Death with dignity law

This has been the week when clean-faced young men in the newspapers and on the networks have put on their grey beards and looked back over 1976 and told us what was probably – they can always hedge by saying 'probably' – the most significant events and movements of the past year.

Well, I've heard some of these but the fallacy of doing it at all seems to me to lie in assuming that the most important things that are going to happen have already shown, last year, at least the tip of the iceberg. But maybe something's happening quietly somewhere that never even rated a paragraph in the papers and it will turn into a thunderbolt this year or two, five, ten years from now. 

I was vividly reminded of this fallacy the other evening when a weekly scientific programme that's done on the non-commercial public broadcasting system put on an hour called 'Hitler's Secret Weapon, The Making of the V-2 Rocket'. Now, I've taken my fill of wartime memoir now that the British Foreign Office has drastically reduced the interval between filing away secret papers and opening them to publication and now that the United States has an even more revealing Freedom of Information Act whereby, for instance, you can make the FBI open up to you the whole personal file they've kept on you. So we've become inured to discovering the secret sources of great events. 

But the V-2 film was a shocker. The two people who narrated it – and at every stage of the conception and testing of the rockets they came on alternately and recalled the hows, the whys, the when – they were Wernher von Braun, the theoretical inventor and General Dornberger who was in charge of the whole thing. I don't remember anything in the memoirs of Churchill, Linderman, Stimpson, or anybody else on the Allied side, I don't recall anybody's getting excited about the V-2 much before the Germans were getting it together after the shooting down of so many V-1s which flew at the ordinary speed of propeller planes and so were handy targets for anti-aircraft. 

But the astonishing thing about this film was that von Braun and company started on the jet-propelled rocket as a weapon in the late 1920s, by the time Hitler had been in power a year or more; even he didn't know about it. And when he did and first looked it over, he took a poor view of it and he kept it very frugally financed for a long time. They had films of everything. The first rockets, not much bigger than vegetable marrows, little torpedoes, the testing of water sprays for cooling, the big jump into liquid fuel and failure after failure rockets that looked like Apollo rockets blasting a hundred feet into the air and fizzling into the sea or exploding over fields. This, plainly, was not the film that Hitler must have had made for morale purposes. 

I don't know where they kept all this material. The late 1920s, early 1930s stuff looked like something dug up from old prints of the Keystone Cops. But we saw every stage from a hunch to a blueprint, to a model, to all the duds and the final launching of the first success. 

I seem to recall a film, a feature film I mean – one of those wartime epics in which somebody like Michael Redgrave was the cool squadron leader, and Gordon Jackson the Cockney or Clydeside sparrow, doomed, you knew it, from the start by his very niceness – which showed the bombing and lucky destruction of Peenemünde, the construction centre on the Baltic Sea. The implication was that our chaps were very much on the ball, and no sooner had von Braun and Dornberger got their monster in the air than we sniffed out the base and abolished that threat. Well, the truth seems to be that nobody in Britain had a clue, throughout all the 1930s and far into the war, that anything in this line was brewing at all and if the tide had not turned against Hitler in the autumn of 1944, the V-2 would have done devastating damage to the cities of England. 

However, my point is not argumentative. I just thought, listening to the pundits telling us what were the most significant, or 'meaningful', as they say, happenings of 1976, I thought if we'd heard some big commentator on the air, way back, reviewing the year 1933 and saying, 'The most significant event of 1933 was the development of a rocket bomb in Germany.' What a hoarse laugh that would have given to the cavalry officers, not to mention the whole army, navy and air force. 

Well, I looked back, not very far, and two or three items come to mind, only one of which, I suppose, is significant in an historical sense, but I have the notion that these three things will stay with me when the Olympics, and even the Bicentennial, are fading memories. 

The historic item comes, as so many things later seem to be historic do, from California. On 1 January, there came into force, in California, a law – the first in all the 50 States – which is generally known as the 'Death with dignity' law. The California legislature passed it three months ago. It is no slapdash, humanitarian effort at what's called mercy killing; it's a very detailed and thoughtful bill. It was exhaustively debated by politicians, lawyers, the clergy, the insurance companies, doctors – everybody. 

