First Confession Read online

  But began as what? I had no idea. I could make a pretty good fist of analysing the barons’ motives at Runnymede or the downfall of Madame Roland and the Girondins, though I was not so hot on Disraeli and Gladstone and the Eastern Question. I could write passably funny sketches, songs and revues, and did quite a good camp impersonation of Queen Victoria. I was capable of charm and of making a speech. For what sort of career – ouch, the very thought of having to embark on a career – would that cut me out? I had made little effort to apply for jobs. I was turned down by two international advertising agencies, in one case discovering that they did not share my sense of humour. In their psychometric test, when replying to a Tom-fool question about what sort of animal or bird I might like to be, I responded by writing ‘a seagull’. I answered the rest of the questions as though I was indeed a seagull. ‘What do you most like doing?’ ‘Swooping low over the waves catching fish’, etc. Plainly, I thought this funnier than the advertising agency did. Perhaps as a result of this experience I have never myself taken any interest whatsoever in these tests, relying on the whole on interviews, CVs and references. I have never tried to discover whether the job applicant might have preferred to be a mongoose. I had also applied for a graduate traineeship for the BBC for the year after my graduation. In the meantime, I would comfort myself with the fact that at Balliol I had won their equivalent of the lottery, a Coolidge Atlantic Crossing Fellowship. This was to prove the oyster, though I was not to know then exactly what sort of pearl lay inside.

  These Coolidge fellowships were the first example of many I have now encountered of the astonishing generosity and imagination of much American philanthropy. Bill Coolidge, then in his sixties, was a Charter member of the Boston-Brahmins – rich by birth and then by shrewd investment. He had been at Harvard, then Balliol, and was a keen member of the Episcopalian Church. Bill was a bachelor and these institutions became the principal members of his family; each of them received shed-loads of his generosity. In the case of Balliol, the benefaction mainly took the form of the scholarships awarded to several members of the college each year for general all-round good chappery. Bill paid for you to travel by liner to New York, stay with him at his country estate in Massachusetts, drink quantities of his first growth claret, get kitted out at the Harvard Co-op – blazer, chinos, Oxford button-down shirts, brown penny loafers – and then set out with a Hertz credit card, 1,000 dollars renewable, and a list of Bill’s friends and Balliol alumni around the United States who were prepared to put you up and show you around their city or state for a few days. We travelled in pairs; I went with Edward Mortimer to cover the United States anti-clockwise from Boston. Like Balliol, this trip was the making of me. Good fortune once again took me under its wing.

  We travelled to New York in late June 1965, on the SS France, and learned for the first time how easily a patina of Oxonian self-confidence and the accent that went with it opened doors, in this case those to the liner’s first-class bars and lounges. The trouble was that, despite the free frozen Daiquiris that my vowels earned me, the atmosphere up in First was far too formal: all white tuxedos worn by young men with licks of dark hair over their foreheads who looked as though they might be training for roles as Ripley gigolos in pursuit of American grand duchesses. I suspected that they did not tie their own black dickies. One evening of this was enough to persuade us that we were better off with the proletariat, who seemed to be having a rather better time without the tuxedos. Several passengers from First plainly felt the same, drifting past the stewards and across the class barriers to enjoy the cruise with the ‘sans culottes’.

