Nuclear Reactions
I was sitting up in bed in the dark of the morning, as I do, reading a quiet piece datelined from the United Nations. Briefly, it said, that Russia and the United States had agreed on a report which the UN’s Atomic Energy Agency will publish this summer. Essentially it says that Saddam Hussein has been a good boy and by the Autumn the United Nations will switch to a system of routine monitoring of the nuclear and chemical sites, suspected sites, etc.

That’s good news. Least it was ’til a flock of independent nuclear experts raised a cry that the new system will be much more casual and leave Iraq many more loopholes through which to return to its old, wily, obstructionist ways.

Having got so far in this interesting bit of news, I was wondering whether, come the autumn, the whole Saddam nuisance mightn’t blow up again – when the daylight came in like thunder. It was the sound of those three nuclear tests in India. And the echo of it in the UN was a howl of renewed protests from those same independent experts crying: “You see. We told you so”. Imagine what Sadaam will be able to do the moment you take your eye off him, if your own CIA has been totally blind to what India has been preparing for two years. The most pathetic government comment here came from Mr Cohen, the Secretary of Defence: “Well” he said, “we did detect the blast”. The most disgusted comment, delivered in a beguiling Irish way, came from the senior Senator from New York, Senator Pat Moynihan. He was once American Ambassador to India and he shocked us all, and most have made the CIA big shots crawl under the bed, by announcing that the last people to see the Indian nuclear tests coming were the American “intelligence”, you should excuse the word agents. “Anyone” he said, “who has read the newspapers of New Delhi, in English, for the past two years could have told you precisely what was on the way”. He thought the whole administration, not merely the CIA, was to blame.

So while we saw pictures of leaping crowds in India letting off fire crackers and jumping for joy now that India too was one of the big boys, the Indian Foreign Minister was saying with a smile that heretofore “we were known as a soft state”. No longer. The whole thing, the timing of it, the exposure of unbelievable snoring at the helm was too much even for the articulate President Clinton. It needed Franklin Roosevelt or Mark Twain to express the proper majestic anger. Mr Clinton can only say he was shocked. And after the encore blasts next day: “This,” he said in the understatement of the century: “This is wrong”.

I suspect his sorrow, more visible than anger, was the reflection of a fear which time along could fulfil. That while it sounds right and proper to punish India with stiff economic sanctions, which America and Japan among others were quick to do, punishing a great nation, short of going to war with it, does nothing but exacerbate, especially in a huge poor nation, the very conditions – poverty, hunger, inefficiency – your economic aid is meant to cure, or better say, alleviate somewhat.

There was another thought that cruelly teased, indeed mocked America’s anger and it came from Pakistan. The first telephone call abroad the President made, after he got the first bad news, was to the Prime Minister of Pakistan and just about the most the President could say was a wish and a prayer that Pakistan would not, as they used to say – “follow suit”. Mr Sharif replied he was under great pressure to do just that. And a former Prime Minister – Pakistani – wondered allowed about America’s nerve in taking the high moral ground.

The reason Prime Minister Sharif and other high officials didn’t even make a pretence of innocence was the wide open demonstration in the streets of the capital, Islamabad, of material, machines, tractors, pads all the equipment of an imminent launching of something. So President Clinton sent off in indecent haste what was called “a high level diplomatic team” to Pakistan. What sort of diplomacy they can practise at this late date it’s impossible to guess. They may be in time to report Pakistan’s thunderous response to India’s big bang, which, so early as Friday, we heard could happen any time this weekend.

A moment later the President had to turn to the possibility of a revolution in Indonesia or, as a starter anyway, the dethroning of Suharto, one dictator the United States has been supporting. If that sentence sounds casual and callous to some people let’s not forget that every nation claiming any influence or customers abroad, every Prime Minister, more than anyone alive the President of the United States wakes up in the morning and after a briefing from his Chief of Staff has to decide today which dictator to embrace and which one to deplore. These affections and enmities are movable, according to the shifting relations including most trade relations, of one country you need with others.

Well the “high level diplomatic mission to Pakistan” was hardly out the door when Mr Clinton quickly mobilised and packed off another so-called “high level military mission” to Jakarta to try and persuade the Indonesian police or security squads not to beat up the rioting protesters. From the pictures we’ve seen and the commentaries we’ve heard this looks and sounds, at the moment, like asking the invading plebs, please to evacuate the Bastille.

Of course the trouble with Mr Suharto has been brewing for some time, though ’til now the emphasis has not been on him as a bad man, but on his government as running outrageous debts and a hopeless tax system.

I happened to say just now, “when the President gets up in the morning”, and it made me think back to the vast changes that have come over the presidency – and its daily burdens – since the first decade of America as a world power, which was in the 1920s. The other week I brought up the wiry creeping little figure of Calvin Coolidge the Vermont Yankee who had the luck to ride a great wave of prosperity and optimism right after the end of the First World War. The Coolidge Prosperity it was called. The United States was the world’s creditor nation. It was only just beginning to extend the range of its interests and therefore to develop world policies. Calvin Coolidge had only two or three interests. One was telling department heads, usually with some irritation, that American policy was their business not his and to get on with it. Secondly he loved to eat cheese in large triangular slices like pie. Most of all he loved to sleep. He made a point of sleeping between 11 and 15 hours a day. The White House staff consisted of about two dozen men, today it’s closer to 500.

