Carter silent on oil crisis

Silence may be golden, but it can do a lot of damage to the dollar and Mr Carter's decision not to talk to us about the oil crisis has caused a general bafflement of a kind that's unique in my experience.

I must say that in the split-second echo of that sentence, I sound as if I were doing a parody of a radio commentator on 'The Muppet Show'. Here comes that fatuous, lantern-jawed newsreader bustling with self-importance, to announce – what? President Carter, who was going to talk to the nation and propose a bold new plan to lick the oil shortage has decided not to talk to the nation. On the contrary, he has gone fishing. And the result has been an immediate drop in the value of the dollar, confusion among his staff and an even more dramatic drop in the president's standing in the polls. You wouldn't need a shower of canned laughter after such an inane bit of farce, but the fact is I have spoken nothing but the truth. 

Presidents have cancelled fireside talks before now. They've done it for the simplest reason. Roosevelt once had a sudden head cold and put if off for 48 hours. Not, of course, that anybody in our wicked world will even accept from a politician a reason so guileless as a cold. There are always wiseacres who know the real reason which vary between the lurid and the absurd. 

But this time there are no rumours. Everybody, not least Mr Carter's staff, is puzzled and looking foolish because Mr Carter, without consulting anybody, even his Secretary of Energy, announced he would appear that night on television. The routine is well known. The White House calls the directors of the four national networks, says the president wants the time, and the time is his. Everything is cancelled. The sponsors are tactfully, but firmly, told that their show is off, and the president goes on the air. 

Well, the preliminaries were done, as usual, and then the next morning the networks were told that the talk was cancelled. The announcement from the White House was as bald as that cryptic little sentence that used to appear in the London Times, 'The marriage arranged between Mr Plympton Bayberry and Miss Daphne Brick will not now take place'. And this always led friends and acquaintances to fill in the blanks with wads of gossip and well-meaning malice. 

And no sooner had Mr Carter cancelled his talk than people leapt to the reason that he was close to exhaustion after his summits in Vienna and Tokyo or there was some sudden new turn in the OPEC world or Mr Brezhnev had come alive and kicking. Anyway, some big new switch in the world situation which, no doubt, we should soon hear about. 

Well, these rumours were soon discounted by President Carter's intimates, no less, as too absurd even to deny. Mr Carter had not told his Secretary of Energy about the talk and not told him it was off either. No explanation of any kind was given. Though, by the time you hear this, the White House, seeing the slump in the dollar and pondering the very low figure of Mr Carter's popularity – lower than Nixon's when he abdicated – maybe the White House will have come up with some plausible, second-thought explanation. I don't know the real reason for the cancellation any more than you do but the most plausible reason was the simplest one. It was uncomfortably hinted by the president’s aides that the president had decided not to say anything because, at the last minute, he couldn't think of anything to say. That also sounds like a Muppet parody but it may well be the truth and, if it is, it will generate more alarm than any other excuse. It would mean that that the president, the father of his people and the leader of the Western world, is just as stumped by the oil shortage as the rest of us. 

The suggestion is that the president had looked over the drafts of his speech on which many hands and brains had been working, and was not satisfied with them, either singly or together. Even then, it's extraordinary for a president, even for a local secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to plan a speech and not have in mind his general line. Mr Carter, after all, is not Governor Brown of California, who boasts of being so responsive to public opinion that he stands for nothing till he sees what people want. 

When Governor Brown was elected to the governorship of California and was approaching the ceremonial of his first day in office, an aide asked him what was to be the main theme of his inaugural address. The governor said he had no main theme. 'But I mean,' said the man, 'we want to get out a release and we'd like just to list the things that you and your administration mean to stand for.' 'But,' said the governor, 'I don't stand for anything till I hear from the people.' He described himself once as the first existentialist politician and proved it by hearing the voice of the people and coming out furiously against Proposition 13 – that you know was the now-famous California measure to make 50 per cent cuts in property taxes, rates. But once the people voted heavily in favour of it, Governor Brown became an instant convert. 

