The rat race

Americans, successful Americans especially, in any line of business, are always talking about getting out of the rat race.

The rat race can mean any working routine that has started to bore you. I've heard this craving voiced bitterly, wistfully, by big businessmen, plumbers, lawyers, big-time golfers, small-time grocers, university lecturers, journalists, farmers... once, I remember – a refreshing novelty – by a parson. He was a Southerner and he said, 'I've had my fill of saving souls. I'd just like to hole up in some dog patch and nurse my own.' 

Englishmen, in my experience, go about it in a far less irascible way. They assume, or maybe they are taught from birth, that any job carries with it daily stretches of boredom, so they jog along for 30, 40 years and patter off sweetly into a pension and then are galvanised into doing what they've secretly wanted to do, catching butterflies, collecting stamps, growing turnips. Or, like an old lady who wrote to me a year or so ago, a very treasured letter, from England, 'My retirement which came in my 65th year made it possible for me at last to pursue my hobby, to jog off and catch 'The Sound of Music' wherever it was being shown. Sometimes I sit through all three performances when there are three. So far I've seen it 79 times and the end is not yet.' 

We English, I guess, live a life of boredom and then switch to mania. With Americans it's the other way round. They're paranoid about the grind and horror of their jobs till they get to the pension. And then they mope and putter and confront their wives with a new ordeal – the job of having to provide these hangers-on with a daily lunch. 

These solemn thoughts came to me when I recalled the pleasure this summer of visiting an old friend, an American newspaper man, who got out of the rat race with a bang one day. No notice given. He had never seemed to complain about the grind even though he was the head of the Washington bureau of a distinguished paper, even though he hated the fetid heat of Washington, which was odd in a boy born on the blistering prairie. It blisters in summer and petrifies you in winter. I suppose we all have a picture in our minds of how and where our friends will retire, the kind of set-up they've been used to, the kind of retreat they yearn for. And of course I had a sharp picture in my mind of this man's ideal life in retirement. 

I'd known him best in the Kennedy days and it was a time when the White House press corps was more eager to be at the president's side than at any time since. Not, I'm convinced, because Kennedy had loads of charm, which he did, but because he chose Palm Beach, Florida as his winter White House and the moment it was known that he would use his father's mansion in Palm Beach as the winter White House and would be down there frequently, the rush to become a White House correspondent was as indecent as a one-day sale at a department store. 

I myself remember writing a fast note to my editor who was a cagey Scot, painfully capable of distinguishing between a call to pleasure disguised as a call to duty. I said that I'd been worried for some time that we never covered the president except when he was in Washington and I felt that I ought to attach myself to the White House press corps on a fairly permanent basis even though it would entail the inconvenience of flying thousands of miles sometimes on the spur of the moment. 

Now Kennedy, you remember, said his administration was going to tackle something called 'the new frontier.' Well, they had some pretty splendid shacks on the new frontier which to all intents and purposes I could figure began and ended at Palm Beach. We used to be put up in a glittering but medium-size hotel overlooking a lagoon and that's where I first met the man I've been talking about, the chief of the Washington bureau, but then the White House correspondent of the Chicago Sun Times. He was tall and he was dapper. White-haired, good looking in a wry, un-fooled way. If it hadn't been for his absolutely slack, unhurried manner, you might have thought he was a navy man. He bore, in fact, a striking resemblance to a Riviera admiral in an old Jerome Kern musical. 

Well, if you'd ask me then which sort of place he'd retire to, I'd have said he'd get himself a handsome, large, comfortable bungalow or ranch-style house overlooking the golf course because he was an addicted golfer of the maddest sort and he was good enough or agreeable enough to play with Kennedy. 

One day, around 1970 I guess, I'd heard that he'd decided to quit. He came home, he saw a two-line ad in a magazine for a cottage in Ireland and he said to his wife, 'That's it!' They thought they'd use this unseen cottage as a base for roving trips around Europe. They packed up everything, the furniture, the clothes, the TV, gramophone, golf clubs, the lot. Well sir, the family possessions are still in a Washington store house. They went to that cottage and they've been there ever since. 

