Who's next for President?

Some months ago you may recall there was a meeting in Europe of various leaders of the Western world on the burning issue of tariffs and free trade and, at one point, a brave Frenchman, I think, said the United States' Congress must be made to see that it is not the centre of the universe.

This was well said, for it's a fact that since the United States became the economic and industrial giant of the world – which takes us back 50, maybe more, years – Congress has tended to believe that it was legislating for the West, if not for all mankind. Just as, until the Second World War, the British Foreign Office, since it was then the curator of about a quarter of the world, never argued with reporters or discussed policy with them, it did not justify policies, it simply announced them. The Russians, of course, have been saying since 1917 that there was only one decent way for the world to go and they were going – are still going – to arrange it.

I saw something the other evening that made me wonder whether any of us, any humans, of whatever national origin or political persuasion, are even the chosen race of our own planet. It was a fascinating television account of the habits and natural gifts of various humble creatures like, say, caterpillars and we saw one species which was not simply said to give birth to its young through the mouth of the male, we saw it, thanks to time-lapse photography, doing it.

This revelation coincided with two items in the papers. One was the drastic decision of the federal government to buy up or buy out all the buildings, the houses and businesses of a small town in Missouri which discovered, after heavy floods in December, that its streets were contaminated with a dangerously toxic chemical. The stuff had been deposited there ten years ago when unpaved streets were sprayed with waste oil.

The other item was an article celebrating the longevity of an old, distinguished lady who's devoted her life to what most of us think of as a pest but which she describes as one of the shrewdest and certainly the cleanest insect that we know, namely, the cockroach. This, I think, will come as news to most of us for if we saw one exploring a piece of toast or a stew, we'd send it back in a huff, our huff, and demand to see the manager, whereas we're all used to waving flies off our sandwiches indifferent to the fact that musca domestica, the simple house fly, is riddled with bacteria and is, very probably, the dirtiest beast alive.

However, the property of the cockroach that interested me most was its ability to survive earthquakes, floods, fire and brimstone and massive radiation. Apparently, in the wake of the ultimate bomb, when we're all gone and the rot will have set in on the elephants and the birds and the leaves of all the trees, the cockroaches will be rustling around in healthy isolation. Well, I won't dwell on what Winston Churchill would have called 'this sombre thought', except to say that a generation of youngsters must now be sprouting, which, from the wonders of television alone, will be ready to believe anything.

It reminds me of a cautionary tale about the majestic, the outrageous, old and long-gone actress, Mrs Patrick Campbell. She was at a dinner party and seated next to a professor, a naturalist, who had only one topic of conversation. He was mad for ants. She listened patiently enough while he went on and on about the amazing industry and ingenuity of these creatures, their methods of collecting food and storing it, their gift for carrying and building, the strict class divisions of drones and commanders and architects and home guard and fighters. 'Fighters?' she cried. 'Yes, indeed,' the man went on, 'they have an army.' She dropped a heavy lid and gave him a sideways look, saying, 'No navy, I suppose?'

Well, I shouldn't be surprised to hear one of these nights from David Attenborough that, indeed, they have a navy and that the ant had, eons ago, launched the prototype of the Exocet.

These explorations into the natural world and into the huge variety of ways in which organisms give birth, eat, live, protect themselves from their neighbours, is certainly enough to make us doubt if we are indeed cock of the walk. It gives a new and comic stress on our efforts to prove it, whether we're a high jumper whose whole life is devoted to making that extra half-inch or a politician learning to accept the assurances of his friends that he and he alone is qualified to rescue his country from the fumblings and stumblings of his rival politicians and become President of the United States.

I ought to say at once that I'm not going, in the next 20 months, to trace the track record of every runner for the White House. Why should I even mention it now? Is Mr Reagan not still the President of the United States? He is. Will he not, God willing, be in the White House until 20 January 1985? He will. Why then should we begin to plot and thrash over the identity of the next president? Well, because, simply, it's the American way.

