Voters believe Reagan lied

I flew into Los Angeles the other day and, as the plane descended, I leaned close to the window to get a bird's eye view of this enormous city. I should modify the word 'enormous', if you're thinking of population. Los Angeles is a Johnny-come-lately, not to be compared, as a congregation of humans, with Shanghai's 11 millions or with the nine millions, just about, of Mexico City, Peking, Tokyo, Calcutta, Bombay, Seoul, Moscow.

Los Angeles has less than half the population of the most famous runners-up, London and New York, but the three million Los Angelinos are spread thin and wide and even across 440 square miles, so that a bird, wanting to get its famous eye view, would have to rise to a cruising altitude of about five miles. As it is, by the time the stewardess, or hostess, or flight attendant, tells you to stop smoking – or, on most American planes, to please extinguish all smoking materials – what you see down there, usually through a thick filter of yellow smog, is a vast tangled web of intertwining motorways crawling with traffic, like a colossal bowl of spaghetti overrun by armies of ants.

I thought back to the first time I came to Los Angeles in 1933, when you didn't fly in – it was possible to fly in, in small, two-engine prop planes on to a fairly rudimentary airstrip. Three years later, there was a real airport from which four-engine, two-decker seaplanes, the famous Clippers, flew you in great comfort, beds and all, to Hawaii. But in 1933, you came in by train, five days and four nights from New York. Of course, most cities and towns everywhere have grown to accommodate the unchecked populating of the globe and I'm not pretending that in 1933 Los Angeles was a very small town, though it was only about 20 years away from having been one. In fact in 1912, it was a sheep town in the hills with no post office.

But on my first visit, there was a small, fairly dense downtown and pretty soon old two-lane roads meandering through random suburbs and much greenery, and continuous stands of exotic trees and burgeoning beds of every sort of flower. And they're still there. Hollywood was a just connected suburb, and very lush too, till at a bend on the road going west on Sunset Boulevard a sign said Beverly Hills and beyond that there was no advertising, no visible telegraph poles, no shops. Just foliage and roads winding into the hills overlooking large lawns and trimly disciplined woods around mansions, small and large, of many styles – French château and some mock Tudor and elegant New England and Southern colonial with white columns and porticos.

That was where the stars lived and just on the eastern side of the entrance to Beverly Hills, there'd be one or two cars and/or little buses with painted signs saying, 'Guide to Stars' Homes'. You signed up for the tours as to Hampton Court and when the bus was full, the man took off and you went weaving up and through the handsome tree-lined roads and the man would stop at intervals and shout through a megaphone, 'The colonial house on the left is the home of Clark Gable', or Loretta Young, or Adolphe Menjou, or Gary Cooper, or some other long-gone idol.

By the way, Loretta Young is still with us. That creamy, adorable young angel is now in her seventies and for many years has been totally absorbed with Catholic charities.

Well, as the song says, 'There've been some changes made'. Words fail me to replace those scattered, leafy, flowery suburbs with the teaming, unending, intertwining, six- and eight-lane motorways, beneath and beside which, live – drive, most of the time, it would seem – the inhabitants of a city that has just under three automobiles for every human.

We were met by an old friend, our Los Angeles host, at the airport and about 40 minutes later, having threaded our way through the seething freeways, we went through a wrought-iron gateway fronting on Sunset Boulevard and were immediately in very bosky mountain countryside – a compound, fenced off from development and vulgarity, I think, about 40 years ago, of about 140,000 acres. Mountain country, right inside the Los Angeles city limits, but the estates and houses are so separated by generous rolling gardens and forests and even by small canyons, that the effect of going to stay with such an old Angelino is that of being some scoundrelly Pacific dictator, forced into exile. But, as often happens with such, finding himself in a small palace overlooking gardens and pools and marvellous semi-tropical trees and canna lily bushes and shasta daisies and a cloudless sky and total silence.

