Seeing justice done

Does the name Joe Biden strike a chord? No punishment if it doesn't. I tried it out on a few friends whose interests go beyond their separate specialties of economics, gardening, music, Wimbledon. Blank stares, filled in by knitted brows and followed by that human sound that defies musical notation, but was always recorded in Victorian novels as 'Humph!' Then somebody says, 'Wait a minute!' And after a racking interval, it was the sports buff who cried, 'Neil Kinnock!' Right on.

I'm sure that Mr Kinnock has ahead of him a powerful political career and will be remembered for his own derring-do, but if it is not to be, he will remain immortal in the lexicon of American politics if only, years and years from now, as a footnote on a par with such forgotten Englishmen as Captain Boycott and Samuel Maverick.

For Neil Kinnock was, quite innocently, Joe Biden's fatal stumbling block on the way to the presidency. Senator Joe Biden was caught out reciting a speech of Mr Kinnock's as his very own. It was such an effective, such a moving, speech after its try-out before an electioneering rally that the senator came to use it again and again. And who, what caught him out? A new device. The people's memory bank that is known as the videotape library, something that all politicians and public hypocrites have got to dread from now on.

Now obviously, politicians for centuries have been recalling other men's quotations and digesting them into their own speeches. No doubt digesting whole passages, but who was ever going to find out, except some polymath with voracious reading habits and a miraculous memory, who also happened to be present at the recital of the man's purple passage? No longer. Candidates for the presidency or their aides now keep files of the TV appearances, speech-making, press conferences, waving and shouting from cars, of their opponents and these, often fleeting, appearances are stacked away on videotape and re-run by candidate A to recall the foolishness or knavery of candidate B.

Somebody on the staff of Governor Dukakis who had followed the last British election was riffling through the videotape speeches of Senator Biden, another candidate for the Democratic nomination and, presto! What did he come across but the senator proudly declaring that he was the first member of his family in 2,000 or 200 years who'd gone to a university, and his wife, also, the first in 2,000 or 200 years. Funny coincidence department. You can imagine with what triumph this alert aide showed this tearful speech to the Dukakis camp. The accusation was made, the senator's stolen speech was broadcast, telecast and Joe Biden retired from the race.

Of course, Governor Dukakis was appalled at such underhanded hanky-panky from a member of his team and the man was fired. Nevertheless, deep in the heart of Michael Dukakis, a sense of satisfaction must surely have moderated his sense of horror.

Of course, in this new era, in which all politicians have to remember that they have always at their back a witness for the prosecution, a witness with total recall, in this era, nobody has suffered more from it than President Reagan. He must scream or faint every time he sees, slipped into the evening news, the visible, audible reminder of his 1981 speech about the evil empire. He's constantly peppered with the same question, do you still feel the Soviet Union is the evil empire? After we saw him in Moscow, with his arm around Mr Gorbachev, he was, inevitably, asked again. He said, quite simply, 'I was talking about other leaders, another time'. That, let us hope, has taken care of that.

But, on Wednesday evening, there was another swift dash by the television networks' sleuths back to the videotape library. We'll come to that in a minute. What provoked the sleuths to their gleeful search was a judgment handed down on Wednesday by the Supreme Court of the United States, which has wound up a term bulging with decisions, the last of which can fairly be called historic.

By a deafening vote of seven to one – the ninth judge excused himself – the court declared that there was nothing unconstitutional about a law passed by Congress after the Watergate scandal which allowed the setting up of special prosecutors to investigate charges against, to have the power of subpoena, summoning of grand juries, eventually to prosecute in court, any official of the presidential branch of government accused of crimes or misdemeanours.

Before that law, in the Watergate hullabaloo itself, the only prosecutor of the presidential branch allowed by law was somebody from the presidential branch, from the Department of Justice, or, as President Nixon demonstrated, a special independent prosecutor brought in from the outside by the president himself.