Well, if Governor Brown were President Brown, nobody who knows him would be at all surprised that first he meant to make a national address and then he meant not to. Whatever else you can say against Mr Carter, you have to admit that he is a serious man. He's obviously as concerned about the oil shortage as anyone in government. He knows, better than we know, that if the general panic about petrol, not to mention winter heating oil, gets tenser, all sorts of grave things are going to happen to the economy, to the dollar, to employment, not to mention his own chances of being re-nominated for a second term. 

Now, many people may want to know, in fact, it's the first thing I've been asked by visitors, 'What is the process of writing a presidential speech?' Well, there's nothing in it that can explain the ultimate failure to produce any speech at all. The usual thing is for the president to call in his chief adviser on the chosen topic, in this case that would have been two men, the Secretary of Energy, Mr James Schlesinger, and a personal adviser on energy matters, Mr Stuart Eizenstat. 

Now, let's forget for the moment the puzzling fact that neither of them was told that the talk was coming up. They heard it from reporters and from reporters they heard it had been cancelled. Let's suppose they were called in. The president would outline to them his general views and stress some particular point or solution he favoured. They would then go off and each do a rough draft. These would go to the writers on their staffs, who would produce more drafts along the prescribed lines and, at some point, the two advisers would meet, pool their drafts and begin to cut and combine. This all sounds very cumbersome but it's familiar enough in every foreign office, presidential office and royal parlour in the world. 

Even if the two principal advisers don't see eye to eye and there are contradictions in the emerging two drafts, the president has the prestige and, usually, the skill to edit and underline and make everything seem forceful and single-minded. There's a case which comes irresistibly to mind in which the President of the United States stood before a vast audience, and an even vaster audience on the radio beyond the auditorium, who found in his hands stapled together parts of two speeches which were, in general philosophy, diametrically opposed. When Franklin Roosevelt was nominated first time by the Democratic convention of 1932 he did something which up to that time had never been done. He announced he would go to Chicago and accept the nomination in person. Before that, nominees always picked a time and place, usually their hometown, to make a later acceptance speech. 

So, Roosevelt, the first man ever to appear to make the acceptance speech before the convention itself, was also the first president to fly in an airplane. He arrived in Chicago before a tumultuous convention and, when the cheers died down, he took out his acceptance speech and he began to read. Through the first page, it was clear that he stood for a new strong phase of central government and his supporters who'd hoped for a dispersal of government among the states visibly wilted in the auditorium. Not least the adviser who'd written the draft proposing a strengthening of states' rights. 

Roosevelt came to the bottom of the first page and turned over to page two. Behold! Page two, and every page after that, was a firm appeal for less central government and now it was the turn of the other speechwriter to wilt. A secretary had stapled the first page of the speech Roosevelt had rejected to most of the speech he's accepted. And such was Roosevelt's soaring tenor voice, his mastery of the microphone that the audience cheered all the way through. 

When the two drafts had been presented to him, what he was confronted with was two opposing philosophies of government. Did this stagger Roosevelt? Not at all! He said to the two men, 'Weave them together!' The two philosophies were unweavable but it didn't throw the great man. 

And I can only surmise from all this that Mr Carter found the drafts he was given unweavable, but being a scrupulous man he must have recognised the contradictions and inconsistencies and realised at the end that nobody had come up with the bold, new solution to the oil problem he'd promised. You can say that Mr Carter is intelligent enough to recognise the awful complexity of the oil situation and is too honest to want to fool us. I can hear sophisticated people saying, 'Oh come, come! No politician in his right mind is going to cancel a speech because he fears he's not going to say anything much!' 

Well, I can only say to that that Jimmy Carter's personal brand of honesty includes the admission that he's honestly confused and, to the extent that he's prepared to make that admission to his advisers and then, by extension, to the public, on any issue, big or small, to that extent he is so much less of a politician. It may be his undoing, whatever the reason, and the idea that he was truly baffled is given weight, in my mind, by the fact of his going off to fish. 

Whatever the reason the country, the papers, the Republicans and his own party see in this bungled episode a woeful sign of 'ineptitude' – that's the word that's being increasingly used. But I believe, in spite of the mechanical clumsiness of the episode, it could be a sign of courage. We know from other people close to him that he doesn't believe there’s a simple or speedy way of challenging the cartel of the oil exporting countries. Rather than put up a pseudo-bold, new solution, he wants the real thing. 

And maybe, watching the fish bite, he will think of one.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.