A popular president

Last evening, a friend dropped in for drinks and dinner – an Englishman, with a wide knowledge of the arts, who lives here now when he's not off in Houston or San Diego, California or Denver or Ashland, Oregon or Anniston, Alabama or any other of the cities, large or small, that possess superb centres for the performing arts. There are over 50 Shakespeare festivals this year in America and my friend is a busy traveller.

As I was pouring his drink, I said, 'So, it seems if there's one thing the French know very little about, it's wine'. He doesn't miss a trick in the newspapers either and he said, 'Yes, surprise, surprise! It just shows how much we take for granted'.

We were talking about a survey conducted by the French government to find out how much the ordinary Frenchman/woman knows about wine. Twenty questions, most of them very elementary, were put to a statistical sample of a thousand people. Like, which of these four grapes is never used in champagne? Only five per cent got the answer, 57 per cent admitted to not knowing. Is Montrachet a red burgundy, a white burgundy, a white wine from somewhere else? Fifteen per cent got it right. 71 per cent didn't know.

The best response came from the 36 per cent who recognised the most famous burgundy as a burgundy. In all, whereas a perfect score would have been 20, the average score was just over four.

It reminded me of the time, some years ago, when the Metropolitan Museum here opened a shining new wing to house what was known as the Lehman Collection, a large gathering of small Renaissance paintings put together throughout 50 years by an American investment banker, Robert Lehman. It remains as a large jewel in the treasure house of the Metropolitan.

When, before it came to its permanent home, it was shown in Paris, a leading French critic sighed, 'I wish that we had a banker who could give to the nation something as incomparable and exquisite as the Collection Lehman'.

Well, the week that the collection took up its residence here, we had a diplomat and his wife to dinner and I mentioned the high praise that had been given to the show and to Robert Lehman. The wife, a shrewish lady, snorted in scorn, 'How could it have any distinction at all? A banker, indeed! And an American'. I mentioned the reviews but she said, banging the door on any further discussion, 'But I am an Italian'. She was annoying enough to make me forget my manners as a host and say, 'I was born in Lancashire, but that doesn't mean that I know anything at all about the paintings of Lowry'.

Well, that's enough about what turned into a tense, unpleasant evening. But on Wednesday after dinner, my English friend and I dropped in on a favourite jazz man of mine, Dick Wellstood, the stride pianist. He was not performing at his usual dive, a small, smoky saloon way up town, where he can wear jeans and a rumply sweater and bang away at the works of Fats Waller and J. P. Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton and all the other, early masters of traditional jazz, who are probably well known to, I now suspect, about two per cent of the American population.

Wellstood, on Wednesday, was doing a long summer stint at a very smart Madison Avenue hotel, where he rightly assumed maybe no per cent of the audience was ready for his usual repertoire. So he played Gershwin and Arthur Schwartz and Richard Rogers and Cole Porter. Standards, as we call them.

Between sets he came and sat down and grunted, 'I'm getting nowhere,' he said, 'with this audience'. He told us that he had once relapsed into his usual blues and stride pieces and in the middle of a particularly fast one, his left hand bouncing back and forth like a demented metronome, a grave gentleman appeared, holding his drink, looked down at the keyboard and harrumphed, 'Must you do that?'.

Ever afterwards, he stayed with the standards. But now a strange, disturbing thing has happened. 'Twenty years ago,' he said, 'everybody who came in here, in their forties and fifties, would know all the standards. Now they don't. They don't recognise them, they don't know them. They clap politely.' He looked at his watch and said he had to get back to play standards to you, I guess. He played a sequence of several Gershwins and I noticed that my friend was not even registering content. As I hummed along with one number, my friend – he's 44 – said to me, 'What's that?' 'That,' I said, 'is called "The Man I Love".' 'By?' By one George Gershwin.' 'Nice,' he said.

A baleful light dawned on me. 'You don't know any of these tunes he's just played, do you?' I said. 'Not a one! When I was at school,' he went on, 'rock and roll was coming in on its revival and the year I left school, the Beatles arrived. So I never heard any of your stuff at all. Of course, as far as Gershwin's concerned, I do know "Porgy and Bess".'

