Illuminating Events with Unpredictable Results - 8 January 1999

It will come as a surprise to some people, and I suspect a relief to many more, to hear that I'm not going to talk much about the impeachment trial of President Clinton, even though it's possibly the most historic moment in the story of the American presidency since 1868, when the first and only other president was tried on charges amounting to impeachment.

Precisely because it has happened only once before and then 130 years ago, even now with the trial just about to begin we barely have an idea of not how it's going to come out but how it's going to work.

It's as if a nation had just invented trial by jury and was about to try it out for the first time without knowing what was the function of the jury, the powers of the judge, if you could call witnesses, what they would say and couldn't and we were groping our way, for the first time in history, into such mysterious practices as cross examination, hearsay, rebuttal, what's evidence - what isn't, the judge's charge and so on.

We don't know how much of the surprise to a proceeding an institution none of us has ever seen in action and about which the few of us who've read about the previous defendant - Andrew Johnson - are very hazy.

The only helpful thing we know about that trial was that the Senate laid out, before it started, 26 rules and this time the Senate hopes to follow them.

Now since the old House - it's a totally new one as you know, since last Thursday we have a new Congress - since the old House voted two articles of impeachment against President Clinton, senators, who are to be the jury, came back to Washington early to try and agree on how the trial should be run. Need I say that on some substantial or substantive matters the two parties are far apart.

Should they call witnesses or should the Special Prosecutor's huge report - which was the basis for the House's vote - should that be accepted in toto so that no witnesses need be called? Or shall we have to go through the whole prosecution case all over again, but this time with the president too being allowed to call witnesses which he could not do by the rules of the grand jury?

The very day the trial formally started last Thursday the White House suddenly said: 'Okay we'll let the Starr Report stand as the prosecution case but no witnesses - if you, the Republicans, call witnesses we'll do the same and the trial could last forever.'

Well will it last a week, a month, throughout the summer or somewhere, as the Republicans' leader in the Senate airily thought, somewhere between three days and three months? We don't know.

There's one thing we do know and a blessed thing it is for those of us who, in our time, have spent many monotonous hours, not to say years, covering the Senate and its interminable oratory.

We are going to see the very odd, the very consoling spectacle of the Senate's not sitting for once as a debating society - they're sitting as a jury. They can, apparently, do what all juries can, which is to ask the presiding judge to have bits of testimony read over, otherwise they are listeners.

I hope you'll appreciate what a massive strain this puts on the 100 Senators whose usual rule has seemed to be: 'Don't say anything in 10 words that you can say in 10 sentences.'

A foreign journalist, new to Washington once asked me, quite unwarned, for just one memorable sentence in the English language and I said on the spot, I could recall one of the great sentences of English literature, but I said there are two versions of it - the old one known as the King James version is Genesis chapter I verse ii: "And God said let there be light and there was light." And then I said with an expression that should have tipped him off that this was a gag, then there's the United States Senate version - so: "Ah, the supreme being mandated the illumination of the Universe and his directive was immediately implemented."

The man started to copy it down. He had a second thought. He said: "Come and have a drink."

So, as I said - or as this generation says without a blush, like I said - we're not going to talk about the trial, there'll be lots of time through the coming weeks or winter or spring or summer.

Oh there is one final cheering point. Just before it all got started the Chief Justice of the United States announced that he wouldn't be available to preside until the afternoons, which sounds like a line out of Gilbert and Sullivan, but is the first sensible, immensely relieving note of reassurance against the almost hysterical warnings of the Democrats, that a long trial would suspend the business of the Congress, arrest the work of the Supreme Court, paralyse the government.

Justice Renquist will be at work as usual listening to case arguments in the court in the mornings and after lunch go to the Senate and say: "Well now ladies and gentlemen, you were saying?"

The other consoling fact to mention is that the Congress is normally very busy through January and most of February, establishing the new composition of its committees and drafting its response to what the president proposes in his State of the Union address which ought to come on 19 January and, of course, may have to wait.

So last time we looked back at 1998 and I sidestepped the commentator's usual chore of telling you what was most memorable because I suggested there is no photo album that's the same for all of us for any of us. You have your own personal memories.

But now, just before the Clinton trial started, the pundits dashed in to do what they love most to do in the face or teeth of experience: to tell us what's going to happen in 1999 - always a foolish occupation.

A well-known economist did a piece on New Year's Day which looked back exactly one year. He had thrashed through year-old papers and magazines, surfed the Internet, to see what 30 of the leading financial and economics experts had predicted for 1998. He separated out the chaff and left only three predictions all 30 agreed on - a consensus if ever there was one.

One: the Asian economic collapse would have finally punctured the swollen bubble of the American economy and the stock market would have suffered a massive "correction" taking the industrial stocks down from 9,000 points to, say, 6,000.

Next the introduction of the euro would have to be postponed.

Third: inflation and its illegitimate brother, unemployment, would finally have risen - "soared" is the professional word.

Well the American stock market at the turn of this year was at a record high. The euro is off and running. Unemployment remains throughout the country very close to a record low. Inflation is barely measurably higher.

Now professional commentators don't like to be reminded of their boo boos, gaffes, clangers and boners but there's one American columnist, a shrewd and engaging lady named Meg Greenfield, who wrote a New Year's piece refusing to predict anything because she says she learned her lesson once for all with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Certainly that astounding event should serve as an object lesson to all experts whether historians, journalists or politicians.

Miss Greenfield reminds us that during the long winter of the Cold War, when the only outsiders who get around the Soviet Union were avowed enthusiastic Communists from other nations, the rest of us had to learn about the shifting movements of Soviet policy and events by attending to, in this country and in Britain, about a half dozen famous - one or two of them practically revered - analysts known as Sovietologists. I knew, at a respectful distance, two or three of them.

They were, for the whole of their careers when we followed them for 40 years or more, very learned, very serious, persuasive and dead wrong.

"In retrospect," writes Miss Greenfield, "what was so remarkable about them was their brass. Far from ever conceding error they would begin each revised explanation: "As I predicted eight months ago when Zshelhimsky ousted Schmasinsky..." - and then they would go on to re-write in wholly re-arranged detail what they'd predicted at the time. In the same article they would render yet another ringing forecast of things to come which would need to be revised after the next Politburo shake up.

Well, I myself remember following these serious men and all the time not noticing that the more things changed the more they stayed the same. I gathered all that time that the ruling of the Soviet Union was, though very stern, extremely complicated and to understand its economy and rates of production in industry and farming took years of study.

I once asked an old friend who'd come to America as a 12-year-old Russian immigrant: "What keeps this immense and scattered population cowed? How can so many millions across eight time zones stay loyal to an oppressive regime? Is it the distant promise still of Utopia?"

This old man made an impatient gesture and stroked his moustache. He said: "They all know very well what keeps them in line, it's fear of the midnight knock on the door. It could happen to the smallest farmer, the greatest merchant, it happened to mine - here I am."

The midnight knock on the door - the secret police, the OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB. To the Russian people it meant what Sovietologists did not care to mention, it signified arrest, at best exile - a labour camp, at worst disappearance, torture and routine - sometime routine - liquidation of whole villages, which being translated means murder.

And after all the tomes and articles we'd read about agricultural reform and productivity plans what finally did in the Soviet Union was an unendurable shortage of potatoes and soap.

So it was the personal experience of the Sovietologists for 40 years ridiculing the possibility of the collapse of Communism itself and its happening on a night and a day in 1989 which convinced Miss Greenfield never to prophesy again.

I've just taken the same vow. So just let's hope it'll be a happy New Year.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.