Reagan wants second term

It must have been four or five years ago that a Japanese soldier came clumping out of the under-brush on a remote Pacific island and said, in effect, 'What's going on here?' He'd just made contact with a small town for the first time in many, many years and the people in the small town were going about their business just as if the Second World War was over. The staggering fact with which the people acquainted him was that the Second World War was over, had been for well over 30 years. Eventually they found out where this alert soldier had come from and his home town gave him a hearty, if belated, welcome.

Most of us, certainly most of us who have radio sets and use them, find such a story incredible but there must be many millions of people who haven't got a radio and have no intention of ever having one. I know quite civilised people living in large cities who, outside their daily work, have one consuming interest – music or movies or fretwork or whatever – and who never read a newspaper. During the Second War, when the action was well along, it must have been during the two years of 1939 to '41, to which Mr Martin Gilbert has devoted the sixth and finest volume of the official life of Winston Churchill. He calls it, understandably, 'Finest Hour', there was a national poll taken in Britain on feelings about the war and the statesmen who were most conspicuously fighting it. It turned out that three per cent of the British public had never heard of Winston Churchill. Do you believe it? It was so!

And when I wrote about this phenomenon at the time, I got a letter from an Essex farmer who said, in so many words, that he, for one, had never taken the slightest interest in politics, that his whole life was concerned with his crops and his livestock and that he must have been one of the people covered by the poll, though he couldn't imagine what a poll was, that, of course, he knew there was a war on because of the blackout and the rationing and the suspicious way people made up to him to snaffle an extra egg or two, but otherwise, he had no idea who was in charge. He'd just learned about this Churchill fellow and he wished him luck.

I thought about this farmer last November, in the high spring in New Zealand when we were gliding through the majestic fjords with a feeling not unlike that which must afflict a mouse tiptoeing for the first time into Cambridge's King's College chapel at evensong. If there are few atheists in foxholes, there must be even fewer among the people who have ever sailed along Milford Sound. The enormous silence, the highest sea cliffs on earth. How, we wondered, could anyone ever have got a foothold on the invisible shore, let alone penetrate these vertical mountains of beech trees?

Our guide, who was no dollar-a-day guru – he was, in fact, a geologist and a forester and had been in the ministry of foreign affairs – he said that, in fact, much of this country was still unexplored, that from time to time, wisps of smoke rose from forested canyons and it was quite possible that, in a manner of speaking, my Essex farmer was in there, some tribe that nobody had ever seen. It offers an immense challenge to some enterprising Gallup pollster.

I suspect that there must be many more, millions perhaps, of such exiles from the world of what we used to call 'the well-informed man' and it's to such people, to the Japanese soldier, the Essex farmer, the undiscovered tribe in the South Island that I bring a bit of unfinished business from which we can then move on. The breathless suspense of last weekend is broken. Ronald Reagan is going to run again, or maybe stand again, for president.

The popular wisdom, nay, the expert wisdom, is by now so confident of itself that there may be no need to talk about the presidency until 20 January next year when Reagan puts on the mantel again and, again, takes the oath. The wisdom goes like this:

Former vice president under Carter, Mondale, is getting so many promises of support from so many large and special-interest groups, from the labour unions, from the teachers, the steel workers, the Democratic state chairmen, from the speaker of the House and from such a gaggle of Democrats in Congress, that the Democratic convention to be held in San Francisco in midsummer will have nothing to do but perform a quick coronation service. All right? Mondale will be the Democratic runner. Reagan will, of course, be nominated by acclamation in Dallas and in November, Reagan will romp into a second term.

All I can say is, don't bet on it! Never bet on anything in American politics, especially a sure thing.

I recall that, in February 1976, one of the national weekly news magazines did a cover story on the Democratic contenders for the presidency, six, I believe, six good men and true. From them would emerge the Democrats' candidate. This was a useful piece to read because you could bone up on the lives of six men so as not to be a bonehead when November came and one of these six came in first.

