Chrysler repays loan

I was in the noonday sun, well not actually in the sun – that would be madness – but in the living room of what we call our beach house at the end of Long Island. Beach house is a misleading term because we're perched on a cliff or bluff, as they say here, a hundred feet above our beach and you have to go down 92 steps to get there. Having got there, you eventually have to climb 92 steps back up.

So, with a rare absence of any wind from the bodies of water that surround us and with the thermometer in the shade of the porch reading 101 degrees, on the whole it seemed prudent to stay put in the living room and stare at the ceiling where we've installed a big propeller fan which does help to waft the hot air your way instead of letting it just hang and brood.

Looking steadily at this airplane propeller might make you think of airplanes but here it served as a tap root back into the American past when these ceiling fans were the only device for the cooling of rooms, theatres, restaurants, offices, whatever. What I recalled was the way that, from the end of June till mid September, Washington was a deserted city and slumped back into the stew of a sleepy, sweating Southern town. It died in summer as a government workshop because, in those good or bad old days, while Washington was the capital city of a powerful nation, it was not yet powerful enough to have taken on what for so long had been Britain's unenviable burden, that's to say of being held responsible for everything that was happening in France and Russia and India and Germany and Japan and the Persian Gulf.

In those days before the Second World War and for 40 or more years before, the only foreign troubles that could really stir the president or Congress to action erupted in Central America, usually in Nicaragua. Nicaragua was the largest country closest to the Panama Canal and, what we would now call America's Caribbean policy, developed entirely from American ownership of the Canal Zone. Several presidents were encouraged to extend American influence over a wider and wider stretch of the territory surrounding the canal so as to ensure its defence.

Nicaragua was also the most unstable of Central American countries and became practically an American protectorate. Nobody thought it odd then that the United States should want to approve the sort of government they had down there and when it was the wrong sort or there was a threatened coup, 'Why!' the cry went up, 'Send in the marines!' And they went in and, in those days before any move any country made anywhere came up for screaming protests in the United Nations, there were no misgivings, no charges about intervention in the domestic affairs of another nation.

This 'big white father' attitude in Central Americans really got going with the first Roosevelt – Teddy – who remains, to this day, the only American president who was ever stirred by the prospect of an American empire. His successor, the mountainous and genial William Howard Taft, had more trouble trying to maintain this paternal view.

Poor old Nicaragua, in chronic trouble – this would be about 1911 – desperately needed a loan from New York bankers and, as part of the deal, the custom house in Nicaragua was put in charge of Americans. There were sporadic riots and old Taft had to send in the marines again. They stayed there by the way for another 20 years. He tried to soften the boredom or the peril of this mission by saying in public that Americans had a duty to perform to protect what he called 'our little brown brothers to the south'. Even the marines, in this explosive period, got fed up with their commuting between Virginia and Nicaragua and got out a song which ran, 'He may be a brother to Big Bill Taft but he ain't no friend of mine!'.

Well, even in the Thirties, with Hitler beginning to go on the rampage in Europe – in the early Thirties anyway – Europe seemed a long way off and the only foreign affairs I can ever remember covering were threats or reported threats to the Panama Canal and, of course, absolutely regular spasms of anxiety about Mexico and a succession of violent governments or a violent succession of governments.

But as I say, at this time of the year, Washington was an easy-going, old, Southern town. It's not, you understand, strictly in the South. It's north of the statutory Mason and Dixon line but its manners and mores and habits and foods have always been more Southern than northern and in those summer days, the senators and the congressmen were long gone out of sweaty Washington back to the grass roots, as they say, which meant for two-thirds of them at least, going back to the heartland, to the centre, or the South, or the West of the country where the summer climate was, and is, if anything, more infernal than Washington.

But now, and it's thanks not only to America's rise as a superpower, but also to the blessed ubiquity of air-conditioning, Congress used 4 July weekend as a mere recess. Now they're back again, ducking through the boiling streets into every and any sort of silent, cool chamber and debating and arguing away on, at the moment, an education bill, an arms bill and, still, after five months, still trying to strike some acceptable compromise with the president to get out an actual budget.

