Dan Quayle and the Soviet Union - 15 December 1989

This is to be a letter with two PSs, two postscripts to previous letters.

First though, several people have wondered what I might have to say about the peculiar performance of Vice President Dan Quayle, almost immediately after President Bush's seaborne meeting with Mr. Gorbachev.

Before M. Bush took off for the Mediterranean, he announced firmly that in 1992, the year of the next election, Mr Quayle would most certainly be on the ticket as his continuing vice president. When Mr Bush got back, he declared, almost in ecstasy, his joy at the changes Mr Gorbachev had brought about and proclaimed his administration's enthusiasm for helping Mr Gorbachev, in every way possible – in arms cuts and in trade, to achieve his aims for aims for perestroika, a policy that made everybody happy except the Republican right wing.

An odd time, you'd think, for Vice President Quayle, of all politicians, to come out and say that the Soviet Union had to be watched, that not much should change in the defensive posture the United States must maintain. He fell just short of singing the Reagan hit song of 1982, "Watch out for the evil empire". Reporters, at once, asked the secretary of state, Mr Baker, if Mr Quayle was still aboard. Still on the team. Mr Baker had an uncomfortable time saying "Of course!" What had changed?

Well, Mr Quayle has been, since his elevation, the president's point man on problems of defence and space, including the rarely-mentioned Star Wars. Behind the scenes, the vice president and his Pentagon advisors and so on, have been watching the upheavals in Eastern Europe as wearily as anybody.

They notice that Mr Gorbachev's popularity in his own country is declining. They bear in mind the possibility that Mr Gorbachev may have opened up, as the saying goes, a barrel of monkeys he may not be able to control – by a benevolent miscalculation not unlike that of the British, French and Dutch before their own empires began to come apart – namely, that the nations of Eastern Europe do not want reforms, however enlightened, handed down from above. They want to run themselves.

Certainly there are bound to be nasty surprises. The rebellious countries won't all go the same placid way towards self government. So, briefly, the chances that, in the next three years, Mr. Gorbachev may not survive the approaching turmoil and may be replaced by the old or new disciplinarians, the chances are open. And if the worst happened, Mr Quayle could emerge as the man who told us so. And, incidentally, Mr Bush could then expect to capture again the right-wing voters in the south and south-west who are unhappy now but who meant so much to his election in 1988.

Now for the postscripts. And since one of them is painful, I'll get it over with first. I've had a letter from a friend in San Francisco who was in Britain on 17 October, the day of the dreaded earthquake.

Next day, he opened his newspaper and saw headlined in boxcar type, the enormous headline, "Golden Gate to hell". The next-largest headline read, "Sick looters try to steal car radios as drivers lie crushed".

It took two reporters to write the lead story. Their third paragraph sets down these two astounding sentences, "Families watched horrified as street gangs went from wrecked house to shattered shops, stripping them bare. Troops and National Guardsmen were sent in to try to control the mobs in the city."

I regret to say that this report is not alone except in its insistent sensationalism, but it is the worst I've seen. The truth is – to which scores of other reporters and innumerable residents of San Francisco could testify – that there was no looting, that the crime rate on that black night, no power, no lighting, was among the lowest of the year. No roaming street gangs, no mobs.

Of course the troops from the Old Fort of the Presidio were called in, as they are for any natural disaster or big accident. They acted under the federal emergency management agency, which organised everybody from the Red Cross to state and city helpers. What the troops did was to rescue people from the houses and the two highways badly hit, to carry to safety the hurt, the infirm and the aged, and arrange for the bedding of the homeless.

If there were anything remotely describable as gangs, there were thousands of scattered residents, out around their neighbourhoods, seeing if there was anybody who needed a temporary home. The first six of the friends I talked to had accosted strangers and taken them in for a night or two. Or more.

In fact, San Francisco, since the earthquake, has taken on a new lease of justifiable pride from the way in which, on that night and the following days, neighbourliness came into its own. By the way, the city's economy, tourism, is still suffering grievously from the effect of the reporting of the earthquake.

I see that Britain's newspapers are getting out an ethics code, "After", it says here, "a rash of sensational articles". I hope the code will come to apply to their reporters on foreign assignment who market their sick fantasies under the guise of news reporting.

The other postscript is a note, a clarifying note, I hope, to my recent talk on the decline of the big department store. You may remember, I quoted a survey which concluded, "It's safe to say that the era of the big store is passing".

I ought to have defined more exactly what, in America and subsequently in Europe, a department store came to be. Under one roof, a place where you could buy the staples of life and many of its niceties, arranged in departments, as of household wares, from pots and pans to ironing boards, furniture, a shoe department, a glove department, a skirt department, a scarf department, a notions – in England, haberdashery – and so on.

There is in New York City still one department store that is true to the original formula, and not doing very well. The thriving ones, as I said, have turned into emporiums housing separate boutiques, in any one of which you can get a very small selection of jewellery, gloves, scarves, perfume, whatever, usually from one manufacturer, more often, one designer. At these transformed department stores, as a young friend of ours, a new New Yorker, discovered to her amazement and discomfiture, there is no scarf department with 100 sorts, no glove department, no skirt department, no electric bulb department, no notions.

If you want an ironing board or needle and thread, you'd better hunt around your own neighbourhood and find a hardware store. You go, as in the old days, from little place to little place.

The institutions that are replacing the big department store are the shopping mall, in every size of town from Chicago to Maple Corner and in this country, on this continent, the proliferation of hundreds of mail-order houses where in the late 19th and through the first half of the 20th Centuries, there were only two or three giant mail order houses, Montgomery Ward, Sears Roebuck which garnered their immense revenues from supplying all the household goods and clothing and notions of the remote communities, the farmers on the prairie and in the mountains.

Just now, I said "in this country, on this continent" because the mail-order house was the boon and the blessing for thousands of scattered communities, hundreds and thousands of miles away from the big cities where the department stores thrived. And it may be that this declining trend has not yet hit small countries where the shopping trip into the city is only 10, 20, 30 miles away.

But today in this country, the once-scattered communities, big and small, have their own shopping malls. At our end of Long Island, there are four big shopping malls. Huge, serving three villages where you can buy everything a household needs, as well as a vast choice of things like television sets and an electric piano which looks like an ironing board, manufactured in Germany.

And, with the enormous improvement in transport and the rapid distribution of advertising catalogues, there came into being hundreds of specialist mail order houses. Every week, we get in the post, I should guess something like a couple of hundred catalogues from all around the country.

You can, of course, order by telephone and dictate the number of your credit card. The result has been, in our household, which is presided over by a woman who is a genius, a mole of a comparison shopper, I hear she no longer patronises a New York department store. All the humble household necessaries, we get within three blocks of our apartment house.

I learned that we get our drinking glasses from a shop in San Francisco and, from the same place the other day, I ordered a giant pancake griddle. And... Ah! There's a ring at the back door. "Hello!" A package of steaks from the prairie itself, from Omaha, Nebraska.

Now people who know this country might think that's a little excessive for butchers are everywhere, in every town and hamlet. And for years and years and years, American beef has been second only to the beef from Kobe, Japan. Nevertheless, these 1200-mile imports are prime beef of the most splendid quality.

Which reminds me, I have to retreat to the kitchen and light an oven. Our stove is 65 years old and came with the apartment when this building was put up in 1924. It is white enamel stove, such as you might have seen advertised in the 1924 Sears Roebuck catalogue. It is a gas stove. It has six surface burners, two pilot lights, two ovens and a warming oven, and a broiler or grill, two thermostats, a storage drawer.

We wouldn't trade it for anything manufactured since. Some things that ante-date the boutique have not been bettered.

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