Assassination attempt on Ford - 12 September 1975

Before the world was inundated with such marvels as tape recorders, televisions, the jet engine and the aerosol spray, it used to be said that radio – what for so long in Britain was known as the wireless, and then for some inexplicable reason as sound radio, though nobody ever told me of any other kind – it used to be said that radio was a marvel. Because you, the listener, felt you were there along with the man who was really there, talking from the spot, and however dead his material, he was live.

This might have its special excitement for the listener, but for the broadcaster, it carried its own highly uncomfortable form of tension. I will remember the morning after the 1948 presidential election when the papers appeared with headlines blaring that Thomas E Dewey had beaten Harry S Truman. But we’re still waiting for the results from a couple of states, and while Republicans could go around slapping each other’s backs and exchanging cigars, the broadcaster has to be extremely pernickety, if he goes on the air, with what everybody on earth takes to be a statement of fact and then two minutes later the "fact" is shown to be false. The broadcaster pretty quickly hears from his mail that he is a blunderer, a sluggard, asleep at the switch, a careless and reprehensible journalist.

On that nervous morning I had to give at noon – 5pm, British time – an absolutely definitive thoughtful commentary, on how and why the winner had won. But an hour before the circuit time we didn’t know who he was. This is very embarrassing to a seasoned commentator, who one minute before an election result is known is assumed to be as fallible as everybody else, but one minute after the result is out, he is expected to trace the hidden and subtle shifts of public opinion that made the result inevitable.

Incidentally, my favourite newspaper is a shrewd lady who makes predictions only in the foggiest terms. But the morning after the election or the assassination or whatever, she recounts to her friends and patients the most lurid and extraordinary dreams in which she foresaw with uncanny accuracy what in fact had happened.

I am happy, by the way, to see that a veritable congregation of distinguished scientists including a stack of Nobel Prize winners, many of them astronomers, has come out with a total denunciation of the astrology mania as a lamentable sign that human gullibility is no less now than it was when superstitious Roman emperors, who knew very little about the movement of the planets, assumed that those mysterious twinkling stars controlled our behaviour. And if the stars didn’t work, and you lost the battle the royal astrologer told you to fight, next time you took the entrails of a dead cat and studied them by the light of a new moon – a clinical exercise which bore as much resemblance to diagnostics as the signs of the zodiac bear to any predictable human behaviour.

Well on that terrible November morning in 1948, the men who step up the circuits across the Atlantic were already testing things out, and talking their squawky mumbo-jumbo, "Erm, do you read me NL, a little feedback at your end I’ll check with post office" and so on, and there was I, with no script, no thoughtful commentary written, and about 40 minutes to go before the cue came from London, "And you’re on the air, live". Live and feeling foolish.

And then the results came in from Ohio. And it suddenly turned out not that Dewey had clobbered Truman, but that Truman had clobbered Dewey. We learned this just in time for me to ad lib my way through thirteen minutes of deep thought – saying, in effect, that that was the way it was bound to be.

Today, it's surely no mystery the system of relaying these talks has changed. Since the days when we broadcast live, and if we felt a froggy cough coming on, we had to bury ourselves under the table and choke the frog. Since then, there have appeared the jet aeroplane and the tape recorder. Of course, there is nothing against looking at transatlantic circuit direct if you’d prefer me to sound like a kidnapped Donald Duck putting in an underwater call to the RSPCA.

Since the miracles of the jet engine and the tape recorder we have assumed that a talk should sound not like a lecture or an essay, or Hitler haranguing through a megaphone, but a talk between two people in a room. So at this moment I am being taped and tonight the tape will be jetted over to London, dispatched to the BBC, and played over to you, first on Friday evening, then on Sunday morning, and early next week to Europe and Asia and lord knows where.

This makes for quite a gap between the considered opinion, and the possibility of a weekend disaster, something for which people, critics especially, naturally don’t allow. How was I to know when I taped a talk about the growing of artichokes in California, or the history of the hamburger, or some other such absorbing bit of Americana, that the Russians were going to send their first astronaut into orbit about 24 hours after my tape had arrived in Britain? A critic wrote, "Cooke evidently doesn’t read the papers, he will go waffling on when the last bomb has dropped".