  Two of our sailing companions conformed so much to type that their photos should have been stuck straight away in an album of our American safari. One was straight off the pages of Scott Fitzgerald or the New Yorker: his underwear probably came from Brooks Brothers; his Oxford cotton button-down shirts (just like the ones we were soon to purchase) and blue blazer certainly did. He was a great patriot and about our age. I remember his outrage that President Johnson’s daughter chewed gum in class and that both his favourite Bowery restaurant and his favourite Fifth Avenue clothes outfitter were closing down. I imagined he would become a banker in Wall Street in the days before the barrow boys took it over. But I learned a couple of years later that Bill was splattered over a Vietnamese paddy field like so many others. I do not think that any other country produces an exactly similar type: decent, likeable, beautifully mannered, a bit reticent, old-fashioned, all too easy to caricature. Rather too many of these young men, along with many more working-class American boys, have died in the last century for what have often been primarily other peoples’ causes. The passenger who was for us an archetypal American was John – the American in (or, strictly, from) Paris. He exuded all the sophistication of a young man who had spent a year in Montmartre living beyond the Place des Abbesses. John was returning to America to scandalize his friends with a trunk load of de Sade and Henry Miller, naturally including the sexually explicit Plexus, Nexus and Sexus, the last of which I had once sneaked a look at on the shelves of a young woman reading Philosophy at St Anne’s College while she was out of the room making a pot of Earl Grey. John was in his mid-twenties, and had a rather world-weary manner that was clearly a great turn-on for women. He appeared to have seen and experienced most of what life had to offer, especially the racy and louche. I could never manage this look myself, the hint of danger that so many women love. Not everyone on board was as much fun as Bill and John. One morning I had breakfast with a Swede who worked in Welwyn Garden City, which he praised for its night life.

  Many of the initial surprising impressions of a 21-year-old in America have been borne out by scores of later visits (I suppose the tally could have reached a hundred by now). For a start, while one of course knows that Americans speak English, they sometimes speak other languages too. Driving through Texas for instance on our journey in 1965 we encountered communities where German and Spanish were languages of choice. Spanish is used increasingly as immigration from Central and Latin America adds to the US population. An increasing number of American politicians now feel it necessary to know at least some Spanish. The use of German reflects the number of German immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The First World War reduced public enthusiasm for speaking the German language. Despite the majority use of English, the visitor from Britain has to remind her- or himself continuously that America is a foreign country. In Athens, Ohio, I felt a greater sense of being foreign than in Athens, Greece. America was globalization on one continent, long before we became obsessed with the concept on every continent. How can the USA be both so global and so insular, an American identity made up of so many smaller parts? I sat one morning recently on Madison Avenue in the window of a deli near St Patrick’s Cathedral and watched the office workers trudging past. How would they identify themselves first and foremost: Vietnamese Americans, New Yorkers, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Afro-Americans, Chinese Americans, maybe Black New Yorker Catholic Americans? Or perhaps they just thought that they were what it said in their passports – US citizens. Except, probably six out of ten would not have a passport, a lower figure than a few years back but still a lot higher than the figures for comparable countries, for example Canada’s four out of ten or the UK’s between two and three. Yet as the American seal says, borrowing from Cicero or St Augustine, ‘E Pluribus Unum’. Despite mostly coming from abroad in their recent ancestry, many Americans are surprisingly uninterested in what happens beyond America’s shores. Julian Barnes once noted that if you want your country to disappear before your eyes just visit the United States and open a newspaper. Though many Americans speak (up to a point) their diaspora languages, they do not appear to be very good or particularly interested linguists. I suppose that, like my own fellow citizens, they are spoilt. As the world speaks English, why speak Italian, French or Japanese?

  This paradox of being a kaleidoscope of national, racial, linguistic and religious identities
, and being (still, for the moment) the world’s biggest economy and its political and security leader, while at the same time being pretty dubious about having too much to do with abroad, is a main reason why America is not, never was and never will be an empire like Rome. This forms part of America’s ineffable charm and attraction. It is an emporium but generally not an imperium. It can be missionary; fight in far-flung deserts and swamps; sell to the world; try to teach the world as Athens taught Greece. But it does not really become enthusiastic about speaking the local dialect, mastering other people’s customs, or coping with diarrhoea, as the British did in their day. America would have needed scores of universities educating imperial administrators to change this, and plane-loads of American Lord Milners would have been thoroughly bad for the world. Far better the America we have had than the America that some think might have served us better, more worldly-wise and know-all. American naivety is a quality from which we have often benefited.

