In the Presidential pool

Stephen Fay

In the White House, 'pool' is a noun or a verb that has nothing to do with swimm- ing. The pool is a limited number of jour- nalists; to pool is to share with colleagues a report on every step taken by the President of the United States, and to record each trivial overheard word.

Thus I can report, accurately but not ex- clusively, that: The Queen was fascinated with Ronald Reagan's saccharine pen `which is a device that you press a button on it and it deposits two teaspoons (sic) of saccharine in your tea'.

That the President definitely felt livelier on Tuesday morning having had a good rest after a wonderful evening at an intimate dinner for 38. (The reason the question was asked so solicitously is that the President nodded off during his visit to the Pope the previous day.) That the British were not upset by Nancy Reagan, who positioned herself next to the Queen as the troops marched by. 'It's an old Reagan family custom,' a press officer explained: 'ladies first.'

Fine; but what actually happened? In the quadrangle at Windsor Castle, where Nan- cy stood next to the Queen on Monday, the night was fine, the band played a delightful arrangement of Beethoven's Ninth for us, and, where I stood, security was in the charge of an attractive young constable from V Division with a perfect peaches and cream complexion.

On to this agreeable scene lurched an old friend from Washington, who had risen in Paris at four in the morning to get to Rome, had then flown to London, and was now sitting gossiping as if he had just arrived by train from Slough station. Everything was so easy-going, he said; in France he'd been shouted at; he'd been pushed around in Italy; and here in England he was greeted by a band — which had now moved on to Verdi.

We stopped this idle chatter to watch the arrival of Ronald Reagan, and after the in- spection of the guard, my friend asked how I thought the President looked. 'As if he were made out of cardboard,' I replied. But my friend observed that he had not seen the President look better or more relaxed since he had set foot in Europe.

As we walked away I wondered what could have made the President feel that way, and, indeed, how he must have looked in Paris and Rome. Then I thought I'd got it: there were no interpreters. For the first time in days Reagan was able to talk to another head of state in the same language. In Windsor English was the lingua franca.

It is a fairly obvious conclusion, but I think it matters because Reagan clearly felt so glad to be here that he inserted in his speech at Westminster, late in the day, the most ringing declaration of support for Mrs Thatcher's South Sea adventure to come from him at any time since it began.

In turn, Reagan's evident pleaSure at be- ing here made his audience rather more tolerant of the President than they might otherwise have been, or, possibly, than he deserved. The visit was not a great popular occasion, of course: it is difficult to establish any communion with the people when gliding along at over 30 miles an hour in a bulletproof Cadillac. The most insistent sound in Parliament Square as the Presides" tial party arrived at the House of Lords was from a woman complaining that she Was going to miss a twelve o'clock appointment at Charing Cross. The demonstrators from the Left were closeted in Central Hail; Westminster, listening to Dame Judith HP (a fate they richly deserved), so the polle,e' who numbered only slightly fewer than t"' spectators, did not even have to look !LILO.' The remarkable thing about the Pres): dent's speech in the Royal Gallery was that most comment afterwards concentrated its delivery rather than its content. One Of lobby correspondent allowed that the ar vantage of having an actor as President Was that he could at least learn his lines. Wrongagain: the President was using one of th's s deceptive, wrap-around teleproMPterf which appear to the audience as a sheet °, glass, and which cannot be seen on tele vision at all. Nonetheless, the speechIl delivered fluently, and the stories were we told. There was, perhaps, too much en'" phasis on Sir Winston, and the President was deeply uncritical of the Western

democracies which he compared so favourably with the tyrannies of Marxist- Leninism. But the Prime Minister thought the speech was 'a long overdue seizing of the offensive for freedom on behalf of freedom'. (At least that is what Secretary of State Haig said she thought.) Only churls subjected the speech to rigorous textual analysis, which is, I suppose, why Edward Heath complained that the President had not explained how the unemployed would into nto the freedom offensive.

The reference to international con- ferences to further the cause of democratic government was mildly embarrassing, and the request for equal time on Soviet televi- sion in return for giving Leonid Brezhnev the freedom of the American networks slightly risible. But, delivered in a language we understand, it is easier to shrug off the Proposals as harmless pieces of political rodomontade. They might persuade the folks back home that their President is a statesman after all, though I doubt it. They are more likely to remember that the Presi- dent was allowed to sleep while his Secretary of State could not apparently make the international telephone work and his Ambassador got her knickers in a twist at the United Nations.

There was a panicky moment in Paris last

Saturday, it seems, when the President's assistants feared that the London visit Would be irrevocably soured by the confu- sion over the United Nations vote. But that was a nervous reading of British reactions. Because the Prime Minister is cross, that does not mean the Queen will snub Ronald Reagan; and when Fleet Street newspapers make headlines out of Presidential in- competence, it does not mean that he will be booed by the crowds in Whitehall. „ For a man who is closeted in the White House, surrounded by grim-faced secret servicemen, a visit to Britain must be a fruitful reminder of the gift the two nations have in common. When I travelled in Ant. erica recently it was plain that, despite misgivings about the scale of Britain's military reaction, there is no doubt whose side they are on. No matter who Jeanne Kirkpatrick has dinner with, The Argenti- nians reason are not really allies, and a principal is that they speak a different language. (I confess I failed to speak to ,a

Panish-speaking Americans.)

This is the sentimental theory of interna- tional relations, and the President's visit has been a case study in it. Whether it will Persuade the United States to guarantee a a°r1-Argentinian government in the Falkland Islands, as Mrs Thatcher hopes, is another matter. But after the gorgeous glit- ter of the state banquet on Tuesday even- ing, I have no doubt that she was heard With uncommon sympathy by the President before he left for Bonn on Wednesday Morning. By the way, the President rode a horse called Centennial at Windsor on Tuesday morning. The horse was given to the Queen ./ the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and s

`ands 17 hands. The pool says so.