American Letter
The President gets smart
Al Capp
Even our most loyal Republicans were beginning to wonder if Lyndon Johnson hadn't summed it all up when he said that Gerald Ford couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time, when the President made two brilliant moves.
First, he didn't answer a request from the Food Conference in Rome immediately to start feeding the world's hungry. Instead, his spokesman at the' conference, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, pointed out that the US has always picked up the check for those who couldn't pay for their own dinners, even though, as in India, we have in the past paid for their belief that their beef was sacred and that their babies had a divine right to multiply, whereas our beef is eaten by those of us who can afford to pay for it, and our babies are aborted by the hundreds of thousands by those who can't afford to feed them. Secretary Butz noted that things were now rough in the US, and, as a result, never better in the oil-blackmailing nations such as Iran, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait. The American liberals at the food conference denounced the President, but didn't have an unkind word for Iran, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, since most of the folks there are brown and liberals never denounce anyone who is any other colour than white.
The other smart move the President made was to get out of the country for a couple of weeks. No longer did we see him on our evening TV newscasts, sweating and apologising, and explaining why he had second thoughts about his nominees for ambassadorships and cabinet posts. Instead, we saw him conferring with the world's great, accompanied by Dr Kissinger, just as dear Mr Nixon used to. Meanwhile, back at the courthouse, Watergate was providing a Wagnerian finale to the asphyxiatingly boring career of Judge John Sirica. Although the judge never lost an opportunity to complain about the complexity of the case, he never skipped a chance to further complicate it. Once Watergate is over, Judge Sirica has no place to go where anyone will pay any more attention to him than anyone has in the last seventy years; thus, understanably, he's doing all he can to make the party last.
There is never a dull day in Sirica's court. If the testimony doesn't supply headlines, the Bench will. Judge Sirica chose the day we all saw Richard Nixon, on TV, stumble out of his California hospital, trying dazedly to shake a few nurses' and attendants' hands, giving it up, and being all but lifted into a car to be taken home, to announce that he was sending three Washington specialists to California to find out if the ex-President had watered his blood tests. The Judge alone knows why Washington specialists are four or five thousand dollars more reliable than California specialists (that being the minimum cost of sending them there, housing them and paying their fees) and certainly the Judge would have been entitled to that laughable fraction of our taxes for the chance to drag the ex-President into his court and guarantee himself a moment in history.
Now, no one will argue that the Judge's suspicions of Mr Nixon aren't well-founded, for our last President was as capable of exercising the Presidential privilege of putting a different face on matters as were his predecessors (Lyndon Johnson's war reports; Jack Kennedy's tricking of the public before the Bay of Pigs, his mid-battle betrayal of the poor souls caught in it; Dwight Eisenhower's embarrassing U-2 performance). And not even the wildest Nixon admirer who has read the transcripts of the latest tapes, those Nixon didn't even dare tell his lawyer about, will claim he was as good at it as were those predecessors. They were pros. He was childish. A child will say anything that pops into his head to escape the spanking that hovers, even knowing full well that the truth will out and his punishment be tenfold. Mr Nixon, in his last few months, resembled a soldier facing a firing squad, asking for the unheard-of second cigarette, hoping that in those few seeonds the reprieve would come.
Yet, as hitherto withheld tapes were revealed, we couldn't help but wonder if this might not be the way such a business, founded upon and occasionally reverting to mass murder, is often run. The week those tapes were revealed was the week The Godfather was shown on national TV. The procedures of the Mafioso were exactly like those in the Oval Room of the White House, except that the Mafia's language was cleaner. We hope, all of us, that those we place in power speak in nobler phrases about nobler purposes, but we don't know. No other administration was demented enough to tape itself, suicidal enough to permit the tapes to exist. And no other administration ever will.
And where will the next administration come from? There is no way the Republican Party can avoid nominating Gerald Ford, and there is no way they can win with him — except to nominate Mr Reagan and that is unthinkable because he might win, and that would prove that the US has gone Fascist, namely that it is sick of carrying those who kick its teeth in, both at home and abroad.
With Ted Kennedy out of the Democratic race, and writing pouting letters to Time magazine complaining about the unfairness and the bias of the media, with all the bitterness of Spiro Agnew but without Agnew's verve, it looked as though Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota might be a man to get to know better. But then Mondale announced that he wasn't going to try for the nomination because the idea of being President didn't seem to be worth the trouble. It was the first public statement he'd made that made him worth being taken seriously as a candidate. The Democrats haven't a single candidate with any vote-getting record, except Governor Wallace of Alabama, and nominating him is unthinkable, because he might win and that would prove the US has gone Fascist, namely that it is sick of carrying those who kick its teeth in, both at home and abroad.
Al Capp writes regularly for The Spectator from the US.
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