I should guess, without being in the least cynical, that half the members of the Senate and the House will calculate their votes in the current and the following sessions of Congress – two whole years – not so much on the rights and wrongs of the issue as on how these votes will look in the autumn of 1984 when they will be running for Congress again and when there may be a new man coming up in the White House. Which new man?

That is the question which, in theory, ought to begin to excite us next spring but it always happens that the moment a president enters his third year, he, whoever he is, doesn't look like the Moses he was declared to be in the glow of his election and so, I find that while sitting around in the evenings, people do, of course, talk about, say, the suspected scandal in the environmental protection agency or how the social security system is going to saved from bankruptcy or whether the sudden world glut of oil is going to be good for us in the short run or the long run.

But the gleam in the eyes comes only when the conversation shifts to the question, will Reagan run again and whether or not, who is going to be the Democratic nominee? Now, this is no longer a speculative question. Every day, it seems, another Democrat declares himself for the presidency, is shown addressing a small crowd of fans, already ecstatic, and declaring that he can turn the country around, give jobs to everybody, come to terms with the Russians and set us on the path to peace and progress.

I'm not going, at this time, to sketch small, tantalising profiles of the queue of Democrats lining up to become our Lord and Master. Senator Cranston of California was the first. Then Jimmy Carter's vice president, Fritz Mondale. Soon there will be another Fritz, Senator Hollings. Senator John Glenn who put a girdle round the earth 20 years ago, the first American in orbit.

I spent a weekend in Bermuda with him only a month or two after that epic performance and it strikes me now that he could have been president then. It was impossible for him to take a walk, check into a hotel, appear in a restaurant without scores – out of doors, hundreds – of starry-eyed people fighting to touch the hem of his garment, a snappy, check tweed sports coat, as I recall and a year or two later when he was attending a board meeting of an encyclopedia firm in the South of France, I remember now, with wistful vividness how, one day, when a distinguished American journalist and I decided to play a round of golf on the course that teeters on a cliff a mile or so above Monte Carlo, he asked us if he might come along. He was not and is not a golfer but he wanted the walk. Of course.

Somewhere along about the sixth fairway, he put a simple, innocent question. 'How', he wondered, 'do you go about getting into politics?' Naturally we had more serious things on our mind but we indicated the rudiments of the game. Familiarity with each and every region of your state, making early connections with the labour leaders and the small business associations and several city political machines, getting to know the health commissioner and the schools superintendents. Most of all, making or feigning friends with the money men, and so on.

His curiosity was as artless as that of a foreign journalist with a passing interest in the oddities of the American system, and that night I remember my old journalist friend said to me, 'Damned if I don't think he's going to take a shot at his state assembly!' which means going into the local government of Ohio.

Well, here he is, a United States senator from Ohio and when he's not in Washington, he's tracking all over the United States making friends and building fences, especially in the states that hold their party primary elections in the early spring of 1984 and the polls show that if the presidential election were held today, either he or Mr Mondale would beat Mr Reagan (handily).

I said I have no intention now or for a long time to come filling in the biographical details of John Glenn or Mondale or Cranston or Hollings or Askew of the four, five, heaven knows how many more Democrats will come to look in the mirror while shaving some morning and say, 'In all frankness, by golly that looks like the next President of the United States!'.

I won't do this because I always bear in mind the sage remark of an old correspondent that other nations' politics sound like another and more complicated form of chess, but also because I well remember the time, not 20 months before an election, but about no more than seven months before the election of 1976 when a national news magazine put out a cover story on the eight Democrats who were running for president. One of these men would obviously be 'It'. It was a very thorough, well-researched piece of journalism, the life stories of eight men and a sober judgement at the end on the two or three most likely to have to fight it out in the end.

There was one politician, a non-entity, so little known that he had to stand on street corners and beg people to come to a meeting he was holding in the local schoolroom or the Salvation Army hall. Naturally he was not mentioned in this comprehensive survey. His name was Jimmy Carter.

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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