First Confession Read online

  Why dwell on Reagan and his philosophy – Hayek out of Disneyland – when writing about the 1960s? Because whatever Republican presidents may have done in practice – and both Bushes were big spenders too – they were tossed politically like corks on the waves of anti-government, deregulatory, anti-tax rhetoric, as were their Democrat opponents. The deficits on the whole went up; the regulatory restraints came down. Too many Americans came to believe that the land of the free had defined itself and earned its glory days through individualism alone, through rejecting a role for the state in America’s life. They were evangelized to believe that any government action was a step towards socialist tyranny. This argument has been a damaging historical fraud. It has nothing to do with real conservatism, but everything to do with the defence of plutocracy, a refusal to accept the costs of citizenship, and populism: in other words, with the steadily growing extremism of the Republican Party as its historic patrician core has been hollowed out. The intuitive traditional understanding of balance in the Republican Party – balance between the state and citizens, between taxing and spending, between international engagement and the national interest – was over time replaced in large part by the fanciful faith of the Tea Party and the very special interests of plutocrats and lobbyists.

  The America that we travelled in 1965 was enjoying (with one huge exception) the fruits of the conservatism of President Eisenhower’s 1950s, the long Age of Ike, which baked in the successful economic and social advances of the New Deal. Eisenhower, a great organizing general and a fine president, had read enough history and was a wise enough man to know that the ‘city on a hill’ had not been built just by individual sweat and prayer. It owed much to community solidarity and state action directed by effective politicians. George Washington’s chief aide and Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, led the way. A believer in strong central government, he promoted industry, commerce and banking. A century later, (Republican) President Teddy Roosevelt took on the robber barons of American minerals, commodities, railroads and banking. He regulated monopolies and used anti-trust legislation to break them up. Fast-forward to the ending of the Depression with (Democrat) President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal with an active government intervening in the economy to promote growth, jobs and the construction of a modern infrastructure. Eisenhower did not regard this as an assault on freedom. A wise conservative, he recognized, like Deng Xiaoping almost thirty years later, that pragmatism which delivered the goods trumped ideology that filled the seminar halls. So the 1950s brought huge housing and highway programmes, the financing of great universities, the support of new technologies through the defence budget – the core technologies of the digital economy, semi-conductors, computing, jet aviation. Federal spending under Eisenhower as a proportion of national wealth was double the figure it had been under Roosevelt. These were the best times for the white middle class of the American dream. And the middle class thrived as income equality advanced. The financial sector represented 3.7 per cent of the economy; today that stands at 8.5 per cent. Then a US chief executive was paid thirty times the average pay in his company; today that figure is well above 300.

  It is particularly interesting to see what happened to income equality in those days. The internationally accepted measure for determining this is called the Gini coefficient. Everyone accepts its credibility to such an extent that some like the Chinese try to cheat on the figures, worried about what they tell the world about the real nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Named after an Italian statistician with fascist sympathies, the Gini coefficient operates on the basis that if one person in a country had all the resources and no one else possessed anything, the index would be 1. If on the other hand, the country’s resources were spread evenly between everyone the index would be 0. The index in America dropped between 1947 and 1974, after which it began to climb. When Edward Mortimer and I were in the United States, it was falling to its lowest ever level, touching the bottom figure of 0.386 in 1968. By 2013, the index had climbed to 0.476, the highest figure for any prosperous democracy. These figures, which seem so prosaic, measure pretty accurately variations of inequality. We can consider later the consequences of income inequality in the United States, but for the present I simply want to make the point that for most people – certainly for white citizens – America was a fairer society in the 1950s and 1960s than it is today. Fairer and probably more content: Americans were living ‘the Dream’. Today, George Carlin has argued that the reason why it is called ‘the American Dream’ is because you have to be asleep to believe it.

  In 1965 we went from one community of wide-awake Americans to another; ‘the Dream’ looked like life in one of the television comedies that emanated from Hollywood. ‘Suburbanophilia’ celebrated happy families living in comfortable homes full of the latest gadgets – televisions, washing machines and air conditioning – surrounded by manicured lawns and white paling fences, and with front porches onto which paper boys cycling past would toss the morning’s edition of the Buffalo Bugle. One morning I saw this happen! The family in I Love Lucy admittedly lived in an apartment, but we all know what they represented, happy families and happy days. Gradually the love affair with this middle-class suburban life was challenged by novelists and moviemakers. The oppression of suburban wives, even the prospect of invasion by alien body snatchers, cast shadows over the idyll. What we saw on our tour of the country was its apogee. Suburbs, shopping malls, spired clapboard churches – these were comfortable neighbourhoods joined physically by a great highway system and spiritually by the intensity of America’s sense of community.

