Republicans solid for Reagan

The summer is not yet here in theory but it's certainly here in fact. Half the continent is burning in the summer sun, most of the population of New York City out in T-shirts through a week of muggy, drenching heat, then a heavenly spell like the fall come too soon, then more humid heat and torrential rains, flooded underground stations and a couple of crashing thunderstorms that sounded like Armageddon.

After a nasty sizzle of lightning and one tremendous explosion that literally shook the house, a neat little French woman, a visitor, said, 'How American (...), you know, violence and drama and always unexpected changes.' Well, as a famous American journalist said to me shortly after I arrived here, in the long ago, 'You may be exasperated and delighted and shocked but you'll never be bored.'

We don't have laws like the Italians with their famous, maddening wind that give a violent act by putting it all down to the weather but summer is the time that the police in the big cities dread. It rouses old grievances, it makes life in the tenements insufferable. It prods sulky people into random violence.

Several hundred Cubans who had been removed far from Miami and sent to Arkansas for processing grew restless in their hot camps and went berserk. It came out that a score or more of them were well-known – well known in Cuba – agitators and there was a riot. Meanwhile, the Cuban refugee policy switched again. President Carter said, in effect, 'No more!' The influx has now gone to over 100,000 and he ordered the coastguard to arrest the crews of incoming ships and the people who organised the charters. So, what happened?

Last Tuesday, a freighter, packed to the gills with over 700 refugees was shadowed by a coastguard cutter but it stayed on course and arrived in Key West under the cutter's escort whereupon the owner, captain and 66 crew members were arrested on a charge of transporting illegal aliens. Well, the justice department said that the ship would not be allowed to dock at an American port but next day they said it had better dock, since the only alternative was to threaten force and, as one glum department spokesman put it, 'have a riot on our hands'. The justice department then started totting up all the charges to which the owner, captain and crew were liable – illegal entry, trading with the enemy act, overloading of ship's quarters etc etc.

Then, it turned out that the owner was a British subject and when the department of justice was asked how a Briton could be charged with trading with the enemy when, in British law, Cuba is not an enemy, they admitted they were stumped.

Then a special assistant to the president horned in and said, 'We're willing to receive refugees who are being reunited with their families and also former political prisoners of Castro but private flotillas have been stopped.' Well, if they have, the word has not got to Cuba. Forty-seven vessels carrying over five thousand refugees arrived the day after the man announced the new order and, at last report, forty more boats were on the way.

If Mr Carter were merely a prime minister instead of being a head of state and a prime minister and a party leader and a man running like mad for the presidency, maybe he'd be free to take time out and unravel the preposterous legal and human tangle of the Cuban refugees but he has the Middle East to think of and a big battle in Congress about increasing the military defence budget and a thumping vote in the Senate to have Congress review and look over all United States' intelligence agencies and the delegation of Ohio's steel workers wanting to know what he's going to do about the big slump in employment. Not to mention the cables from Tehran about the so-called 'conference' on American crimes in Iran and then whether India should get nuclear fuel and whether to veto a bill passed by the House to deny the president a ten-cent-a-gallon fee he wanted imposed on imported oil.

No sooner does he catch his breath than the word comes in at dawn on Wednesday that a succession of tornadoes had blasted through Nebraska, killed 30 people, injured 130 more and left millions of dollars worth of damage. So he has to get up and sign an order declaring that part of Nebraska to be a disaster area liable for quick federal funds.

And yet, last Wednesday, all the television pictures of him showed a beaming boy. Is this his version of a man whistling in a graveyard? Not at all. He had cause to beam, or thought he had. He'd heard the results of the eight remaining presidential primary elections and he's come out with more than the 1,666 delegate votes he needs to secure his nomination in New York in August as the next Democratic candidate for president. Now, among these eight, there were three big states – big in population and so, big in the number of delegates they're allowed to send to the conventions – New Jersey, Ohio and California.

Ohio, in spite of its feeling the recession worse than most states, went for Carter over Kennedy but Kennedy won New Jersey and the really big one, the most populous state, with therefore the biggest prize in delegates, California, to the horror of the White House and the astonishment of most of us, went for Senator Kennedy.

