Spring heatwave, 1976

A week ago, my wife called up the man who stores furs and winter coats and such and said, 'Hold everything!' We'd had an up and down February and March, mostly up, during which Washington's famous cherry blossom trees had flowered five weeks before their usual appearance for photographing by the Easter tourists. And then a week ago, it was suddenly in the 20s, just like the sometimes endless days of February and March when you walk across town into the knifing wind and have to touch your ears to see if you still have them.

And now, here I am doing this letter with a pair of slacks on and no shirt, requiring only a necklace of Indian beads to look like a hippy in Southern Arizona writing home to mum to say it's time to go out and squeeze a little cactus juice. 

Naturally in April we haven't yet had the air-conditioners brought out of winter storage, so here I am with the windows open – a novelty that never happens in either winter or summer – and the shades drawn and it's 96 degrees. And from time to time a naked female taps around the house on the way between the bed-making and the dishwasher. It's my wife, I believe. 

So, what's happening in New York and Washington? Well, it's the heat, that's what. And the willingness of people to slump and complain about nothing but their personal discomfort reminds me of the old days in Washington, before the Second War when Congress lit out for home and the grass roots before the blast of the long summer heat came on. America was a world power even then. And I sometimes wonder whether America didn't have a more settled, certainly understandable, foreign policy then when the Senate went home for three months and hadn't the energy to sit in silent, air-conditioned committee rooms and browse over the change in China's leadership and brood over how the United States should react, if the Italian Christian Democrats and the Communists form a coalition government. 

There has been one consequence of the fall of Richard Nixon which very few people, I'm sure, anticipated. It's the determination of the Congress to dispute American foreign policy with the two people who normally don't exactly run it, but initiate it and guide it, with, of course, as the constitution prescribes, the advice and consent of the Senate, namely the president and the Secretary of State. Even the liberals and the left and the far left who gloated over the unmasking of the villain Nixon and who are now proceeding to probe into all the private, as well as the public, symptoms of that ghastly ordeal, even they did not expect a radical change in the conduct of American foreign policy. Mr Nixon's worst enemies grudgingly allowed that that was the one policy in which he'd made striking gains. His continuing close contact with the Russians, which has now cooled under Mr Ford, and his – Nixon's – opening up friendly relations with China. 

I ought to remind you that the people who deplored these moves were not Mr Nixon's traditional enemies, but his former supporters on the right. The conservative wing of the Republican Party saw, and sees, no good coming out of any buddying-up to communists, whether of the European, African or Asian variety. But, on the whole the most moral editorials on the chicanery of Watergate, and Mr Nixon's steady lying to the Congress and the people, even in those editorials they gave him high marks for his initiatives in foreign policy. 

However, Watergate and the Nixon debacle, once over, spread their stigma over the whole executive branch. The revelations about the CIA's poking into the lives of Americans at home heightened the bad smell. And the result has been that Congress is suspicious of the presidency and its staff on all counts. 

There's just been a series of interviews with congressmen and it comes out they believe that for 25 years, from the end of the Second War until 1970, Congress accepted with too much 'docility', was the word they use, the presidential conduct of foreign policy and they mean to change it. This is not only an impression, a hunch, it's a judgement made by a score of thoughtful congressmen who seek to explain some drastic changes that have crept in, all of which reflect the new determination of Congress to have an equal, if not decisive, say in the working-out of foreign policy. Even the house is getting into the act, though foreign policy is not normally the business of the House of Representatives, except when it comes to voting money bills. 

Also, congressional committees, for some time now, have been hiring more and more foreign policy experts who are qualified to argue with the presidential experts. Perhaps the most striking, if not alarming, sign is the willingness of members’ congressional committees, after they've held secret meetings to look into this or that episode of foreign policy, their willingness to leak to the press items discussed in secret and sometimes even the whole verbatim report of the secret sessions. There's a case pending now which involves a newsman who got access to the Senate's secret report on the CIA and he published it. 

