have now forbidden abortions in public hospitals or in clinics supported by public funds. Idaho has banned them everywhere.

Consequently, one of the national pro-abortion organisations has urged a general boycott of Idaho's potato crop. The Idaho potato is large and famous. It is grown there on 1,800 big farms. They produce 10 billion pounds a year, 27% of the entire national crop.

Just a 1% drop in the distribution, the sale, of Idaho potatoes cost the farmers over $6 million. So there's nothing comical or trivial about this boycott which has already spread to half a dozen states and restaurant chains in states that are easy on abortion.

Mr. Bush once favoured abortion. And then, during the campaign, came out against it. He has not said, nor is likely to, how he stands on the Idaho baked potato.

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