It pronounces the right of anyone who is terminally ill to refuse artificial or mechanical, electronic or other aids without which the patient would die. This bill was given a powerful momentum in 1976 by the well-publicised case of that girl in New Jersey doomed to a vegetable life because the law required every known medical aid to keep her alive. The word 'alive', by the way, is legally in dispute. In some states it means the existence of a heartbeat. In others, a discernable brainwave. Also, I have no doubt the parents or children of terminally ill people gave their shivery attention to the long ordeal of Generalissimo Franco, who was not pronounced dead until teams of doctors finally allowed mortality to settle in. 

Well, already in California close to two thousand people, young as well as old, the healthy as well as the ailing, have applied for a form which the state has printed up that allows you to make up what is called a living will, which prohibits, on your say-so, now, before you're in a coma, the use of respirators, dialysis machines and all other unusual or artificial means to sustain life. The insurance companies were, understandably, very alert watchdogs over this bill. There loomed up before them the likelihood of wills, otherwise legally imperfect, malpractice suits from relatives opposed to the idea, the definition of what is unusual – as, for instance, the use of dialysis in acute kidney disease. 

But the early, and the most tenacious, opposition came, as you'd expect, from Roman Catholics. This has dissolved, however, not because of any secular persuasions on the part of the bill's authors, but because of one crucial word spoken by the Pope himself. The Pope recently said that human life is sacred from the first moment until the last instant of its natural survival in time. And the man who introduced the bill says that the word 'natural' was a godsend for its passage. It will, of course, be tested, most likely by the grieving relative of some patient who signed the appropriate form after being told that his or her illness was fatal, and it will, I imagine, go to the Supreme Court. Anyway, the whole question of maintaining human beings, either in agony or in a vegetable state, has been brought out of the cellar for the first time and given an airing no doubt shortly in the courts. 

In the past few days, we've heard a lot about the next, the new, Congress, though about 90 per cent of its members were there in the old Congress. We've been reading profiles of Mr Baker, the new Republican leader, and Mr Byrd, the new majority Democratic leader, and we've been boning up on some of the more colourful, or voluble, or rambunctious, newcomers. To me, the most moving figure was not anybody coming in but one old man – not so old, 67 – going out. He is Wilbur Mills, congressman from the second district of Arkansas. I did a talk about him long ago and called him the 'Confederate president' because as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over all matters of public finance, tax bills, tariffs and the like, he could watch the President of the United States rant and fume about the pressing need to pass a money bill, but if Wilbur Mills didn't like it, he could bottle it up and kill it. 

However, Mr Mills was the victim of a scandalous episode. He got drunk one night and, when he was picked up, his companion, a stripper known as the Argentine Bombshell, fell into a nearby pond. He pursued her to Boston, he embraced her on stage. He subsequently went into a hospital to dry out for many months. His fall from power was very swift and very pathetic. He's now a reformed alcoholic and giving his time to other alcoholics. 

On his last day in his congressional office, he stood upright and very forthrightly defined an alcoholic as 'anyone who feels he has to have a drink. If you ever think you have a drinking problem, then you probably do. I found out I was an alcoholic when I tried to prove I wasn't. The key to living with it,' he said before he locked up and closed his door for the last time, 'is to remember the past. Don't forget it, but don't dwell on it! That, and forgiving yourself, are the most important. Come and see me any time!' 

The third item I'll remember is a simple sentence from a survey somebody did on the twentieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. Thirty-two thousand Hungarian refugees came into this country and the piece was about what had happened to them. Most of them, a large majority, have done well. The memorable line came from a man who arrived with his wife and his health and nothing else. They learned the language, he did odd jobs, he went to night school and architecture school and today he's a 44-year-old architect and his wife is a chemical engineer. It was a long pull. Why did he feel rooted here and now content? 

'Well,' he said, 'you still have the idea in this country that if you roll up your sleeves and work hard, you can succeed.'

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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