Now this trend, this new alertness, of Congress to the conduct of foreign policy is what is making life very difficult for the president and his Secretary of State and, more than anything else, may sooner, I should guess, than later, break Dr Kissinger. A few people you talk to about his policies can mobilise chapter and verse of his actions in order to condemn him. There's just a vague, powerful feeling abroad that a man who's so close to Nixon, a man who keeps his counsel with the president – Nixon or Ford – (as he is by his oath bound to do) is not to be trusted. And I believe this feeling will pass over to any other Secretary of State and make the practice of secret diplomacy an almost impossible job for some time to come. 

Well, you see I'm trying to be serious and responsible talking about knotty things while we're all dripping in four days and nights of the all-time record heat for April, for this part of the country anyway. 

Easter Sunday was an oddity – greatly changed in its civilian appearance from even a decade ago. One of the quaint things about what they used to call 'little old New York’ was the way upper middle-class people got themselves rigged out on Easter Sunday, with cutaways and top hats and wing collars, not necessarily to go to church, but just to join in the conspicuous stroll along Fifth Avenue afterwards. Well, last Sunday, a man in a cutaway and a wing collar would have been surrounded and jeered at as some sort of circus freak. The weather, of course, assisted the revolution in dress. There was hardly a jacket in sight. Only very old gentlemen, who lived for years in New York when air-conditioning was unheard of, went out in suits. For the rest, it looked like the Coney Island crowd lifted en masse and deposited on Fifth Avenue, down to bikinis, except in and around St Patrick's Cathedral. For once, the requirement that women in Catholic churches shall have their heads and arms covered if only by a token wisp of silk or cotton net, was forgotten. 

Up at the Episcopal Cathedral, which is close by the river, the Hudson River, there was a blockbuster of a sermon that, more than the weather, made people very hot under the collar. This church, by the way, is the unfinished cathedral of St John the Divine. They started building it in 1892 and we are promised that, when it's finished, it will be the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Maybe so, maybe not. After all, they've only been at it 88 years. Well, the Episcopal bishop of New York, Paul Moore, plainly felt the time had come to dispense with the dollops of Irving Berlin molasses which are usually ladled out from the pulpits at Easter time. He began almost with a sneer at the traditional Easter sentiment. 'This is going to be', he said, 'a funny kind of Easter sermon with no flowers, no bunny rabbits, no 'sunrise' sermon.' 

He went at once into his scalding theme which could well have been inspired by a depressing study put out, last week, by the United States Census Bureau. It is that in the five years between 1970 and 1975, the white population of New York City has declined by more than 600,000. The borough of the Bronx is the first borough now to have an actual majority of blacks and Puerto Ricans. Yet, the black population has increased by only 29,000 which means that more blacks too are now leaving than are entering the city. But this enormous white exodus will surely be accelerated by the decision of many big industries to leave the city. It will accelerate or it will leave more and more blacks and Puerto Ricans shored up in unemployment. 

These figures provided Bishop Moore's stark text. 'The businesses that are departing', he said, 'are rats leaving the sinking ship and the suburbs they are going to will become soulless, urban wastelands where social irresponsibility also slinks through the night. And New York City,' he said, 'is plunging down the Galilean slope.' 

Without feeling quite so hopeless, a lot of New Yorkers think back with a strange yearning for the days when gangsters were taking a king's ransom from the citizens of this town by way of levying protection on our vegetables, our laundry, liquor, everything that came onto this island by truck over the bridges or through the tunnels. And then appeared the man we think of with such longing, Fiorello LaGuardia, the cocky little whirlwind of a mayor who was as tough as the Tammany bosses he skinned, a brilliant administrator but wily, industrious and totally incorruptible. 

I suppose it's a melancholy sign of the times that last week the School Board of a Harlem school, named in LaGuardia's honour voted to change its name to the Pedro Albizu Campos School. Pedro Albizu Campos founded the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party whose members tried to assassinate President Truman in 1950. And they did shoot five congressmen in the House four years later. The school board, its chairman said rather limply, felt it should be an Hispanic name. 

Well, no time to sit and fume over such things. I must be off and to the airport, to LaGuardia Airport or whatever they've decided to rename it by the time I get there. How about the Sirhan Sirhan Airport?

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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