It's what they'd call in Scotland a crofter's cottage, one door, one combination living room, dining room, kitchen, playpen, the whole about as big as a postage stamp. Upstairs two bedrooms, a sort of partitioned alleyway with a hole in the ceiling through which drips a dribble of water – that's the shower. From the downstairs room they look out on a seven-foot high whitewashed wall. From their bedroom they look out on dropping headlands and a bay and the sweeping Atlantic and beyond that – on a clear day and if you'll have something like the Mount Palomar telescope on hand – you can see clear to the Antarctic. 

And that's what they do. They look towards the Antarctic and at intervals they read a paperback, bake the gritty, chewy Irish bread, take it according to my Irish doctor's prescription with refreshing swigs of the poteen and they breathe in and out. And if they occasionally infringe the law like parking their old boneshaker near a hydrant or picking up a pint ten minutes after closing, they are not apprehended. As my friend says, the great thing about this country is 'there's always somebody who doesn't care'. 

Well I don't need to tell chronic listeners to these talks that I had not at first meant to talk about the rat race and retirement, but I got into it and I hope it has been an improving sermon and a lesson to all of us who fret about retirement and the upkeep of the mortgage payment and how to stretch the pound and, most especially, how to maintain on half-pay the lifestyle – as we now preposterously call any way of life whether it has a style or not. 

The moral, my friends, is something an old schoolmaster told me, 'Never,' he said to me, 'let your wants outstrip your needs.' Now, this is no sort of advice to give to a 15-year-old who's lusting after a new cricket bat or the latest Venuti Lang record or ... not to mention the contribution to whipping the local blonde off to the cinema, or whatever. But it's a fine line to say to fretful oldsters on the verge of a pension. 

My handsome, high-living, Jerome Kern admiral with, I suspect a firm push from his beguiling wife, is one of the few people I ever knew who got out of the rat race and managed with obvious serenity to reduce his wants to his needs. And it's all the more remarkable in that it happened to an American couple who, the whole world knows, are harried and cushioned from the womb with the urge for every brand of material comfort. Not, I hasten to say, like the English or the Indians who, as we all know, want only to sit by a broken teapot and meditate and grow a flower. 

I think what got me off on to this highly moral theme was the fact that the day I first met Jerome Kern's admiral, I was invited to dinner in Palm Beach by a new United States' senator who was celebrating his victory at the polls with a holiday down there. He was an old friend of mine, he'd been governor of his state twice and because he'd jumped aboard the Kennedy bandwagon about four years before anybody else, he was the first man appointed to the Kennedy cabinet. 

This Palm Beach dinner was the first time I'd see him since his translation from Cabinet officer into senator and I asked him why he'd made the switch. Why quit the Kennedy administration in which he might go onwards and upwards – he'd actually had an offer of a seat on the Supreme Court – to have to start the appalling 16-hour-a-day grind of being a United States' senator? 

He was very clear about it. 'You know why?' he said, 'you know why?' – sounding for the moment like Jackie Gleason about to browbeat Alice – 'Because now I'm my own man.' 'Go on!' I said. 'Well,' he said, 'let me put it this way! When you become a Cabinet officer you think you'll have the president's ear every day. I had great plans for a health and welfare bill. I drafted it, I sent it up to the president. Hell! I didn't see him in two months. Finally I got a call from the real President of the United States.' 'Who dat?' I drawled. 'The Director of the Bureau of the Budget, that's who. He told me they'd looked over the bill, it was great, but they decided they'd cut the appropriation suggested down from, I don't know, 20 millions to one million. And that was it! Never forget, my friend, the effective President of the United States is the Director of the Budget. He's the guy you have to watch out for.' 

Well, it sometimes takes the wheel a long time to come full circle and, in this case, 17 years. The Director of the Budget has changed his title, now he's the Director of the Office of Management and Budget but he's the same, quietly dictatorial figure who decides what the president's budget is to be. 

As I write, the big man is one Bert Lance, an old, dear friend of the president and he's now accused of all sorts of shenanigans with his own bank and his securities and investments. Four government agencies, three congressional committees, are looking in to these dark matters. The key committee is the Senate's Governmental Affairs Committee and its chairman had enough evidence by midweek to urge Mr Lance to resign. In any case, that chairman's judgement would be decisive. He's the key man in the investigations and that chairman of the Senate committee is that senator who, in Palm Beach, discovered to his chagrin who was the real President of the United States. 

That senator is the handsome, the very able, the honourable senior senator from Connecticut, Abraham Ribicoff.

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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