Now these revelations may be to some of you what the old Punch used to call 'more glimpses of the obvious' but until that moment, it was not obvious to me that probably four-fifths of that hotel bar audience was totally unacquainted with what I should have said everybody knew. Just as, however ignorant or prejudiced they may be in other matters, the French certainly know their wines.

Indeed, this has turned into 'Never Take Anything for Granted' week. A poll taken here, as the millions flocked in to see the Liberty celebrations, revealed that just over one per cent of Americans know that the statue was presented to the United States by France. And I see that the week the bounding bombshell, Boris Becker, came to Wimbledon and conquered again, they took a poll in Germany, what is known as a recognition poll – they toss a name at the samples and ask them to identify it. Only 70 per cent knew that Mr Kohl was the chancellor. Ninety-eight point something at once identified the 18-year-old hero, also known as Boris the First.

He is, I should guess, better known to more Germans than Bismarck or Hindenburg, maybe even Hitler, ever was. Is that an absurd guess? I recall a survey taken in England in 1941 when France had capitulated and Britain, in the person of Prime Minister Churchill, stood alone shaking a fist at the Channel Ports. Dr Gallup held a recognition poll. Just over five per cent of Britons could not identify the name or job of – wait for it! – Winston Churchill.

I mentioned this astounding fact to a lady who was lunching down the island – I'd better say Long Island, which lies to the east off the north-eastern mainland of the United States – she was properly amazed. She's the widow of an old Scot, a naturalised American, who was through all his 75 years a passionate golfer. I told her that last year a survey had been done on which sports Americans follow as a regular thing. The criterion of a follower was, which sport do you play or read about or watch?

Baseball, professional basketball, professional football (American) and college football led the poll in that order. At the bottom was lacrosse. Near the bottom, I regret to say, people who have never played, never watch, never read about, was the golf. Just over five per cent of the population – it's one reason I never mention the subject in these talks.

So, I reflected aloud, about 95 Americans in a hundred have never seen or read about or watched or would know him if they bumped into him Jack Nicklaus. Nicklaus, I hasten to say, is a 46-year-old American of Alsatian descent, born in Columbus, Ohio, the birthplace of James Thurber, a deceased American humorist and is – Nicklaus – generally rated the greatest player the game has ever known.

My hostess who, in manner and especially in riposte, bears a striking resemblance to Penelope Keith, my hostess roared, 'Ridiculous! I absolutely refuse to believe it!' So there.

We all have a file of mental pictures of the way the world turns. The French cherish their wine, the Americans are for ever grateful to the French for the Statue of Liberty, everybody knows 'The Man I Love' and, scientific proof to the contrary, we are not going to have our picture file thrown into disorder.

Talking of surveys and statistics and scientific proof that so many things are rarely what we all think they are leads me to bring up one great puzzle of American life under the Reagan administration. It's a puzzle, so far as I know, unique in American political history or I'd better say unique since statistical sampling was invented and we were able to puncture our assumptions.

It is the unexplained gap, and it's a large one, between the unprecedented popularity of Ronald Reagan, of a president halfway through a second term, and the startling unpopularity of many of his policies. When Franklin Roosevelt took the nation by the scruff of its aching neck in the pit of the Depression and dedicated it to a policy of galloping liberalism, his own popularity as a saviour was soon matched by thundering approval of his policies. The opposition to him from the old Coolidge and Hoover establishments, from business, from lifelong Republicans, from some professional people, the opposition was bitter and very focal, but it was drowned out by the massive approval of the people in four successive presidential elections.

Today, something like 68 per cent of Americans approve of Ronald Reagan as president. Over 70 per cent are against giving aid of any sort to the rebels, the Contras, in Nicaragua, yet, Reagan twisted the arms of enough Democrats to get an aid bill passed. Seventy per cent of the country favours the choice of abortion. Reagan is implacably against it. Reagan is for prayer in the public schools. Most of the country and the Supreme Court is against it. It goes on and on. Why?

New York's Senator Moynihan thinks he has the answer. Ronald Reagan has done the country a great service. After Vietnam and Watergate and the Iranian hostages, we needed a popular president. The social order is peaceable, but he has crippled the economy of the nation and this will be with us for the rest of the century.

Very trenchant, very persuasive. But maybe we won't know the answer until a Gallup poll taken in AD 2000.

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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