Jump only 10 years from Coolidge to Roosevelt in the depth of the depression. Roosevelt called aides and his brain trusters to his bedside in the morning and, as somebody said, didn’t need briefing papers. He listened and took everything in with his antennae. And decided every policy himself and then left the carrying out of it to a small devoted, brilliant, staff of young men with, he used to boast – “a passion for anonymity”. He did this from dawn to midnight for most of 12 years.

And Kennedy’s time, think of him with his bad back lying in his bath, and getting his morning briefing of the overnight cables from the military aide. He was up by 7 and worked on maybe ’till 7 p.m. – in the increasing crisis of his time ’till midnight and beyond.

By our time, the first thing the President does in the morning is to check the nuclear code of the day with the United States underground nuclear headquarters, which could give the red alert if a missile is on its way. Then he gets down to a score of the most urgent problems. Then he must do something about protesting letters and petitions from single-issue patriots – anti-abortion groups, the labor unions, small businessmen, flat taxers, the environmentalists, the tobacco lawyers, the government anti-tobacco missionaries. What’s the latest from New Delhi. The boy scouts of Wyoming want to present the President with a special medal. The lady camellia growers of Alabama wonder if he will speak at their hundredth anniversary. Please, Mr President, where are we going to bury those hundreds of thousands of barrels of radioactive waste? There are 23 sites picked out but 14 states are objecting strenuously – not in my backyard. The lettuce growers of the huge Salinas Valley in California want to send a delegation – since El Nino they have only one third of the normal crop and prices are ruinous to them. Bad news from the Bangkok stock exchange. Should we divert those Pacific naval manoeuvres off Thailand? Oh, you must make three dates next month for democratic fund rallies, one in Chicago, another in Florida, one, as always, in California and better add Iowa, since that state is the first one to hold its primary, so what Iowa decides in February may have a big effect on whether we can hold the House in November. The special prosecutor says, no immunity for Lewinsky. And by the way, your secret service guards are probably not going to be exempt from testifying before a grand jury. And, oh yes, we hate to tell you how many were killed in those Palestinian riots yesterday over Israel’s 50th anniversary, what they call the catastrophe.

Just looking over the President’s calendar, the private one and the public one, you have to wonder how to harmonise them and leave him time to eat, sleep and somehow stay fit. And please don’t remind him that of the last four secretaries of State, one’s had a triple heart by-pass, another a quadruple.

While one or two of us were sitting around the other evening and asking why does anyone go out or yearn to become President? The usual answer is power – power for what? They always say power to affect people for good. Well that sometimes, maybe quite often, happens much less than the retired ones claim. True or not, I believe, the big incentive is the feeling, the high. As Lord Acton said, I quote the revised version: “Power corrupts, absolute power is absolutely delicious”.

In this section

Democracy in action
At the centre of things
That fateful night in Macbeth
Wishful thinking overload
A plea to the Senate
Greed, liquor, jingoism and bad taste
The arrival of the golf hooligan
An historic devastator of the interior
Barkers at pleasure beach side shows
No exempt categories
Re-writing history
Grave concerns
Close, but no cigar
No word from Mount Olympus
Going to pot or to Pluto
Loneliness, male companionship and the hunt
Tyrants and curses live on
The brewing of racial storms
Air conditioning and changes in society
The first golden paratrooper
Playing for time
Freedom in America
Testing times in the advancement of science
Laws doomed from the start
Witticisms and crazy one-liners
A course in manners
Two attitudes about China
These are my times and I must know them
No schadenfreude on Nato’s birthday
What’s your exit strategy?
Whatever it takes
The art and curse of television
In the hot seat
Doves, hawks, owls and the people
Wholesale flouting of the law
A natural gentleman
Played for a sucker
The pursuit of self-determination
Our long holiday from history is over
It ain’t over, till it’s over
Dot dot dash dash, over and out
The moral pillar and the moral contortionist
Striving for a more perfect Union
Trial of the century
Illuminating events with unpredictable results
America, 1998
Happy Christmas
Fantastical times in a modern world
Woe and loss of Eden
A reverential but cheerful air
Optimism versus pessimism
Indelible memories on this special occasion
My first thought was to protect him
Let’s forget the whole topic
Rum, Romanism and rebellion
What was so special about John Glenn?
New words for objects new and old
Thou shalt not be found out
News off the back burner

Front Page | World | UK | UK Politics | Business | Sci/Tech | Health | Education | Sport | Entertainment | Talking Point | High Graphics | On Air | Feedback | Help | Noticias | Newyddion |

Back to top | BBC News Home | BBC Homepage | ©