America expects
Henry Fairlie
Washington All students of government should have watched television on Inauguration Day from the beginning to the end. They would have learned how far the political stage has been reduced to the small screen. As the news anchormen juggled the two stories of the Inauguration itself and the release of the American hostages, one could be forgiven for thinking that both events had been scheduled and produced for the cameras with their winking red eyes. Dominating the scene in front of the Capitol loomed the tower specially built for the cameramen. Preceding the President's car in the parade was the truck carrying the cameras. Television reporters were in the parade itself, filmed almost as much as President Reagan. But this was only a half of it. The last act in the miserable farce in Teheran was being played out on television. It was television which made the periodic announcements of each stage of the release, so that by the time the new President made his statement, he had nothing unknown to tell.
Television was in its element. It had a ball. It was running two soaps at the same time. The cast of characters was complete: the weak husband fired from his job, his loyal but anguished wife: the new and handsome man in town, his wife inspected for errors in taste: the town's small-time heroes coming home from defeat, their wives simpering on camera to the producer's directions, It was a conservative columnist who at least had the gumption a week ago to say that if he saw one more interview with one more of the hostage's wives, he would scream out loud. But for television it was a field day. The most powerful free nation in the world was enacting one of its few solemn rites while it was being reminded of one of the most ignominious of its surrenders to international lawlessness. Yet television turned them both into a double feature of false emotion. When the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at last sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic, to conclude the proceedings in Washington, it is true that with the television reporter one felt a lump in one's throat: the gob vomit had stuck in one's craw.
Yet, as one has gone about one's business in the last few weeks of hectic negotiations with Iran, one has met no one in any walk or station of life who has been much excited by the prospect of the hostages' release. There may be relief that the affair is over: there is no feeling of gladness or triumph. Everyone knows that a ransom has been paid. It has been the final humiliation of President Carter that it required the threat of his successor's presidency to reach agreement even on the terms of that surrender. The Iranians then added the extra twist of delaying the departure of the hostages until half an hour after he had left office. President Reagan is praised for magnaminity in sending Mr Carter to welcome the hostages back. But in doing so he sensibly keeps clear of the whole unhappy denouement to so sorry a business. The American people will quickly put it behind them. If there is one thing which a people are sometimes quick to grasp, it is when a surrender of national honour is a setback to the national interest. One can feel strongly their sense of discomfiture today.
Yet there was no such sense in television's jocose coverage of the release of the hostages. What one must realise is that from start to finish the holding of the hostages has been a television event. It is true that it was President Carter who made the hostages important. It was he who said that he would not leave the White House until they had been freed. In the event, he was kicked out of the White House 30 minutes before they were set free, a final irony. But every one Of his actions during the long 14 months was a manipulation of the hostages as symbols — such as not turning on the lights on the Christmas tree both in 1979 and 1980— and I believe that he was tempted to such manipulation by the existence of television, The fact is that television relies on such symbols. Television news is not a representational art. The camera is not an instrument of documentation. To call a news programme a documentary is a misleading use of language. To make news suitable for the screen, events have to be translated into symbols.
It is important to remember this as one tries to estimate the mood of America at the moment of the Inauguration. Very • few people across the country have tied yellow ribbons to the aerials of their cars, or to tree trunks, or to their hair, in order to show that the hostages have never been out of their minds. They have been as rare as the Americans who have flagpoles in their gardens and run up the Stars and Stripes on the Fourth of July to the embarrassment of most of their neighbours on the block. But the ribbons are there to catch the eye of the camera, just as are the candlelight vigils in front of an empty embassy. The hostages have never been a preoccupation of most Americans. They have been a preoccupation of television and, because of television, of a President and then his opponents in an election. The best that can be said is that their release will rapidly consign them to a past which Americans wish to forget as they look forward with unusual expectation to what a new regime in both the White House and Congress may bring them.
I am one of many whom one meets today who wished that Jimmy Carter would win the election but — honourably, I think — are not overwrought or even much displeased by the fact that in the event he lost. Although I do not share the high expectations which are ushering in the new administration, therefore, I do not find it difficult to understand them and even to feel some sympathy with them. This is the fourth Inauguration which I have witnessed in Washington. No one expected much of Richard Nixon in 1968 — he was not even really the choice of his party — and certainly in 1972 nothing new was expected of him. Nothing much new was expected of Jimmy Carter in 1976 and those who had high expectations were soon disappointed. But this time it is different. As I wrote before the election that the odour in Washington was of the end of a regime, so the scent of expectancy in the air just now is the hope that this regime will indeed be new. Not a new president, or a new administration, but a new regime.
Is there not another way than that which, to all intents and purposes, has been followed for the past half century. by Republicans as well as Democrats? President Reagan will really have done enough, not if he suceeds beyond any reasonable hope, but if he begins redrawing the lines of a political debate. The liberals as much as the conservatives need this stimulation. There are many to the left of centre in America today who are willing to allow him considerable latitude in pursuing his policies if new possibilities are explored. This as much as anything accounts for the unusual measure of bipartisan cooperation which at present is being offered by Congress. The very distinct atmosphere is of more than the usual honeymoon with a new president. One takes notice when Rep Shirley Chisholm, who represents the eastern half of the huge Brooklyn ghetto, says that she gets 'good vibes' from the new President, She has always liked to attract attention but that is an interesting way to seek it.