Very strange and very congenial to deep meditation, but essentially you have the feeling of being under house arrest, for if you should want a loaf of bread or a newspaper or a shoe lace, it would be necessary to drive out down the winding hills, out of the woods and the compound and, again, past the homes of stars or lawyers or agents or whoever, and driving, say, four miles away to the necessity of a shop.

On the way into exile, down on a leafy corner of Sunset, we passed a parked car and, sure enough, the old sign, 'Stars' Homes Tour'. Still at it. 'But', said my host, 'I don't think you'd be terribly excited, a different group.' I asked who they might be. I recognised only one name and that was not because I don't go to the movies as often as I used to, but because only about ten per cent of all Hollywood movies are shot in Hollywood and, what with the jet plane and the collapse long ago of the studio contract system, the big stars live all over the place and if they're needed for filming at the remaining two studios, they wing in for work from their homes in Switzerland or London or the Riviera, northern California or wherever.

The general idea behind this talk when I began was to remark on the blessed escape high up there in the Hollywood Hills from the burning issues and the chronic smouldering issues and Washington's investigation of what is now being simply called, in the serious papers as well as in Life, 'the mess in Iran'. Now you could, of course, refuse to read a paper or listen to the radio or watch television and shun your friends, but you could do that if you were determined just as easily in a cottage in Norfolk. The fact is that unless you're a moron or a deliberate hermit, there is no place to hide.

In the early days, in my early days in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times, the only big city daily, could provide a rest of a sort from international affairs. It was a predictable, rock-ribbed conservative, local sheet and so city-proud, so intensely chauvinist that an old, droll, Hollywood screenwriter said, 'The Los Angeles Times would never report Man Bites Dog. The headline would say, "LA Man Bites LA Dog".'

Well, today, the Los Angeles Times is, at the least, the second-best newspaper in America and has no superior that I know of in the English-speaking world for its foreign news coverage. So, breaking from my meditation around the trees and flowers, I did a quick read about the world, which took a couple of hours, and then turned, inevitably, to the coverage of the mess in Iran.

There've been two striking changes. One, not so striking, is that there was for a day or two last week a lull in the breadth and intensity of the newspaper and television coverage. Nothing else took pride of place, but other things – Soviet-American relations, the fighting in Nicaragua, the surgeon-general's tough report on AIDS, the policy prospects of the new Congress – fought for second place.

The lull did not last once the House Foreign Affairs Committee started its hearings – open hearings and televised – alongside the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's closed hearings. The new note was one struck by the White House. A vicious outburst came from Mr Patrick Buchanan, the White House (that means the president's) communications director – communications as in press, radio and TV. Mr Buchanan blamed the press for overplaying the mess and making outrageous comparisons with Watergate. And the president was not far behind. He talked about the press as a school of sharks circling for the kill in bloodied waters.

I think it was a pity he said that. Of course, there will always be reporters and papers that jump the gun on any story that has sensational possibilities, but the press is not a regiment or a masonic lodge. It's a scattered company of innumerable individuals, of all degrees of competence and incompetence, of good faith and bad faith, and I think in fairness and seriousness, the best have easily outweighed the worst.

Now that the Senate and the House have full-fledged committees calling every relevant witness, from the secretary of state on down, it is from them that the truth, however ugly, will come out. It's not the press that refused to testify. The press has done no more than report a chain of events that, in the latest two national polls, finds 76 per cent of the American people believing that the mess has seriously damaged American relations with the rest of the world. And, for the moment, more seriously, that finds 47 per cent, almost one American in two, believing the president lied in professing not to know that the money from the sale of arms to Iran had gone to the counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua.

Sooner than later, the president must accept that Congress is charged to find out those truths, if any, that violate or go beyond the president's constitutional powers and beyond the general law.

So, back to the flowerbeds and the marvellous quiet trees and, as the night comes on, the coyotes squealing in the hills like wounded cats.

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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