The health reform bill - 1 October 1993

If you are living in this country and riffling casually through a file of newspapers and magazines, you'd get the notion that the proposed Clinton health plan was the greatest event in history since Moses parted the waters. On this project, Mrs Clinton I suppose the first president's wife in history to be the architect of a government policy has been doing her homework for about 18 months including time spent studying the French health system and the German and the Canadian, as well as the systems with which about half a dozen of the states, the United States have been experimenting on their own.

The labour Mrs Clinton has put into this plan was acknowledged in an extraordinary, a unique salute to her when she appeared as the first expert witness before two committees of Congress, one in the Senate, one in the House. When she'd finished her testimony she was applauded by the committees and one of them gave her a standing ovation. It had better be understood at the start that the tribute of applause was given for the work Mrs Clinton has put into the plan and for the demonstrable fact that she'd looked into just about every possible human claim on a medical system that could be imagined. But the proposed solutions are what the whole thing is about and it's going to be sometime maybe a year before applause for the Clinton solutions is heard or is icily withheld, for never forget with any president with any bill he sends to Congress, all he's doing, all he can do in this non-parliamentary system is to propose. Congress will dispose of his ideas and his plans as it thinks fit.

I don't off-hand remember a presidential proposal bill other than a declaration of war that the two Houses of Congress have accepted without months of debate and much amending, amending if there's a powerful opposition that had better be called crippling. So until I totter behind Mrs Clinton with my own finished homework, I'll say nothing about the plan, what it means to do, by whom and how it's opposed. For the moment, let me just say that there is a general agreement between the two parties that the present system while splendid for the rich, the very poor and everybody over 65, is inadequate or ruinous for people in-between and that the cost of supplying it, which is twice that of any other Western industrialised country is alarmingly out of control. Oh and one other point, the president will be lucky to get half of what he wants. The main flaw, which just about everybody outside the administration and even many Democrats concede is that the numbers, the estimates of the cost to the country of the whole plan are wildly optimistic. The senior senator from New York who is the chairman and therefore the captain of the Senate Committee that's there to steer the bill on the President's behalf through Congress, Senator Pat Moynihan calls the estimates "fantasy, pure fantasy".

In the meantime, on Thursday last, the 30th, the New York Times printed a remarkable document. It became a document the moment it appeared in print for it was not written for publication, it was written, handwritten as an entry in a man's diary, he calls it, "an item dated December the 9th 1992". I have left it unedited exactly as then written. The diarist is George F Kennan who's been in the American foreign service since 1926, as you might guess he's retired full of honours in 1963, his last post was ambassador to Yugoslavia. He was most notably the American ambassador to the Soviet Union for only a year but he'd been a minister and attaché in Moscow for many earlier years. Indeed, he set up the United States embassy in Moscow in 1943 and has been generally reckoned for many decades to be America's most knowledgeable expert on the Soviet Union. Unlike most foreign experts on the Soviet Union, while not making a profession of prophecy, he has predicted or guessed the future of the Soviets more accurately than anyone I know off.

In 1947, two years after the end of the Second War he zoomed out of the protected oblivion of a diplomat into public notice all because of an article in the American quarterly foreign affairs, which was signed Mr X. For a long time, the identity of Mr X was as much of a fascinating mystery as the identity of Deep Throat, the confidential tipster in Nixon's Watergate crisis. Why did this single article propel Mr X into public fame, because it proposed a positive policy towards the Soviet Union at a time when the United States was racked with fears and quarrels about the Soviet Union, which was then still under the iron rule of Stalin. It was a time when the ambassador of the Soviet Union in the United Nations was wearily but constantly registering the Soviet veto against almost any move proposed by the Western nations, a time only a year after Mr Churchill had seen an Iron Curtain descend from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.

Most vividly to us looking back on it, it was 1947 a year when the United States and the West had fears, great fears of Soviet thrusts down to the Persian Gulf, they were already in Iran and west at some point into Europe. This may sound fantastic to a later generation, but the fears were very real at the time and well founded.

Mr X's article quite simply proposed a policy of what he called "containment", it was to make clear to Stalin and his successors that the Western nations would unite to resist any such moves. George Kennan's policy, he hid the piece under the pseudonym of Mr X because he was at the time head of the state department's policy planning staff. The policy was adopted by Secretary of State, formerly General, Marshall and his successors and the next year 10 nations of Western Europe and the United States and Canada created the North Atlantic Treaty organisation NATO to drive the point home that the Soviet Union had better stay contained within its new borders.

I truly believe that the Kennan policy protected by the umbrella of the American possession of the bomb is what has given us nearly 50 years of, shall we say no contest, with Russia and its satellites.

Now for the first time Mr Kennan has come out of his closet at the institute for advanced study in Princeton and let us see what almost a year ago he thought about the American entry into starving Somalia. This diary entry goes however beyond Somalia into the the moral dilemma of humanitarian missions into troubled countries, I should tell you first I think that I do not know on this planet a gentler less dogmatic, more compassionate man than George Kennan. The date is 2 December. Remember 1992, Mr Bush is still president and will be to the following January. Kennan wakes up and sees on television the Marines going ashore in Somalia and he notes that there is plainly a general support for this venture.

Kennan at once writes, "I regard this move as a dreadful error of American policy and should set down my reasons if only for the diary". He then states the physical social situation of the populous and the people are starving and we the United States find the sight of it outrageous and intolerable, but because armed bans harassed the supply lines, most of the food is planted. Why does he think our action is undesirable because he says the idea is to deliver the food, save the starving, then withdraw American troops and let the United Nations takeover, he thinks this plan highly uncertain. The situation as he sees it is this, the country has no government; starvation is the result of drought, over-population and the chaos of being ungoverned and at the mercy of bandits.

If we withdraw he goes on, these determining conditions will remain exactly as they were before, this dreadful situation cannot possibly be put to rights other than by establishing a governing power, which because the prerequisites for a democratic political system don't exist, cannot be democratic. It would have to be he thinks a very ruthless and determined government, so he fears the Marines' venture will bring temporarily relief at best, he foresees an occupation army being there for years. What he reluctantly concludes is that it's actually a police action in another country where no defence of American interest is involved, why was it not put before the Congress? Because our own government is paralysed during the interregnum between Bush and Clinton and big point this, President Bush was able to take this action swiftly without Congressional discussion or public protest because of the stimulus of television, the unbearable sight of the suffering and the starving.

This Mr Kennan says does credit to the idealism of the American people but it's an emotional reaction and not one really under our control. If he ends up American policy from here on out involving the use of our armed forces abroad is to be provoked by the television industry then there is no place for what have been regarded as the responsible organs of government in both the executive and the legislative branches. Mr Kennan will be 90 in February.

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