  This America was the product of a combination of ‘can do’ entrepreneurial energy and pragmatic government intervention. Unlike Jeremy Bentham, Eisenhower and those who worked with him did not have a prior assumption that government intervention was generally ‘needless and pernicious’. As the President once wrote to his brother Edgar, ‘to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal Government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of people firmly believe should be undertaken by it’. The Federal Housing Agency helped build the homes; the Highway Trust Fund met most of the cost of constructing the Interstate Highway System. In the background a tightly regulated banking system provided the cash to finance commerce and home ownership. What was good for Wall Street really was good for Main Street – because Wall Street was hemmed in by restrictions to make it boring and safe, and avoid the bubbles, panics and crashes that had periodically shattered lives and business and set back the economy.

  What happened? In the 1980s (though it started earlier) Hayekian Austrian economics captured the commanding heights of public debate, often supported by rich men’s money and financial service lobbyists. Rules introduced to make bank deposits safe, to control stock markets tightly, and to keep investment banking and commercial banking separate were scrapped. The repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act (passed in the 1930s to separate commercial and investment banking) in 1999 enabled banks to take on ever greater risks with ever less oversight. This was the biggest of all the changes in the thousands of cuts in regulations that led to gunslinger banking and the crash of 2007–8. There had been no crash like it since the Second World War: a reason perhaps for taking very small helpings of ideological spinach. Moreover, all this deregulatory frenzy was accompanied by growing inequality in the United States. As the incomes of middle America were squeezed, families and individuals made up for the fact that they had less disposable income by borrowing on a vast scale, encouraged by banks and others through a range of arcane but dodgy instruments, especially tied to house purchase. Household debt increased from $680 billion in 1974 to $14 trillion in 2008, including a doubling between 2001 and 2008. By that date, householders possessed on average thirteen credit cards. Alongside this steep increase, federal debt soared as well, to over $10 trillion by the year’s end. Americans were spending far more than they earned, and the country as a whole was doing the same, becoming the world’s
biggest debtor, the global borrower of last resort. It is difficult to command the world’s respect when you are so dependent on borrowing what other countries are earning in order to pay for what you are spending. It undermined America’s global leadership. But the banks were happy; bankers were prodigiously well-paid; and the larger banks provided the high command for the Washington establishment. Democratic government had perhaps become in reality the cash nexus to which Thomas Carlyle argued capitalism had reduced all social relationships.

  If a large section of American society seemed happier in the 1960s than it is today, that sense of middle-class well-being did not extend to families with a black skin. In the diary I kept of our visit I note today that I sometimes referred to African-Americans as negroes, not then regarded as anything but a conventional and polite description. In his great speech ‘I have a dream’ in 1963, Martin Luther King used the word several times. But as the 1960s and 1970s wore on, the Civil Rights Movement came to prefer other descriptions of black identity. African-American was one of them, though a journalist friend of mine, himself the descendant of slaves, refuses to use this term about himself, having spent several years as chief correspondent for his paper in Africa during some of the worst atrocities on that continent in both Rwanda and Somalia: he wants to be regarded as an American, not an African-American. Even the most sensitive souls these days, meaning no offence, can find themselves in hot water when they appear to put a foot wrong on this issue. A white English actor advancing an argument well disposed to actors who did not share his colour, referred to ‘coloured people’ when he should apparently have said ‘people of colour’. He beat, poor man, an embarrassed retreat. No one should want to give offence describing other, too often oppressed or disadvantaged, racial groups, indeed one should lean over backwards to avoid it. But this can, I suspect, be an area in which some hunt out offence where none was ever intended in an excessively prickly assertion of identity. I hope that my three mixed-race grandchildren, smart, feisty, beautiful kids, will grow up in a society where sensitivities about these issues have been marginalized by equity of respect and opportunity. Where I admire the work of the British organization Black Boys Can, I observe that the boys are indeed black, but the problem is that (to take the grammatical distinction mentioned earlier) at the moment while they can, they may not because too often their background condemns them to an inferior secondary education.

  In 1960s America, we witnessed terrible evidence that the American dream did not encompass the black, African-American community. Martin Luther King’s dream that out of a ‘mountain of despair’ it should be possible to hew a ‘stone of hope’, with the call for freedom ringing from the top of every mountain and hilltop from Stone Mountain of Georgia to the hills and molehills of Mississippi, was very far from fulfilment. The valleys were not yet exalted, nor the hills and mountains laid low.