We were saying until Tuesday night, the day of the voting that if Kennedy lost California, that would be the absolute end of his presidential hopes. Before the voting the Carter team was so confident it was all over with the senator that the president, remembering Churchill's maxim that 'nothing is more becoming in victory than magnanimity', President Carter offered to forgive and forget the waspish taunts of Senator Kennedy – quite recently, the senator described the president as a 'Reagan clone'.

Mr Carter suggested that they meet and discuss the future and the unity of the party. Mr Carter's idea of unity being that Senator Kennedy should quit the race and, for this concession, the president would generously incorporate some of the senator's ideas and policies into the Democratic platform which has to be worked out between now and the convention, even though some of those ideas the president has described as disastrous and harmful to the country.

Well, the Kennedy team, flushed from the California victory, at first scorned the idea of a meeting. Next day, last Thursday, Senator Kennedy said, 'Yes!' The White House was delighted, imagining a humble Kennedy arriving, cap in hand, to admit that the game was up. It wasn't like that at all. The president and the senator spent an hour together, at the end of which the senator appeared saying he intended to be the Democrats' nominee and would battle for the nomination on the convention floor. Of course, there's a lot of time left between now and August for manoeuvring and compromising but if things go as badly for President Carter as they have been doing, he may be the one with cap in hand.

On Wednesday, a non-profit research group known as the National Bureau of Economic Research published a report which said that the United States was now settled into a recession that began in January. Well, many people have been saying so and any housewife would tell you so but the administration has hedged by saying the recession was here or about to be but might be milder than it had guessed.

The force of the National Bureau's report is the force of its authority. It's an entirely neutral body calling the shots in fair weather and foul, it has no ties with any political party or any special-interest group and its reports carry great weight in the business world, so that the New York Times could make a big headline, 'Nation Declared in Recession.' It quoted the National Bureau as saying that 'every business cycle has four parts – a peak, a period of contraction which is when a recession has positively arrived, a trough and a phase of expansion.' The report says we are in the 'contraction period', that the worst is yet to come and that the recession will last and probably deepen through most of this year.

Well, the voters may never have heard of the National Bureau of Economic Research but its authority makes it all the harder for Mr Carter to say that things may begin to look up before the presidential election and the voters, by now, have positive and depressing things to say about the Carter presidency. Only 28 per cent of Americans think he's doing a good or excellent job as president. Sixty per cent think he's doing a bad job with foreign policy and more than half the people think he's failing on domestic policy, but the results of the last of the primaries hold worse omens for him than just the general consensus that he's inept as president.

When you look not at the simple gross figures of who voted for whom in the three big primaries – New Jersey, Ohio and California – but at why they voted, there's bad news both for Mr Carter and the two-in-three victor Senator Kennedy. In each of these three states, more than two-thirds of the people who voted for Kennedy confessed in an analytical survey that in November they expected they'd vote either for representative John Anderson, the independent candidate, or for Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan? Democrats for Kennedy, the un-defeatable liberals, saying they would vote for Ronald Reagan, the great right-winger? That's been out of the question.

It may give solace to President Carter in suggesting he's unlikely to lose the nomination at the Democratic convention but it gives little encouragement to Kennedy to see himself as a longed-for candidate and, worse still, about 15 per cent of the people who actually voted for Carter said they expected to defect from him in November and vote either for Anderson or Reagan.

Well, Reagan has obviously rejoiced in the candidacy of John Anderson because he would probably pull liberal Democrats away from Carter but nobody expected that any Kennedy supporter, however dashed and desolated by a Kennedy loss of the nomination in August, would come to vote for Reagan in November. On the contrary, over 60 per cent of all the Reagan voters in the Republican primaries are positive that Reagan will be their man come the fall. For once it's the Republicans, not the Democrats, who have a united party.

Mr Reagan expects to go to Europe shortly to expound his ideas on foreign policy to the allied ministers. A lot can happen between now and November but,for the first time, the title 'President Reagan' sounds like one we may have to get used to.

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.