The only flaw in that piece was that it made no mention of a man from Georgia named Jimmy Carter. In other words, it is February. We have nine months before the election. Whatever characteristics American politics lack, drama, even melodrama, is not one of them. Within nine months, as we all know, a new being can emerge, there can be a slump, some horrendous foreign disaster, an act of God.

Well, now Congress is assembled for its final session and swearing to face all the great issues of the day without playing politics, is going to play politics harder than ever. There's one issue that is going to affect America's power and its influence in the world that we have so far hardly touched on. It is the matter of Lebanon and the American marines there.

Of course the social, religious and political fractures of the region are a great deal more complicated than the plight of the American marines, but the way the problem is being talked about in Congress and being forced on the president, you'd think it was as overwhelming an issue as whether Great Britain, on 3 August 1914, should or should not go into the First War.

I'm aware that this obsession with the American marines is irritating to many people on the outside. It may, years from now, come to seem as negligible an issue as the one that dominated the presidential debates in 1960 between Kennedy and Nixon. How many people who listened to those television debates can recall what was the burning issue? It was whether the United States should be prepared to defend two islands off the mainland of China – Quemoy and Matsu. Even before the election, the names, let alone the commitment, were practically forgotten.

But I think Lebanon is a far weightier matter. Rightly or wrongly, the United States initiated the move to form a multinational force to be known as a peacekeeping force. Perhaps that was the first mistake, the name. Peacekeeping forces have been traditionally mustered by, and in the name of, the United Nations. They have been buffer forces. Their role, as such, has been tacitly conceded by both sides. They have not been attacked as a third or combat force. Unfortunately, that's what happened to the Americans and at least one of the combatant sides in Lebanon, maybe more, regards them as a battle force or an intruder that ought not to be there.

From the way things have been going, I think it's plain that the American detachment is looked on as an alternative enemy, not the French or the British or the Italians. Well, there was, to put it mildly, apprehension when President Reagan first sent the marines in and after that frightful explosion of the marine headquarters, the House of Representatives passed a resolution limiting the marines' presence in Lebanon to 18 months.

The White House pointed out at once that this was a defeatist move. It would tell the world either that terrorists had driven the United States out of the Middle East or that the United States was voluntarily changing its mind and leaving the Middle East as a battleground for many contestants who would, sooner or later, come to be controlled by the Soviet Union through its surrogate, Syria. This is the dreadful American dilemma. The White House is undoubtedly right in saying that this is how a withdrawal would be looked on, as a retreat from what every president since Truman has maintained is a region of the world that contains a vital American interest.

So you could say, and I think fairly, that the Democrats in Congress are being irresponsible in simply chanting, 'Get the marines out now!' Last week, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill who is, remember, not only the speaker, but the Democrats' leader in the House, he went to the president and said, 'Every time I talk to you, you say things are going well but there's nothing but deterioration over there.' Later, Mr O'Neill said that about half of the 123 Democrats who voted in September for the 18-month limit would now vote to bring them home at once. A House resolution to that effect for prompt and orderly withdrawal has just been drafted, at the instance of Speaker O'Neill.

It was suggested months ago – and the White House was wistfully agreeable – that the present multinational force ought to be replaced with a United Nations force composed of small nations with no stake in the Middle East outcome. Indeed, 14 nations were privately invited to join such a force. They all declined and, in the UN Security Council, the Soviet Union would veto such a move anyway.

Well, whether the Democrats are being political or irresponsible, the hard fact is that they have been listening to the people. They have been watching the polls. A big majority of Americans thinks of Lebanon as the most present danger in foreign affairs and a literal majority wants the marines brought home now.

The Middle East is a dreadful complexity that most people want to forget. This may be a tragic dereliction. It suggests that too many people crave the ignorant bliss of the Japanese soldier, the Essex farmer, the undiscovered tribe of the South Island. But, looking towards November, the Democrats have listened to what most people want and it's a democracy, isn't it?

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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