Meanwhile, the oil money was floating around, waiting to land wherever it could find even a tiny percentage of profit, and it moved into Latin America and central Europe, especially Poland, the rulers of which were projecting themselves as a new Japan. When Citibank left Okęcie airport at Warsaw, after signing the deal, the plane was delayed on departure because a drunken baggage-handler crashed his vehicle into it. That debt built up, and up, and even Professor Congdon worried enough about it, in 1986, to write an alarmist book. It was not necessary: the debt was simply not paid, or, rather, the American taxpayer paid it. The West, in the summer of 1979, was in poor condition, and Europe was not producing the answers. Creativity would have to come from the Atlantic again, and it did. Margaret Thatcher emerged in May, and Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980.
21. Atlantic Recovery: ‘Reagan and Thatcher’
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher each brought to bear some of the core beliefs of their civilization, which included (among others) Hollywood and a belief in facts. Ronald Reagan had been an actor, a Rooseveltian Democrat, and he had escaped from a past in a way that commanded respect — his father a drunken failure, his mother a shrew. He had pushed his way forward, via a degree in simple-minded verities at an obscure college, through sports-commentating, to Hollywood. There, he had been repelled at the tactics of the Left, in the actors’ milieu. Actors’ politics are generally repellent: in the Middle Ages they were refused a proper burial, and in the French Revolution they had been well to the fore in revolutionary activities. The Revolution did not have a sense of humour, but they had been given the job of enforcing the price-maximum in grain. Peasants, to avoid selling the grain, had fed it to their animals, which at least they could consume, and a trick was to detect the grain husks in the animals’ excrement, a task for which actors were especially selected by the reigning revolutionaries.
In the later forties in Hollywood, the McCarthy scare fell darkly upon the land, and there were victims, none of whom lost his life, though some, in employment, were for a time under an eclipse. It was certainly true that, as Vladimir Bukovsky says, if you looked at the twentieth century through Hollywood, you would have no idea what it was about. Its wallet, as was said about the Third Republic, was on the Right, but its heart was on the Left, and it felt guilty if in, say, The Killing Fields or Dr Zhivago Communists were mentioned in a bad light, or even at all. In that period Reagan seems to have guessed that these actors were being manipulated, and he became spokesman for the Republican cause: he was even divorced for ‘extreme mental cruelty’, his then wife tending to go along with the martyr-histrions. He had many gifts, especially as a talker. Provincial American politicians tended to be lecturing and charmless. Jeane Kirkpatrick, for instance, talked as if she had a carriage-shift bell in her larynx and qualified for the French phrase, ‘She listens to herself talking.’ Reagan was not like that: he told funny stories, and even, against his opponents, acted them out. There was a revealing scene when Berkeley students protested against his proposals to make them pay money for their education: past screeching demonstrators, Reagan adopted a creeping pose, and said, ‘Shsh,’ That disarmed even the screeching protestors, and worked very well on television, which, of course, Reagan had had in mind. As Governor of California, he had known how to goad his enemies into making allies for him. When the time came, in the crisis-ridden atmosphere of Carter’s America, he quite easily defeated any north-eastern and moderate Republican candidate, and was adopted. In his way, Reagan was a Nixon with charm, for he did not lock himself away, like Nixon, and there was an element of steel as well, in the sense that he knew that the United States represented something. He had charisma, such that people around him delivered, without quite knowing why. He was also quite indolent, and would semi-doze through Cabinet meetings, eating endless jujubes, a habit he had taken up in order to stop the cigarettes that everyone had smoked in earlier decades. Not for him the Carter regimen of rising at six and ploughing through endless paper, before jogging scrawnily in shorts, holding his wife’s claw-like hand, around the grounds. Nancy Reagan was no doubt a facelift too far, but she had seen him through crises, and knew how to deal with the Californian tuxedos whose activities had not made good publicity for Nixon. The White House machine, by now very large, worked messily, and there was a constant changeover. There were complaints. Apparently more efficient machines, both his predecessor’s and his successor’s, consisted of clockwork but worked to little effect. Ronald Reagan managed to get the big things right, sometimes despite crushing bombardments from people who ostensibly knew them much better than he did. In 1987, for instance, the most respected financial expert on Wall Street, Felix Rohatyn, wrote a vast article in the New York Review of Books to explain that the debt and the deficit would wreck the country. Reagan sailed on regardless, and was proved to be quite right. East-coast America was nonplussed, and was vengeful enough to have Reagan missed off the guest list for the Harvard Tercentennial celebration in 1993, whereas a parade of mediocrities such as Ford and Carter was welcomed. In fact, Carter was so full of sour grapes that he did not even give Reagan more than an hour or so of preparatory talk when the changeover occurred, and was appalled that Reagan did not take notes. Reagan had his revenge. Carter had asked him to send a telegram to the South Korean president, asking for an opposition leader’s life to be spared. Reagan sent it, but added that he so wished that he, too, could deal with university mayhem by conscripting students. Americans were good at everything, except losing. They were about to win an enormous victory, and the most interesting question about 1981 is why it did not foresee 1989.
The same question occurs about Great Britain. Margaret Thatcher in 1979 had a very difficult hand to play, and though she was a very different figure from Reagan, she ran into similar opposition: famously, almost all of the grand names in British economics denounced her to The Times in 1981, just as England was becoming, once again, an interesting country. But it was not just the economists. No Prime Minister can have met such sheer hatred since David Lloyd George, whom the Right had loathed because he had fought, in his way, for the class-eroding England that had ended up under trade union rule in the 1970s. Writers, actors, philosophers: off they rode, and a meeting of the PEN club in Lisbon, where various well-known writers of the world were expecting to protest about the fate, generally under Communism, of their peers, had to listen, in utter bewilderment, as the English contingent went on, and on, and on about Margaret Thatcher, whom most continental Europeans vaguely respected, as a woman fighting her corner in a man’s world. A high point of such criticism occurred when Dame Mary Warnock, a porphyrogenita of the long-bottomed-knicker progressive Edwardian world, mother of five, philosopher called to any committee requiring pronouncements as to public morality, headmistress of a famous school but also wife of the Oxford Vice-Chancellor, was interviewed about Mrs Thatcher. She did not have much to contribute as to privatization or the money supply, and the high point came with a strangled ‘that voice… those hats.’ In such circles Mrs Thatcher was regarded as utterly without culture, but there again was a mistake. She had grown up in a provincial world where application to schoolwork was very important, where you read the national classics. There was a revealing occasion in 1989 when François Mitterrand staged the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He had made quite an effort, and had a shiny Paris on show. Mrs Thatcher arrived by the new Channel Tunnel and gave an interview to Le Monde as to what she thought of 1789; and her remarks were in favour of the English way of doing things, what with individual rights rather than Rights of Man. Her reward was to be placed in an obscure place in the official photographs. She had her revenge. The official party was taken to a performance of a revolution opera, André Chenier. It was a hot night, and the opera lasted for four hours. The party was then taken to the new Impressionist museum, a brilliantly converted railway station at the Quai d’Orsay. Protocol had forgotten an essentiaclass="underline" that after four hours’ exposure to second-rate opera, the guests might need to visit the lavatory. Upon arrival at the museum, they found only one, down a flight of steps, which Margaret Thatcher naturally had the right to use first. She took her time, emerging from the steps to find a small platoon of African heads of state, in their tribal finery, squirming. She was then taken, alone, round the museum by its director, Françoise Cachin (granddaughter, as it happens, of a Comintern stalwart), who later said that, of all the politicians she had taken round, Margaret Thatcher was the one who showed the greatest interest and asked the best questions.