Ford loses Angola aid vote

As I sit down to talk to you, the snow is swirling past my windows and I think how nice it would be if I could honestly do what I did many years ago, namely to dredge up, or dream up, an American Christmas story to tell at this time.

I think I did that three years in a row and it naturally brings up the question, was there nothing happening inside or outside the United States of sufficient gravity or terror to make such frivolous storytelling an evasion, an almost culpable evasion, of the world we were living in? Well, nobody ever wrote in to say so. I've gone back in my mind over the two or three years when this Christmas talk was a regular thing and when I certainly felt no embarrassment in doing it. 

They were not placid years. In 1951, while we formally put an end to the war with Germany and Japan, there was a big dust-up in Washington when Senator Keifover opened an investigation into crime and showed that much of it was organised nationally and its huge profits used to go into legitimate business and buy protection from cops and politicians. It's not a new story but it was on a shockingly national scale. 

And then in the spring, President Truman astounded everybody by stripping General Douglas MacArthur of his command in the Far East. The war in Korea was, of course, the chronic American headache in 1950-51 and so it was the next year, in the end throwing Truman out of the presidency as effectively as Vietnam forced out Lyndon Johnson. There were also spy trials, national strikes, the first explosion of a hydrogen device and the first of those three years, I remember, 1950, the army had seized the railroads to prevent a general strike, two Puerto Ricans came very close to assassinating President Truman and only three weeks before Christmas, a session of the House of Commons was thrown into near panic by a news flash from Washington that Mr Truman was thinking of using the atomic bomb in Korea. This rumour grew out of a crass misunderstanding of something the president had said at a news conference, but 100 MPs stuck with the misunderstanding and when the prime minister, Mr Atlee, got up in the House and said he'd decided to fly to Washington, implicitly to save us all from Truman's bomb, the cheers broke out from both sides of the House. 

So, why could I, two weeks later, without a qualm, sit down and talk about a fictional character, one Zabulon Adams, retired banker, in an old folks' home, who ached to play Santa Claus, attended a college for the training of Santa Clauses and made it? I simply cannot imagine sitting here now and telling tales of pseudo-Dickensian, or even true Dickensian, Christmas cheer. 

I think now that, whatever happened 20 years ago – spies, bomb threats, even Korea – never seemed very frightening for long because they all took place under the protective umbrella of the American bomb. The Russians had it by then, but only just. America's friends and foes agreed, however grudgingly, that the United States was the only effective superpower, the one that had what we now call 'a nuclear capability'. The Russians were raising Cain in all sorts of places but nobody had to fly to Moscow to beg them to hold it. 

It may be, of course, that the past always looks like the last stand of innocence and there are, just now, a spate of movies around which deliberately assume that the early 1950s were a carefree, naive time. Well, they weren't but there was no worlwide plague of terrorism. There was no serious suggestion that the Soviet Union and/or China could bury us all if they went on the loose. 

Still, I don't think it's the bomb that disturbs us so much as the feeling that America is no longer the protector, that we're all off balance. We don't really know for sure, as we once did, who is the effective superpower. The Russians figures are secret but the intelligence reports on the capability, for instance, of their navy are frightening and while we all thrash over the rightness or wrongness of the United States and Russia coming up against each other in Africa, are the Russians there because of the penetrating inroads the Chinese have made in Africa? Most of us don't even think about Chinese technicians in Africa until we see them, or consider the bizarre fact that the Chinese surpass us all – the British, the Americans, the Russians – in the number of radio broadcasts in innumerable languages that they beam to Africa. 

A few weeks ago, I mentioned this sense of what I called, I think, something like 'alert frustration' because we don't know who – in the Soviet Union, in China or, for that matter, in the United States – who's in charge of the store. In Russia and China the power has fallen away, or is about to, from Brezchnev and Mao Tse-tung because of sickness and/or age. In the United States there is now the strange situation that the sitting president is, as the 1976 campaign gets under way, the underdog. Even in his own party, he's frightened by the oncoming charge of Ronald Reagan. 

