Politics as usual
Henry Fairlie
Washington The Washington Hilton hotel is more or less' round the corner from my home. Shortly after 2.30 p.m. on Monday, I was settling, down to compose an essay for this journal, and needed only an idea and silence. Suddenly the sirens of police cars and ambulances outside were very loud and persistent. I thought that as usual they were chasing each other to the next traffic light for the heck of it. A disturbance, but America. The telephone rang. A friend in New York. She is usually versatile in her opening greetings on the telephone. But she just said, in a voice of dismay, 'It's so awful'. I asked: 'What is?' It was the first news which I had, from 200 miles away, that the President had been shot — only a few yards from me. I turned on the television, and indeed she was right. I was just about to call the editor of the Spectator, to demonstrate that his man in the field was on the spot in an emergency, when the telephone rang and he was calling me. He was watching the same pictures as me, 3,000 miles away in London, of what was happening round the corner. If we are to grasp the nature of the event, this matters — that it happened far away as quickly and really as here. When one comes to look at it, after all, it is not much of a story. Those of us who were posted a century ago to various corners of the world to prevent the sun from setting, a task which explains why we began drinking hard at sundown, often received the Illustrated London News three months late with its pictures of ambuscades and attempted assassinations. In every issue was a drawing of some crazed man holding a pistol towards the carriage of one of the crowned heads of Europe. But by the time we read of it, the event had long passed, the sun was still going round, and we had to stop it setting. No American officer in Samoa was much disturbed when he at last heard that President McKinley had been shot. A study of the records also suggests that, when Spencer Perceval was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons at about 5 p.m. on 11 May 1812, no one in Wiltshire thought to call London at 6 p.m. As the excitement on television on Monday was flashed round the world, so that New York and London sprang at once into my life, all seemed much the same to me round the corner from where it happened. Washington was not in flames. People were queueing for buses to get home.
The event was unfortunate. It is a pity that it happened. One is sorry for those who were injured. But what has been disclosed by it? What has happened as a result? It is of some importance that the young man who fired the shots is exactly who he is. He is white; upper middle class; son of an oil man; raised in Texas, his family now in Colorado; has 'ever been a university student; cannot be called an intellectual; has never belonged to radical movements; has been associated politically only with the extreme right; likes guns; buys guns from pawnshops; walks around with guns; and now shoots a gun. This background could scarcely be more representative of the West from which the main support for Mr Reagan has come for so many years. This is not to attribute the shooting to that background. Bt it does mean that those of this background cannot blame any of the other groups in the society whom they are so quick to suspect of left-wing conspiracies. The gun that shot Mr Reagan came of the most solid, conservative, and Republican elements that support him in the country. One has only to consider what the atmosphere would be today if the shots had been fired by a black or a 'communist'. Then it would be important.
It was its very unimportance which then made it interesting. Far from there being an atmosphere of emergency — of what is now sillily known as 'crisis management' — it has been politics as usual and very engaging. There is something immediately reassuring' in a nation which waits calmly for VicePresident George Bush to turn round his plane and fly back to the capital in time for cocktails. Americans split infinitives, even in headlines. The headlines in the Washington Post on Tuesday nonetheless caught the real drama of the events of Monday: 'Bush on swing through Texas returns to quietly take command'. The genuine excitement was in the descriptions of his conduct, during what was described as his ordeal. Said the secretary of state of Texas: 'The Vice-President looks like he's in total control'. Said the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives who was on the flight back with him: 'The Vice President displayed total calm with complete control of his emotions'. Why do they think that George was sent to prep school? To break down when destiny at last calls? Harvard would have thought and worried how to behave. Yale just behaved. It is said that George did not pass water the whole time. We had all forgotten good old George until a couple of weeks ago. He was then brought to the fore by the White House, to resist the ambitious power plays of General Alexander Haig at the Department of State. Everyone had been saying that there was no one in charge at the White House who knew anything about foreign policy and so could be deployed to oppose the encroachments of the State. Department. Lord Randolph Churchill forgot Goschen. General Alexander Haig forgot George.I But we had all mislaid him in our assess-! ments. It is a long time since any VicePresident has been moved to the front to engage so directly in a political battle. The General went before Congress and stamped his feet. One looked at him under pressure, and he was a flustered martimet. One looked back to the White House to find his victor. He said not a word. He was hardly to be found. He was prep all through. All at once it was discovered that Vice-President Bush is a man of unusual experience and even consummate wisdom.
