Domestic affairs

At a tense moment in one of the Marx Brothers' films, some fine upstanding citizen who had nothing but contempt for Groucho – and it was part of the Marxian propaganda value of Groucho that all upstanding citizens had nothing but contempt for him – anyway, it was probably Douglass Dumbrille who wheeled on Groucho and said with withering scorn, 'Why, every schoolboy knows that!' And Groucho said, 'Run out and fetch me a schoolboy!'

And that, it strikes me, is the line of a perfect, instinctive politician – of a doer, a man who acts by his reflexes and leaves subordinates to fill in the research and find the proof. 

If Franklin Roosevelt had been a witty man, he would have said that line about every other day. He was the supreme American politician of my time. And like one of the witches in Macbeth, he acted on his natural hunches by the pricking of his thumbs. Of course, as a born Victorian, he had a proper respect for scholars and the knowledge that lies buried in books, but he was not a digger. He left it buried there and whenever he wanted to have impressive backing for something he itched to do, he hired a brace of professors and they came up with the rationale. 

I remember an old and close adviser of Roosevelt shocking me once at a time when I was young and pure, by saying that he couldn't recall ever seeing Roosevelt read a book, except something about stamps or ships. Now this it not to say, far from it, that Roosevelt was an ignorant man. He had, indeed, a genius for taking in complicated knowledge, but he took it in through his fingertips or through a sudden liking for the man who was dispensing the knowledge. Then other experts who held the opposite opinion would rush in and argue, and beg him to think again. But, on the whole, he stayed with his impulses and he once said to a friend, 'The President of the United States is nothing if he is not a moral leader. His job is to go on the radio and say to the American people, "We can do this or we can do that. That is bad and this is good. And we're going to do this".' 

President Carter's recent trip has made at least one thing clear. He has Roosevelt's belief in the moral function of the American presidency. He probably has it more than anybody since Lincoln. But as a politician, he's at the opposite pole from Roosevelt and Lincoln. When he faces any one of the enduring problems of politics – poverty, crime, taxes, public health, social security, the national defence – I'm sure he has his instinctive hunches about what to do. More than that, he has a genuine, steady concern to do what is best for most people. He has unwavering ideals. He always has a moral purpose. 

But at that point his resemblance to Lincoln or Jefferson, and certainly Franklin Roosevelt, ends. He brings in the experts. He reads the vast memoranda and reports. He reads the staggering volume of testimony given before the house committee on finance or the Senate committee on housing, or whatever. 

By the way, in the year between his campaign and his election, he took a course in speed reading. And when he's not seeing his staff or consulting with the party leaders or calling a Cabinet minister, or welcoming a foreign head of state, he reads, reads, reads and then he telephones, telephones, telephones. And during this conscientious process, his mind has grown as many legs as a centipede and, at the end of it, he begins to wonder which ones to start moving. He sighs. He finds there's much to say not on both sides, but on five sides to build more of the nuclear missile or to junk it, or to make some but not enough to frighten the Russians, or to modify the design or to make enough in a part of the country whose defence industry is lagging, so as to put people back to work. 

When somebody asked him at the end of the year, what was the most striking thing he'd discovered about the job of being president, he said, 'The complexity of it. All the mistakes I've made,' he said, 'have been ones of naiveté and ignorance.' I don't hear any other president of our time saying that. Roosevelt, asked a similar question during the thick of the Second War, said, 'It's a tough, demanding job but when I leave the White House I hope I could say, like Cousin Theodore I had a bully time.' It's safe to say that Jimmy Carter is not having a bully time. 

Foreigners keep on asking us about the mystery of Jimmy Carter or as one British politician put it to me, 'What is he really up to?' I don't believe he's 'up' to anything in the sense of ever having some secret, foxy purpose. He's not secretive. And he's not mysterious. He's simply a new type in the presidency or, say, he's an old and familiar Southern type – a serious, devout Baptist, a circumspect intelligence, a very moral man who finds himself in a new game which he never suspected would be so worldly, as well as being so complicated. 

