Another voice

One more footpath untrod

Auberon Waugh

The most encouraging piece of news last week was that Jimmy Carter, the plastic identikit American presidential candidate, has been seeing flying saucers: 'It was big. It was bright. It changed colours': also that he experienced a spiritual rebirth while walking in the woods with his evangelical sister.

Possibly because the strain of degenerate, detribalised urban existence does not lend itself to deliberate reasoning, few people in Britain seem aware of the extent to which their own security, not to mention their survival, depends upon a general belief that the President of the United States is mad. The logic of nuclear deterrence requires him to be ready at any moment of the day or night, at a couple of minutes' notice, to assume the role of homicidal maniac on a scale never before achieved in human history.

I hope nobody supposes I am a nuclear disarmer. Along with the contraceptive pill, the hydrogen bomb strikes me as the most benign discovery of the century and one which might, eventually, remove war altogether as a means by which national politicians can make up for their own and each other's emotional deprivations in childhood. The logic of deterrence holds beautifully until the one moment which is crucial to its credibility : somebody must be found who is either stupid enough, or mad enough, to accept it as a rational response to the information that his own half of the world is about to be blown up that the other half should be blown up, too.

Even more accurately, so far as we Europeans are concerned, the American President must accept it as a rational response to intelligence of troop movements in Europe, 3500 miles away, that the whole world should be blown up without more ado. If ever the Russians begin to doubt that this degree of stupidity or insanity prevails (as they might if they listen to Kissinger's murderously inept rhetoric about 'conditioned response') then our security isn't worth so much as a dud 50p piece or a politician's promise.

My own view, of course, has always been that a man has to be, if not mad, at any rate emotionally disturbed to be attracted to a political career in the first place. One day, perhaps, this hunger for power which seems to visit certain people in every class of soci ety nowadays will be recognised as an illness and treated as such—some treatment involv ing cod liver oil and syrup of figs, I hope. But until that moment arrives and politicians are brought face to face with their predicament, it is instructive to list the measures which various American Presidents have taken to reinforce a general suspicion of insanity.

Where President Kennedy was concerned, the image carefully fostered was that of a sex maniac who spent large parts of his time under the influence of marijuana or hashish. A reputation for sexual promiscuity may not instil much terror in the West, but no doubt it worked wonders among the puritanical, sexually deprived bureaucrats of Moscow. And we all know, of course, how the word 'assassin' derives from certain fanatical Moslem hashish-eaters who were sent by their Sheikh—the 'old man of the mountains'—to murder Christian leaders at the time of the Crusades.

President Johnson was an eminently sane man, apart from his political symptoms, but he took his responsibilities so seriously that he felt bound to expose himself from time to time to selected journalists, making wild remarks about his private parts and the things he inflicted with them on his poor wife, Ladybird.

Nixon kept the show on the road until the very end. There are those who interpret accounts of his kneeling in prayer and talking to portraits of past Presidents on the wall as if they were a sign of disintegration. I see them rather as a pathetic reaffirmation against all the evidence (like his abject and criminally wrongheaded policy of détente with the Soviet Union) of his own fitness to remain President of the United States.

Perhaps it is the case that President Ford lacks the intelligence or the acting ability to sustain the exciting role which history has prescribed for him, but nobody can complain that he doesn't make the most of what is there. Not content with tolerating the widespread belief that he is too stupid to chew gum and walk at the same time (a rumour patriotically launched by former President Johnson) he has to fall down in public on every possible occasion—most especially when arriving on a state visit to China.

In point of fact, [dare say that Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were mad enough and President Ford is stupid enough to accept this cornerstone of the doctrine of deterrence. Blowing up half the world is all part of a day's work, and they get paid the rate for the job. But I can see a certain amount of resistance building up to the extension of my argument, that Britain, too, requires a leader who is widely believed to be either stupid or mad enough to decide on courses of action which fly in the face of reason, prudence and simple moral decency. Certainly, the Waugh doctrine can scarcely be applied to our independent nuclear deterrent. Apart from the simple error im plicit in any assumption that 'unacceptable retaliation' will carry weight in a country as vast as the Soviet Union, there will always be profound scepticism about the ability of the British deterrent to get itself off the ground.

Under present circumstances, people villtend to believe that any British Prime Milli'

ster who orders his aeroplanes to bomb the Soviet Union will find he has a strike among

the bomb-loaders at that particular motneat'

or a demarcation dispute between the Boilermakers Union and the Amalgamated Union

of Engineers and Foundry Workers on the question of which shall have the honour 01 attaching the nuclear warheads.

My reason for arguing that we need an apparent imbecile or madman is more darn

estic. Logic requires us to accept that in atlY test of strength between the unions and the elected government, the unions will corne out on top. The electrical power workers alone can bring the whole country t°, standstill within a matter of hours; so, with' in a matter of days or weeks, can coalminers' the train drivers, the dockers and almost arlY group of workers who is able to enlist these' people's support. The former logic of the sanctions behind collective bargaining– whereby both parties must show a readiness to cut off their noses to spite their faces foreogetting down to the serious business bargaining----has now been superseded. OnioY one party must now assert its readiness t commit suicide before it can establish ar bargaining position and that is the emP10Ye (or government). Largely through govern ment decisions most British 'workers' are now better off on strike than they are w°r:" ing, what with income tax rebate and ft a.; vast spread of family welfare benefits wal ing to catch them.

None of which would matter very ITfl the it were not for the unfortunate fact that ' British working class is demonstrablY t°0 lazy, too greedy and too stupid to be ahle.t00, govern the country even in its own best ,10/ terests. If we are to avoid the bestial soeleZr which the working class has created Igi'a itself and for everybody else in Russia' nly must find a leader who is prepared not to take the unions on but also one vih°0. able to beat them. And it is here in a cci..ci frontation where the unions hold every eatIra in the pack as well as a couple 01 egad packs up their sleeves that I argue the er for someone who is generally thought elt"h..d mad enough or stupid enough to disrega,nig the logic of his own non-existent barg..0 position and threatens to bring the vv°'et. crashing down unless his demands are alto Women frequently get their way bec3e jfl they are not frightened to make a seen.0y

public; a true psychotic gets his way (at ' rate until society organises itself to lockull''re

up) because nobody knows quite how fe!,,,e is prepared to go. Nobody supposes thatittles", army can run the country for five mit3„serit but for anyone to make sense of our Pr'pre, predicament he must apparentlY be ocied pared to reduce the country to anext!„, be chaos or anarchy, and apparentlY alasurchy prepared to use the army to 'win' the an ..bie by a policy of selective and unaccePs":„,. reprisals against the proletarian leaderecidibi'y None of which can possible be aehiev. ved bluff, but it might just possibly be by a madman with a certain gleam in [us°