  Perhaps America has always been a little uncomfortable with the world because it has its work cut out feeling comfortable with all the different parts of itself. As Edward and I discovered in the summer of 1965 in our Hertz-rented Dodge Dart, it is so damned big. We drove quite a bit of it on those wonderful roads built under President Eisenhower’s National Defense Highway Act, a huge Republican public works programme. We flew over large tracts of the continent in between our stopping-off points – high over the Little Big Horn from Chicago to Billings, Montana – at which point we realized how far away Boston, New York, and Washington were. There is an old Chinese saying: ‘The sky is big and the emperor is far away.’ The same is true of America. No wonder so many American politicians like the Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill opined that all politics is local. It surely was in Billings or Salt Lake City, our next stop. Only the other day, a very clever young American D.Phil. student at Oxford, now a member of the State Department, confessed to me that he had never been to Washington.

  The foreignness of America is manifested in its food and in its sport. I recall my first encounter with a prawn cocktail and a T-bone steak at an eatery in Ohio. The prawns, large and tasteless, were deluged in pink gunge and served in frosted glass the size of a flower vase. The steak would have fed a small village in the developing world. At the other extreme you find the celebration of all natural ingredients, accompanied, or rather drizzled, by pretentious descriptions. The famous Alice Walters restaurant in Berkeley, Chez Panisse, announces the distinction between a Tom Thumb and an Iceberg lettuce as though it really mattered. Human shapes more than anywhere else I have been reflect class. The poor are often large on fast food, the rich trim on all those green salads, vitamin tablets and gym subscriptions. American protein consumption caused a diplomatic row when the second President Bush noted (correctly) that the cost of meat was increasing around the world partly because economic development in Asia meant that more Indians and Chinese were eating it. Indian politicians were apoplectic, noting that the consumption by their fellow citizens was chop size compared to the haunches eaten by Americans. American waiters, terribly over-tipped in posh restaurants, are more patronizing and unctuous even than in Paris. After I ordered skate in a New York restaurant the waiter opined, ‘What a very European choice.’ I did not make myself any more popular by asking to his confusion what this meant.

  America’s most iconic sports – baseball and American football – are hardly played elsewhere, though basketball is played in countries which can find enough giants to excel at the sport. Some soccer has been infiltrated into the American psyche, giving its name to a particular sort of middle-class mother and being played exceptionally well by American women themselves. I was first taken to a baseball game by a professional American diplomat, Ray Seitz, one of the smartest public servants I have known, who eventually became the US ambassador in London. It is one of those deceptive games where clearly a great deal more is happening than the amateur eye can detect. It is also a game, like cricket, which provides boundless fascination for those interested in the statistics of sporting warfare. I was once treated to a lecture on baseball by the great Socratic Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel which jumped enthusiastically from one decimal point to another. None of it made as great an impression on me as Sandel’s assertion that the common, socially binding experience of attending a game (queuing for the lavatory, eating cheese-burgers, getting drenched in the rain) had been lost with the introduction of special seating and boxes for sponsors and the rich.

  I have not enjoyed my experience of watching American football as much as baseball. It is a game in which long, static periods are interrupted by sudden flurries of athleticism; as it were, board meetings punctuated by well-organized violence. This game of football is extremely popular at universities and is indeed one of the ways in which alumni are bound into their alma maters. Going to speak at the University of Oklahoma, where a Balliol contemporary and former Governor and senator, David Boren, was president, I was shown the university football stadium, which had a crowd capacity of almost 90,000. The funding of football at American universities is huge, and not without controversy. There is a great deal of criticism of the treatment of large kids from poor, often black backgrounds, who often contract serious injuries while playing football and end up with a free but not very useful or extensive education. But my favourite American football university, Notre Dame in Indiana, is not like that. Football is important there: the team – known as ‘the fighting Irish’ – has a great reputation, and a mural of the resurrection of Jesus, arms upraised, which overlooks the stadium, is known as ‘Touchdown Jesus’. But you do not get the impression that everything else at the university takes second place to football. Notre Dame successfully asserts its academic personality as both a centre of scholarship and as a genuinely Christian (indeed Catholic) foundation with more than a generation of commitment to the improvement of civil rights in the United States.