  We saw this in two places in particular: Los Angeles and Alabama. We arrived in Los Angeles in late August and went first to the charmingly tasteless Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which boasted not only a replica of the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather where Annie Laurie waited and prayed through that long and turgid Scottish ballad, but also what was apparently the biggest reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper in America and presumably in the world. It was curious to be in a cemetery in which over a quarter of a million were buried where, nevertheless, the very idea of death had, as in much of America’s culture, passed, moved on, departed, gone to a better place. We went from there to a place that was definitely not better, the suburb of Watts. Riots had broken out the week before we arrived in southern California, following the arrest of an African-American motorist. Six days of looting and arson followed. We went into the suburbs of mostly detached run-down bungalows, described by some Angelinos as ‘a decent slum’, the day after most of the National Guard were withdrawn. This area, Watts, still bore all the marks of violence – walls pock-marked by bullets, burning overturned cars, smashed shop windows. There were knots of young black men, frequently drunk, on the street corners. We had seen worse signs of urban deprivation in Chicago, but there was no doubt that it was a pretty grim and impoverished area, where already high levels of unemployment were made worse by a steady influx from the poorer, rural South.

  It was far worse in Alabama, where Jim Crow, racial segregation, was sovereign. In 1957, Vice-President Nixon had been invited by the Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, to Ghana’s independence celebrations. At an official reception it is said that the Vice-President went over to speak to a group of black guests. ‘It must be great,’ he said, ‘to be citizens of a country where you can now vote in freedom for your own government.’ ‘I don’t know what that must be like,’ one of them replied. ‘We are from Alabama.’ The Civil Rights Movement was still fighting in 1965 to get voting rights for African-Americans as well as equal treatment to that of their white fellow citizens across the board. In Washington, with a mixture of legislative aplomb and political bullying, President Johnson was himself battling reactionary forces in the Senate and the House of Representatives on those questions. This was to be his greatest triumph. But we turned up in an Alabama city as guests of a courtly newspaper editor while the battle was still joined. We had flown in from New Orleans and collected our rental car at the airport, not noticing that it had Pennsylvania number plates. (We probably wouldn’t have realized the significance anyway.) Stopping in the car a day or so later at a bar, the place fell ominously silent as we walked up to the counter, Beatle haircuts and English accents. Fortunately, our host was with us and followed us in. ‘Don’t worry, boys,’ he said loudly. ‘They are English. They’re not from the north. They are just like us.’ Not long before this, civil rights campaigners from the north had been shot down, and there had been a number of students from universities in Pennsylvania among them, campaigning for black rights. We were lucky our host was with us.

  We spent two or three days with him. A widower, I think, he was looked after by black servants and driven by one of them to the office. He explained the protocol of this. He could not sit beside his black driver, a woman, in the front of the car; if he was driving, the servant had to sit in the back. If there were three people in the car, including one white female and two blacks, the latter would sit in the front rather than having black and white thighs in any sort of clothed proximity. He was a gentle, well-read, likeable man, ran what was for the times and the community a pretty moderate newspaper, and had no truck with the Ku Klux Klan or violent prejudices. But he was not going to challenge the old culture of Confederacy politics: change might need to come, but it could not be hurried. Maybe all men were created equal – and should be able to go to the same schools, clamber on to the same buses, eat in the same restaurants, sleep in the same motels as one another. But it would take time to bring this about. Dignity could be acquired in a dignified way, step by step. He wanted ‘the rough places to be made plain, and the crooked places made straight’, but perhaps not just yet. He was a good and decent man, a kind man, and it was easier to think that you knew what he should be doing than to be in his position yourself. When you’re able to move on, it is plain sailing to be more courageous than those who have to stay behind, anchored in their own cultures and communities. Self-righteousness is a curse of the judgemental liberal.

  So the great stain on America’s honour in the 1960s was race. Could I have imagined then that just over forty years later a black man would be President? I was in Hong Kong on the night that news of Barack Obama’s victory came through in November 2008. So too was Colin Powell – we were both making speeches there. He came up to my hotel room to have a drink afterwards and watch the results. He was pretty emotional, as far as generals allow themselves to be. It was not difficult to sympathize: ‘Free at last.’ Except that Obama had to cope throughout his presidency with a slick of racism in the water behind his ship of state. Racism was not dead and buried, as we were to see in the run-up to, and in the course of, Donald Trump’s electoral
triumph.

  I worked closely with Colin Powell when I was a European Commissioner; I had already had a couple of years working with his predecessor, Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, especially on the Balkans after the Kosovo War. We rarely had any differences of opinion with her. She was smart, firm in her views and charming; she was particularly kind to me, Europe’s Commissioner for External Affairs, very aware that I was suddenly playing in a league of big hitters. I remember she loved jewellery, particularly big brooches. I told her about a little shop in Brussels which sold classic costume jewellery (where I bought Lavender a few pieces) and she used to visit the shop every time she came to Brussels. I would then enjoy seeing her wearing her spectacular purchases. Like others in American administrations, she was sometimes both frustrated and puzzled that the European Union found it so difficult to adopt quickly, and stick to, common positions.