For once, an issue that is central to the running of the American system of government is not hard to understand. The law that was being challenged by the president and all conservatives said, in its preamble, that when anyone in the president's branch of government is charged with serious offences, it's absurd to have the president do the investigating. If not absurd, then inhuman to expect a fair and objective verdict. It's the old Roman question of who shall police the policemen?

President Reagan insisted all along that the constitution gives the president this extraordinary power. All along, I should explain, means all along the rocky road of the past few years, during which at least three high officials of his own White House staff were investigated by a special prosecutor appointed, as the new law requires, by three independent judges. All three of these suspect men went before grand juries, went to trial and were convicted. They have been pacing around in limbo ever since, waiting to see if the Supreme Court would declare their prosecutors to have been unconstitutionally appointed, and if that had happened, their cases would have been abandoned, and today they would be free. As it is, they now await their sentences.

Apart from the White House defendants, there are five men at present under indictment who are of much livelier interest to the public at large and who have, themselves, been at large hoping they would never be brought to trial. And they are the defendants in the Iran-Contra scandal, accused of many offences in connection with the supplying of arms to Iran and the transfer of the proceeds against the law to the Nicaraguan rebels, known as the Contras.

Surely, there is no need to wonder if two of those five strike a chord. They strike a discord. They are Colonel Oliver North and his boss in national security, John Poindexter. Their special prosecutor, Mr Walsh, was all smiles after the Supreme Court decision and no wonder. He's been ploughing through thousands of pages of testimony, hunting down hundreds of witnesses, spending his days before a grand jury and his nights pouring over the interminable record of Iran-Contra for, by now, just about two years. There is, of course, no appeal against the final arbiter, the Supreme Court. Colonel North had filed a personal suit claiming that Mr Walsh was an unconstitutional institution. Wrong, said the court.

So, presumably, Colonel North and Admiral Poindexter, and the rest, will now go to trial. When is an interesting point. I should guess they would press for an early, speedy trial, though speed in the American courts, especially in federal courts, can have the lightning motion of a turtle. But if they came through and were convicted before November – indeed, before next 20 January when Mr Reagan will cease to be president – it's possible that they could then appeal to another extraordinary presidential power, which is the power of pardoning government officials in the presidential branch found guilty of crimes and misdemeanours, as President Ford pardoned Mr Nixon, to the rage of the Democrats, the liberals and many Republicans who'd voted for Mr Nixon's impeachment in the hearings of the House Judiciary Committee.

The written opinions of the justices, even in the most peremptory cases, are never short. In this case, there was one dissent from the fairly new judge, Justice Scalia. He started, uncharacteristically, short and sharp. 'This,' he declared, 'is what this suit is about. Power. The allocation of power between Congress, the president and the courts in such fashion as to preserve the equilibrium the constitution sought to establish.' He maintained that the equilibrium had been tilted unfairly by the new law away from the president. The other seven said, 'Not so'.

Now, even excerpts from these learned opinions run to five full page columns in the New York Times and will not be read by more than a tiny minority of citizens, but the telly gave them the gist and the telly gave them, on Wednesday night, much more. Lovingly rescued from that wonderful new resource of the investigative and even the mean reporter, the videotape library. We saw shots of Colonel North and of the president in the not so long ago proclaiming the colonel to be a national hero. We saw President Nixon, 15 years ago, avowing he was not a crook. We saw a crumpled Mr Archibald Cox on the night Nixon fired him as special prosecutor. We saw Judge Bork rejected by the Senate for the Supreme Court, declaring months ago that the role of a special prosecutor was unconstitutional.

Combine these vivid images and the Supreme Court decision turns into a Cup Final in which Reagan, Nixon, Bork, North become a team thoroughly thrashed by the team of Chief Justice Rehnquist, Judge O'Connor, Mr Cox, Mr Walsh and, the implication is, all good men and true. Such a simple, smashing outcome will give joy to some, bitterness to others.

What the new device does, though, is to reduce government of the people in the people's imagination to a simple melodrama. It could, I'm afraid, I suggest, in time, oversimplify the difficulties of good government in the interests of a good show.

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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