On Wednesday, the Senate came to the end of a rather terrifying debate and came to a vote and, for the first time in several years, the vote was a tie – 49 to 49. What do you do in such a case? You send for the vice president. He is in theory, in legal, constitutional fact, the presiding officer of the Senate, though he's very rarely there, other senators preside in rotation, but this was one time, in fact the only time, that the vice president has decisive power. The motion was to authorise $130 million to produce a new kind of nerve gas, bombs and shells. There was impassioned oratory against and for. Vice President Bush came in and voted, 'Aye'.

So the headlines on Thursday morning read, 'Nerve Gas Arms are Authorised in Senate Vote. Bush Breaks Tie Vote'. I'd not be surprised if this story and that sort of headline were already flashing around a scared world and certainly anyone coming in on the topic for the first time would be sure to shudder or wince. For, was not the United States a sort of pioneer in trying to outlaw all chemical weapons? Yes, it was. By the end of the Sixties, it was no secret, but it wasn't bandied about in the newspapers of our side or their side either, that most of the big countries had been steadily at the manufacture of chemical weapons if not during, certainly since, the Second War.

In 1969, the then-President Nixon stopped this hideous industry and publicly proclaimed that the United States would abide by the Geneva protocol of 1925 which, back in the days when poison gas was the known deadly chemical weapon used, you may hate to recall, widely in the First World War, the protocol banned the first use of poison gas. Nixon's successor signed the protocol, President Ford, which most of the old allies, but not the United States, had signed in the 1920s. Mr Ford then tried to draft or get negotiations going to draft a treaty, a world treaty outlawing chemical weapons of every kind.

It will be new to most of us that since then, the middle 1970s, those negotiations have been going on, but so far no treaty. As late as February of this year, the United States put before the 40 nations who meet continuously in Geneva to talk about disarmament, a proposal for a convention which would ban chemical weapons and make their manufacture anywhere verifiable. So what's the Senate going passing a bill to spend 130 millions on nerve gas of a new kind?

Well, Geneva or no Geneva, it is no secret that the Russians are extremely accomplished in the manufacture of chemicals for war and neither the White House nor the Pentagon has been reluctant to admit that there is pretty certain evidence that the Russians have been trying out some of their chemicals in Afghanistan. Now the question persists, but hasn't the United States got nerve gases anyway? Yes, it has. Why should it want to manufacture new ones?

Well, what turned the vote of a lot of reluctant senators from 'no' to 'yes' was testimony given before the relevant committee that looked into the issue that, whereas the present bombs and shells are beginning to corrode and contain gases which, in compound, the moment they're released, are lethal. The new bombs and shells are known as binaries. They would contain two separate elements, each of which is harmless and which had to be triggered into a compound before it can be released as a lethal gas.

If that's not much consolation for you, let me say that the headline, 'Senate Authorises...' doesn't mean it's going to happen. The House has to appropriate the money and the House voted a month ago against these new weapons. It will now go to a joint committee of both Houses but the last word, as always, on how much money can be spent for what, is with the House.

Not to leave you with this unpleasant smell in your nostrils, let me mention the good, the incredible news. A genial, middle-aged man, twinkling behind his glasses, walked into the White House on Wednesday and walked out a hero. He'd just told the president what he told a breathless audience at the National Press Club later. He is Lee Iacocca, chairman of the Chrysler Corporation.

Three years ago, the Chrysler Motor Company was bust, $1.8 billion in the red. The administration thought many a time about letting the company go to the wall but eventually gave it a government guaranteed loan of well over one billion dollars. The company had to pay it all back by 1990.

On Wednesday, Mr Iacocca announced that the last $800 million owed would be paid back by the end of this August. To an audience gasping with disbelief, the Chrysler chairman, parodying a TV commercial of a well-known investment firm, said, 'Chrysler borrows its money the old-fashioned way. It pays it back'.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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