There are also the indications that the leaders of American labour, their attitudes different from those of their British counterparts, would grumble but also not too much if the present level of unemployment was maintained, as long as the real value of wages was increased by reducing inflation. President Reagan in fact has a mandate beyond his small popular majority and even his landslide in the electoral college, because of the widespread feeling that it will be no bad thing if experiments are tried in developing new policies. This is what he promised in his campaign. He repeated the promise in his address to the nation, in which he indeed was the candidate back on the hustings. It will be all too easy for him to be deflected in the first six months of his administration by the international crises and domestic problems which will call for his decision. But if that happens, his mandate will go. The inertia of the huge bureaucracy will be reasserted, the resistance of Congress will be provoked, and the expectations of the people will evaporate.
The member of the new administration who is Most likely to keep President Reagan heading into the wind, instead of tacking or veering with it, is the man whom he has appointed to head the key Office of Management and the Budget (OMB). This office has grown out of the earlier Bureau of the Budget, which was one of those innovations hardly noticed at the time. But the Bureau grew like a coral reef from the day • that it was removed from the Treasury in 1939 and transferred by Roosevelt to the Executive Office of the President which was established in the same year. It thus became a strong arm of. the Presidency, as its director is the personal agent of the President. If any president were heard to say of a truculent head of a department:'Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?', it would be officers of the OMB who would ride down Constitution Avenue, and try to hack him down even in the sanctuary of his own office. The OMB supervises all federal agencies. No federal expenditure is made Without the approval of the Comptroller General under the authority of the OMB's Director.
The new Director is Mr David Stockman. He is now 34 years old. He has been described by one admirer as 'Southern Michigan's contribution to intelligent gov ernment'. He oddly began his political career as a staff aide of John Anderson. He then firmly established his reputation on Capitol Hill, before he had been elected to any office, as the director of the Republican Conference of the House of Representatives, which is as much concerned with policy as any of the party's organisations. At the age of 26, he became a fellow of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and ran for Congress. It has been said of him that 'old-fashioned Republicans used to talk about the federal budget as if it were a family budget: Stockman is more apt to talk about how Keynesian models do not describe the world today'. He is totally free or older conservatives' opposition to civil rights, and so on, and his first and last preoccupation is to reduce federal regulation and government spending.
If there is to be a Mrs Thatcher in this administration, it will not be President Reagan. It will be Mr Stockman. But then what happens if Mr Reagan turns out to be himself the leader of the wets? This is the question mark that hangs over the new Administration. No one knows which way the President will lean under pressure. Most of the other appointments suggest an administration that will dutifully increase the rewards of private industry to the extent that this does not provoke too much opposition or other political difficulty. But Mr Stockman vigorously opposed the provision of public funds to Gulf Oil in order to build a coal liquefication plant. He expects private industry to pay its own bills if it wants high profits. He does not just say so at dinners of the Chamber of Commerce. He has voted for it all along. He also opposed the provision of public funds to the quasiprivate corporation, Amtrak, which is responsible for running most of the railways which still operate here.
In a country which is made for railways, as it was made by them, and which has foolishly and disgracefully let them disintegrate, that opposition shows the strength of Mr Stockman's convictions. It is evidence of that kind of dcgree of conviction which Americans expect from the administration. It seems to be almost less important to them what those convictions are as long as they are steadily held and enunciated and followed, If Mr Reagan fails in that, he will fail in much more, not least in foreign policy. It was a well-known economist who said to me recently that what is most needed is a long term consistency in the policy of the Government. 'The Government must send consistent signals to the other institutions of the country', not least, he added, to the private sector which is quite as responsible for inflation as the Government itself. In short, what remains to be seen is whether the Administration will make the distinction between big government, which it says it abhors, and the strong government which America now expects almost more from the conservatives than from the liberals; I turned on the television again at that point, to watch the arrival of the hostages in West Germany. The reporter at Frankfurt Airport said that the Europeans had all along taken the view that the lives of 52 diplomats must be held in some appropriate balance against the real interests of the alliance which America leads. The reporter in Washington said that he did not think that Europeans could understand the feelings of all Americanns in putting first the lives of the hostages. This has been the falseness of American television from the start of the affair. Last night I had attended a birthday party at which a member of the British Embassy asked to be introduced to me. He had in 1967 been a member of the British Mission in Peking when it was attacked, and its Staff beaten Up, at first held in close arrest, followed by a longer period of compound arrest than that suffered by the American hostages. He expressed his appreciation at my mention of this episode in an article in the Washington Post. It is not the US foreign service but American television, not its people but their politicians, which have failed to follow this example. It is up to President Reagan to choose between the two. The American people are fed up with symbols.
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