Of one thing I'm certain. It is a big mistake to fall back on saying he's a peanut farmer out of his depth unless you're prepared to say that what you mean is a farmer who built up a family business into a half-million dollar affair, who's also a typical navy commander, a nuclear physicist and a lover of Mozart. That is surely a pretty surprising variation on the Southern hick character of the comic strips to which his enemies are eager to consign him. 

Now how does all this fit in with his ambitious trip to India and the Middle East and Europe? He first, you remember, meant to visit nine countries, two of them in South America and then was accused of a bad blunder by cancelling or postponing the trip because he was forcibly reminded by his party leaders in Congress, as well as by the press, that he'd once said the test of his first year in office would be his ability to get an effective energy bill through the Congress. He admitted, yes, he had said that. So, he put off his trip and settled down to battle with the oil men and the natural gas men to get through his energy bill. Well, at the end of the last session of Congress, the Congress went home for Christmas and any recognisable energy bill lay in shreds. His original brave recipe to produce a bill to save energy which would represent what he called 'the moral equivalent of war' produced only six or seven deadlock factions and, literally, over 200 amendments left to be debated. 

So, privately admitting defeat in trying to turn a moral crusade into a workable law, what did he do? He reverted to what he does best. He went off on another moral crusade. He decided to carry his Baptist message abroad. He reinstituted his overseas trip. 

I don't think anybody can fault Mr Carter for his sincerity. He does seek a lasting peace in the Middle East. He does want to go on insisting that a workable democracy is a sham if it does not protect human rights, however much this insistence upsets the Soviet Union or the Cubans or the Chinese or the Albanians. But now he discovers that he can't make a big issue of this when he talks to the Shah of Iran, say, or any other country on which America depends for raw materials. 

I imagine Mr Carter was never more uncomfortable with his moral message than when he was meeting King Khalid and Crown Prince Fahd, for Saudi Arabia is the main foreign supplier of America's oil and America is now importing more oil than it did before the Arabs jacked up the price. And that, for any travelling American preacher, is a sobering statistic. 

So what do you do if you're an intelligent Southern Baptist and a champion of human rights and the President of the United States sworn to protect the integrity of Israel, what do you do when you meet the rulers of Saudi Arabia and they say that Israel must withdraw all its troops from the territory she occupied in 1967? What sort of answer can a dependent customer give to the Saudi Arab news when it writes, as it did after Mr Carter left, 'Friendship is a two-way street. Sooner or later, the United States will have to deliver.' 

The European press has tended to play up the president's tour as a series of bungles and blunders, what with the boo-boos of that interpreter in Poland and the side remarks to Secretary Vance picked up by a sound recordist who had more alertness than conscience. But maybe the trip will have been worthwhile if it shows Mr Carter that foreign problems are just as intractable as the problems at home. Just before he took off, the president gave a television interview to the four national networks. The most striking thing about it was the contrast between his optimism about America's problems abroad and his pessimism about the outcome of his domestic programme. He sorrowfully reneged on his campaign promise to balance the budget. In fact the deficit will be higher than it’s ever been. A new and better tax bill has been abandoned. His failure to get an energy bill he called 'a cloud over the leadership qualities of the nation'. 

But he was very gung-ho about the prospects of the SALT talks with Russia and the progress of the Sadat-Begin negotiations and the Panama Canal treaty and the probable effect on the rest of the world of his campaign to spread and protect human rights. 

The contrast between the joys of preaching and the pains of practising is not lost on the Congress. Once Mr Carter is back in Washington, he will be reminded by the party, the Democratic Party, that the voters may take an intelligent interest in foreign affairs, but they judge a president on his domestic record. 

The president, I think, would do well to be reminded of a story about the late Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, a veteran senator who found once he got on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he didn't have much time to go home to his constituency. When he did pay a belated visit, he walked down the main street of his hometown and recited to the gaping locals all the great things he'd done on the Foreign Relations Committee – Europe put on its feet again, the Marshall Plan, the Russians held in Iran, NATO set up for the defence of Europe. 

An old tooth-sucking man listened patiently and when the senator was through, he looked up at him and said, 'Alben, tell me something! What have you done for me lately?'

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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