  Even the greatest empires fall, often, as Herodotus argued (when writing about the Lydians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Persians), because they grow soft. Countries with tried and tested constitutional arrangements can be undermined from within, by personal ambition for instance. Cicero died in part for making this argument in Rome. They can also be weakened by a failure to understand their complex, beautifully constructed political symmetry, a point understood by Bagehot in the middle of the nineteenth century as Britain floundered to adapt its own unwritten constitution to changing needs: ‘all our pomp of yesterday … is … one with Nineveh and Tyre’, as Kipling put it so elegiacally. American experience itself shows how successful political establishments and economic settlements can be weakened by ideology, by simple, sharp-edged ideas that appear to explain everything. One of President Reagan’s favourite jokes, going back to the days when he was paid as a motivational speaker by General Electric, and polished when he supported Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, captured the dogma perfectly. ‘The scariest words in America,’ he used to say to loud laughter and applause, are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.’ This crowd-pleasing right-wingery, so reactionary as to be beyond conservatism, was pulled into an extremely influential and beautifully delivered speech entitled ‘A Time for Choosing’. It was delivered just before Goldwater went down in flames in his contest against Lyndon Johnson. A principal reason for Goldwater’s defeat was his apparent advocacy of the use of nuclear weapons to end the Vietnam War. Reagan’s scintillating speech dealt with war and peace in rich, 1930s anti-appeasement language. Moses and Jesus Christ were called on to support the Goldwater military doctrine. The main part of the speech went on to assemble all the artillery of anti-state rhetoric that was to become the Bible for the right wing of the Republican Party for the next fifty years. It was one of the most influential speeches ever given by an American politician. It helped to catapult the originally New Deal Democrat into the governorship of California as a Republican and not long after into the presidency, defeating Jimmy Carter, one of Amer
ica’s greatest ex-presidents.

  For a political hack like me, the Reagan speech later became a masterclass in drafting simple and effective rhetoric and delivering it, like the great performer Reagan was. I thoroughly disagreed with it, but it was beautifully crafted. Reagan was pitch perfect, infusing traditional, very conservative themes with the Messianic libertarian, market economics of the Russian-American writer Ayn Rand. The speech contrasted not right and left, but up and down: up – freedom; down – totalitarianism. There seemed to be no mezzanine floor. According to Reagan, America was confronted by an assault on liberty. Government was set on trying to solve misery, as if such a thing was humanly possible. Many of those whom it was claimed were going to bed in America hungry every night were feeling peckish because they were on diets. Departments in Washington were the nearest things on earth to examples of eternal life. At home the US faced the advance of socialism; abroad, subservient as it was to the United Nations General Assembly, it could face a millennium of darkness unless it pulled its socks up. Reagan’s speech is not for the squeamish.

  What is interesting is how different that sort of brilliant reactionary tosh was from the way Reagan behaved in office. Johnson had probably pushed domestic spending programmes too far and was certainly wrong to try to fight the Vietnam War and increase social spending at the same time, without calling for any sacrifice from taxpayers. But the slash-and-burn rhetoric about the size and spending of the state was light years from Reagan’s actual deeds. His great strengths as a politician were geniality, the clever choice of colleagues like George Shultz, and his ability to radiate self-confidence and hope: hope, that sublime four-letter word. This was certainly not accompanied by a blitzkrieg on the state and the spending needed to maintain its institutions. Reagan was a big spender – one of the biggest – in the last few years, supported by Congress. The annual growth of federal spending was 8.7 per cent in Reagan’s first term, 4.9 per cent in his second. Federal spending as a proportion of national income was higher than under his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, and the federal budget deficit rose from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion. These levels of deficit spending and especially debt were not surprisingly regarded by Reagan (at least rhetorically) as the ‘greatest disappointment’ of his presidency. They helped to fuel a long period of unbalanced economic expansion but also to solidify the association of Reagan with happy days. The man from the government really did seem to have come along to help. Reagan went on whistling cheerfully as he ambled past the cemetery of his ideology. It was left to President Clinton to bring spending growth to less than 4 per cent and produce budget surprises. Obama’s spending growth figures are lower still – not surprising, perhaps, given the financial crisis which began shortly before he was elected.