Notebook
Vice-President George Bush has got a
in- troduced memory. When I was n- troduced to him last week at the American Embassy he remembered that we had once Met before ten years ago in Peking, where he was the US Representative. Clare Holt- ingworth, the Telegraph correspondent, had taken me round to the very modest residence and Bush appeared in tennis shorts carrying a Slazenger racket. I don't think in those days he had much to do since the Chinese, who have a thing about age, found him too young to take seriously. His predecessor, the venerable David Bruce, had received much more preferential treat- ment. In fact, I rather got the impression that poor Bush had to rely on Clare for such knowledge as he had of what was real- ly going on. But he could not have been friendlier and gave me a bottle of Bourbon• to take away, which ,in Mao's China was worth its weight in gold. After last week's excellent embassy lunch the Vice-President gave us all a little homily on Reagan's at- titude to nuclear weapons. Of its kind it was quite well done, but listening to his far from inspirational style one could not help realis- ing how hopelessly inadequate Western rhetoric has become to the awesome nature of thermonuclear reality. 'Ronald Reagan Wants peace quite as much as you do...' etc. I don't doubt that he does. But such rather lame words scarcely do justice to the apocalyptic scale of the issue. That seems to me part of the trouble today. Having spent the first half of the 20th century trying to find a cosy style of leadership suitable for the age of the common man', we are now appalled at the lack of 'Olympian leaders' around who can assuage fears which are blacker than those mankind has ever before been tormented by in previous centuries. Given the prevailing sense of doom, only "ble men of almost god-like superiority could have much chance of restoring con- fidence. Yet the American electoral and political procedures make it very difficult, if not impossible, for such moral giants to emerge. Indeed the system is almost ex- pressly designed to produce pygmies. Just Conceivably an American leadership put on a Pedestal of power, so far above the mud of controversy as to remain unsullied, might be able to seem pure enough to cope. But of course the American system does ex- actly the opposite. In these respects, the Soviet Union fares much better. However flawed and human Mr Andropov may be, everything about the Kremlin set-up is ex- pressly designed to make him seem a god. The more frightened people become, the
more they yearn for protection from outsiz- ed leadership which democracy is very bad at supplying. Nice George Bush in his white tennis shorts is not at all the same thing as a man on a white horse.
While on the subject of American leadership it may interest you to know that a new semi-official agency, 'The Democracy Program', has been established in Washington charged with winning the battle of ideas against Soviet Communism. But this time, mindful of the fate of the Congress of Cultural Freedom which was never forgiven for having been covertly and clandestinely funded by CIA money, the operation is going to be scrupulously open and above-board, with bipartisan Congres- sional' backing. Its director, Allen Weinsten, a distinguished academic, ac- companied by one Democrat and one Republican, was in London recently and did not seem to make much sense. We ask- ed him whether the new agency would be as friendly towards, say, a unilateralist Bennite government in Britain, dedicated to break- ing up the Alliance, as to the present strong- ly pro-Atlantic Thatcher Government. So far as democracy is concerned (we said), there would not necessarily be anything to choose between them, since both would be freely elected, etc. No reply was forthcom- ing; just incoherent mumblings. Would it not be franker, we persisted, to call the new agency something like 'Alliance Program', since presumably its true intention was to do battle for NATO, which was not necessarily at all the same thing as democracy? Taking the case of Greece, we asked, would the new agency prefer a democratically elected extreme left-wing anti-NATO government or a pro-American junta of sound anti-democratic colonels? Again, no answer; just incoherent mumbl- ings. That is the trouble with open and above-board bipartisan American pro- paganda agencies — they can never afford to clear their minds of cant. In the bad old days of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, at least one could get a straight answer to a straight question, since the people runnine it were sophisticated realists, like Mel Lasky, editor of Encounter, who kness what the cold war was all about. But then they never had Congress breathing down their necks, eager to pounce on any devia- tion from democratic platitudes and pieties. Until recently it made good sense for the United States to go on repeating that they stood four-square behind democracy, since at least in Western Europe this meant sup- port for parties which were basically pro- American.
But if European democracy starts producing less satisfactory results, then where will this new agency stand? On balance, perhaps CIA funding was not such a bad idea after all.
oger Scruton has written to say that he 1\invited the Times man to the private dinner of the Conservative Philosophy Group — vide my column last week under the impression that he was going to write 'an article on intellectual movements within the Tory Party' rather than 'the trivial journalistic' piece of gossip which ac- tually appeared. Knowing Scruton I am quite prepared to accept that explanation. His own journalism is never less than serious, almost to a fault. But how blind he must be to suppose that the Times any longer shares these high standards. This Monday's issue, for example, contains two long pieces about Ken Livingstone and An- dropov, both of which are full of spicy details and absolutely,empty of serious con- tent. I would like to be able to acquit the editor, Charlie Douglas Home, on the grounds that he is absent in hospital. But apparently, thanks to the marvels of com- munications technology, he still presides from his sickbed, talking into some machine which then carries his voice, great- ly magnified in volume, into the conference room. Far from his authority being diminished by distance it is greatly enhanc- ed, since the disembodied voice sounds as it it was literally coming from On High or, even more impressively for the non- believers, from outer space. Not that this is the first example of editing by remote con- trol. The great Garvin used to do the same: without use even of the telephone. Instead of coming into the Observer office in per- son, he would summon young Hugh Mass- ingham to his country home and charge him with transmitting his instructions. In those days, of course, such was the moral authority of editors that they could afford to leave their chairs physically empty without having to fear that somebody else might try to fill them in their absence. Donald Trelford, one suspects, would not wish to push his luck that far.
Peregrine Worsthorne
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