Well, of course we try to keep up and last summer, the summer of 1974 that is, I used to do my talk, drive a hundred miles down Long Island, hear that Mr Nixon had just discovered some further high-principled explanation of why he’d lied – or as he used to put it, made a mistake of judgement – and I’d go into reverse and drive a hundred miles back, tell them to scrap the tape already in London and talk on the circuit about fifteen minutes before the clock – your clock – struck 6.15 on Friday night. In that terrible time Mr Nixon would sometimes perform another trick on Saturday and, again, we’d scrap the latest thoughtful commentary and think again.

Well things have been relatively calm, though no more predictable since then, but last week I had my say, and on the Friday night I turned on the television and was chilled by an emblem or logo which showed the picture of a pistol above the word Sacramento. It was, of course about the outrage precipitated by that ex-disciple of Charles Manson, on the president of the United States.

I was glad, for once, that I had been caught out – in the immediate shock there was nothing new to say. And now I think there is. Time was when President Truman, who kept his old farmer's hours, used to leave the white house at 6.45 sharp in the morning and go for a brisk walk along the streets of Washington, pausing to hail a stalled bus driver, or a shoe-shine boy, duck into a grocer's shop, talk cheerily to a little band of early birds who tagged along behind him.

Well, there is no way of bringing those times back. For three weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson stayed at his ranch in Texas and thought things over. The White House press corps was housed in a hotel in Austin, the capital city of Texas, about 30 miles away from the ranch. The last thing we expected was ever to see a president again, at large, on the highways, let alone the streets.

We had, I recall, a couple of press conferences at the ranch – more like barbecues, they were chiefly get-acquainted sessions with the new men. But one day, I went out of the hotel and up to a main street and was petrified to see, padding along the sidewalk, and followed by a dozen gaping stragglers young, old, people just out walking, the pied piper himself, the huge, loping elephantine figure of President Johnson.

Austin was home-town country to him and he stopped at a jewellers and a barber's shop, I remember. The owners had been at school with him and he was full of nods and pecks and wreathed smiles. I presume there were a couple of secret service men along but I couldn't spot them, though usually they are the most conspicuous of incognitos – they have their right hands in their coat pockets and they jerk their heads around unceasingly, like jungle inventory men on the lookout for snipers. One of them in Sacramento last week was just a split-second ahead of the girl with the gun.

Well President Johnson was not simply slap-happy. He told us, when he came into a newspapermens' party on New Year’s Eve, that he had thought the whole thing over and decided what President Ford must have decided a year ago, that if you are going to be president you must get out and meet the people and, as Mrs Ford said, live with it.

This is brave talk. I mean it, but we have to begin to ask ourselves if, in the television age, the president needs to live with it. Even in the days many decades before radio, presidents didn’t always mingle with the crowd, and for the same precautionary reasons. In the last century, since 1865 to be exact, four presidents have been assassinated and four – Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman and now Mr Ford – have had very close calls. That works out at about one assassination attempt every 13 years. Only by God’s grace and the nudging elbow of a lady standing beside a maniac in Miami in 1933 did the bullet meant for president-elect Franklin Roosevelt kill the man standing next to him.

The theory that if the president isn’t seen and pressed in the flesh, people won’t know him wasn’t even accepted in the days when a photograph or a line drawing was all people ever saw of their president's likeness. One president decided not to campaign at all – he sat out the summer on his back porch and won.

But today, you can learn all you ever want to know about a man, and more, by watching and hearing him on television. So it’s been said that we should have an end of mingling with the people. Mr Ford doesn’t agree. So now there is take of more rigid gun control. There was much talk after Kennedy and nothing much happened for nine years. The sporting gun lobby is very powerful and appeals to 30 million Americans who use guns for the so-called sporting purpose of shooting ducks, geese, pheasants, turkeys, deer and other innocent non-politicians.

What the Sacramento incident has done, as a political episode, has been to give pause to those Democrats who are relying their fellows to storm their next convention and nominate Senator Edward Kennedy. There is nothing in the stars to say that when two brothers are killed the third is bound to be the next target. But there are demented people at large who like to think so.

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