It's always been said and it's always been true, that an incumbent preisdent has an enormous advantage in a presidential election campaign. This time it's not true. We can easily rationalise Mr Ford's weakness by saying he's the first unelected president, that the people know it and they want to have their say. But it's Mr Ford's performance itself that could doom him. He came in like a clean north wind after a tropical heatwave. He was, everybody recognised, a nice, decent, honest man and he evidently still is. While the recent scandals about wire tapping of political opponents and citizens on order from the White House have besmirched every president, from Franklin Roosevelt to Nixon – with the striking, outraged exception of Mr Truman – Mr Ford, also, remains the nice guy who would strongly agree with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's axiom that 'wire tapping is a dirty business'. But niceness is not enough. 

Mr Ford, finding himself unable like, say, President Johnson, to woo or wheedle a majority to back him up in Congress has reverted to a dangerous game which is a strain on the American system and a bigger strain on the tempers of Congress – the game of government by veto. Every other bill put up by Congress is threatened with a presidential veto. It may look like strength but the strong presidents are able to convince or conjur a consensus. In Mr Ford it's more like a desperate assertion of a virility that isn't there. 

Now the main mischief, it seems to me, about the waning status of Mr Ford during the campaign is that great events and decisions will not wait till the next presidential election in November and, in the meantime, it is at least possible that Mr Ford, in a given situation, may be right and Congress may be wrong. The one big decision which may, in the months or years ahead, come to seem like a fateful decision is the one that the Senate has just made about Angola. 

It came out only very recently, no more than a couple of weeks ago – it came out almost as a lurid bit of Washington gossip – that the United States had secretly given $27 million worth of aid to one of the three guerrilla groups now fighting each other in Angola. 'Secretly' is perhaps too strong a word. At least one committee of Congress had been told in secret session that the money had been given, by the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency. I think that's what did it. No American government agency is in worse odour just now than the CIA. The mere mention of a whacking subsidy to one faction in a civil war, if it's provided by the CIA, is enough to make the deed suspect. 

President Ford wanted to give our side, which is naturally fighting the side subsidised by the Russians, another $28 millions. The debate in the Senate that refused him any more money for Angola was almost as precipitate as the debate ten years ago that gave President Johnson unanimous support for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and put power into his hands that the cheering Senate didn't dream of at that time. 

Well, now the equation between Vietnam and Angola was quickly stated. We intervened first with money, then with technology, then with men. In the end we had 500,000 men there and had to leave and lost Vietnam. And now in another country, we are told the same story. The United States has a vital interest in the west coast of Africa. It has sent money, it wants more money, then what? Not this time. The Democratic majority congratulated itself for being on the alert and not being caught out twice. 

And it's true that suddenly, with their backs against the wall, President Ford and Dr Kissinger argued very much in the terms that the Johnson and Nixon administrations had argued on Vietnam. Dr Kissinger, in particular, said that the balance of power in the whole of Africa will turn on what happens in Angola. If the Russians succeed in their propaganda that it's a war between a people's front against fascist guerrillas supported by South Africa and the Russian side wins, then the other African nations could conclude that the Soviet Union is THE superpower in Africa. 

And Dr Kissinger also let it be known that if the Popular Movement, so-called, wins, it could give a submarine base to the Russians from which, with their vast submarine fleet, they could control all the lanes in the South Atlantic. 

What I think decided the vote so firmly in the Senate was the fact that the Pentagon was split in its views on Angola as it never was on Vietnam. There was a powerful wing in the Pentagon giving much aid and comfort to Democrats in the Senate that thought the chances were that once the Popular Movement won, if might, like the Egyptians at one stage, thank the Russians briefly and toss them out of Angola which would be very nice, of course, but nobody knows that this is true until it happens. 

Well, the Angola bill comes up before the House next month and anxious second thoughts may have set in by then. But whether the Senate was right or wrong, in this instance, what it has convinced many people of, in an election year, is the dangerous maxim that the United States has few, or no, vital interests outside northern Europe and its own borders.

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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