Even before Monday, therefore, he wasI on the rise. But neither he nor the Whitel House can have expected General Haig would play into their hands. In a rather ordinary way after 2.30 on Monday afternoon, White House men and Cabinet officers began to assemble. Uncertain about the condition of their President, they dropped by more or less as a matter of course. What else were they meant to do? One must say without any qualification that they seem to have behaved in an exemplary way. This frustrated the television reporters, who were being given little official news and so kept putting out unchecked stories, then blaming their inaccuracies on the White House. But I believe that millions of people were like me: the absence of official bustle suggested the absence of emergency. It was all so unlike the Kennedy men in 1963. One saw no one rushing here and there. None issued any crisis statement. None went on television. No one called on the Lord to save the nation. None of them, that is, except for the General. To the surprise of his colleagues, he held a press conference on television, and claimed that he was in control at the White House.
It was the same General who had blown himself out of the water in front of Congress only a few days before. It took about an hour for the White House to eat him up, en Monday, and then the Vice President returned and digested him. Mr Bush put not one foot wrong. It is not the easiest thing for a Vice President to be caught in mid air when his President is shot and the extent of his injuries not known. When this Vice President landed at Andrews air force base, at 6.30 p.m., he did not then land his helicopter on the south lawn of the White House. That is a prerogative normally reserved for the President. No one would have blamed Mr Bush if he had exercised that prerogative in the circumstances. But, instead, he chose to land at the naval observatory and drive to the White House. When he at last went on television he spoke very briefly, he spoke in the name of the President, he spoke in his normal voice, and he did not claim to be in charge. He simPlY was in charge. It is often said that some presidents grow into the job. When before has one thought of a man growing into the job of Vice President? Politics always amazes, with unexpected politicians. Once again the Administration has i triumphed simply by the manner of ts public conduct. There is a sense in which I .wish that this were not so. I dislike manY (/` its policies, distrust others, and even fear some of them. But the public manner of this Administration is a political fact of some importance. As the political battles are . fought within it, as they must be at the r°Ie riet a ls.1,e.l.t. beginning of any Administation, it n less behaves collectively with considerable,. cohesion. That is why the conduct. 0,t General Alexander Haig stands out: It Is why the behaviour of Mr David Stockman will eventually be his undoing. These are men who are not playing the game ought to be played, and are not nearly, skilful enough to play it as cads and get away with it. There is a presence m this Administration which is dictating its manner. One looks for it. It is not there. It is not there. It is not there. One turns to the hospital, and there is the presence. Makrg jokes. That is what is insufferable. He has not issued one call the the nation to rallY m its hour of danger. He just makesbad Jo kes' i and makes sure they get reported. He is the President of the United States of Amelia. He ought to be agitating the natio. n, Proclaiming days of national prayer, Saying that violence is a curse which lies upon the land. Here's the opportunity for him to assume the mantle of John Kennedy. The stricken old President picks up the banner of the stricken young hero. But he does nothing of the sort. He makes a succession of bad jokes, and encourages them to be itlayed. He even wrote some out. It is impossible not to admire it, and indeed to be grateful for it this week. It was he more than anyone who cut the event down to size. nut what does it mean? His government is embarked on policies which make not only his enemies feel uneasy. There are conservatives and Republicans and business men who are worried. Yet the unusual ways of his leadership keep on reassuring. If the policies of his Administration are mistaken, the command of his leadership in the end determines the policies of his Administration, then there is a possibility of a presidency of subtle but even welcome influence on events. Where is the parallel? He is beginning to remind me of Stanley Baldwin. But then I think that Baldwin was a valuable man. than to send a docile young citizen to college.
But the truth of the argument of• the anti-gun controllers will be taken and acted on. They always say, and they are incontrovertibly right, that it isn't guns which kill, it's people. We rear killers: we do. We raise all kinds of them. We might have a typology of American murderers, but we won't because that also might tell us about ourselves.
Instead, the newspapers are full of quotes about the irrationality and randomness of this last attack, as though it were plain bad luck. The killer is a member of no known political group, a devotee of no particular ideology, although he may have nibbled at the loose strings of American Nazism, but we are told not to be deceived by that. He is said to have been arrested last year in Nashville with three guns in his pocket when Jimmy Carter was in town.
If it is true it fits with the typology of 'American murderers. Like the man who killed John Lennon, this one would also be the kind who seeks the celebrity target. George Wallace's assailant was the same, zig-zagging this way and that in aeroplanes and rented cars, holing up in fly-speck motels, tracking, stalking, setting up to shoot a famous personage be he Democrat or Republican or independent. The important thing is that the victim must be I well-known. We might name him the Andy Warhol killer type, in honour of Warhol's observation that every one of us is to be a celebrity for 15 minutes, In America we believe everything comes from the business end of a gun — power and fame. Shoot your way on to television. We raise men who will kill to be famous. Then we call it bad luck when they do and interview them and pay them fees so that equally famous authors can write the story of their infamously short careers.
Previous page
