A Day Like Today: Memoirs. John Humphrys

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A Day Like Today: Memoirs - John  Humphrys


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I never did it again. The other thing I learned from that convention was how to make the most powerful man in the world look an idiot – courtesy of Charles Wheeler.

      National party conventions are awe-inspiring demonstrations of American politics at their majestic best and cringe-making worst. There is a bit of a gap in rhetorical brilliance between Williams Jennings Bryan in 1896 and Donald J. Trump 120 years later. The big issue at the 1896 convention was whether the United States should have gold coinage as well as silver. The moneyed classes said yes, the poor farmers said no. Bryan was on the side of the poor: ‘Having behind us the commercial interests and the labouring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’

      What a phrase eh? Hard to imagine anything like it coming from the lips of some more recent candidates. Perhaps the most memorable sound bite from the Trump convention was the endless baying of ‘Lock her up, lock her up!’ from the floor whenever the name of Hillary Clinton was mentioned.

      ‘For God’s sake!’ he spluttered. ‘They’ve given us the wrong copy. This is Nixon’s own personal copy. It’s the one he will be reading from!’ And so it was. Between almost every paragraph were instructions to Nixon as to how, exactly, he should deliver it:

      Serious expression here

      Look as if you really care

      Smile! This is meant to be funny

      Squeeze out a tear at this point … VERY sad face!

      Nobody believes this: show that YOU do!

      Stern look at the delegates!

      ENJOY this bit!

      I may not recall every instruction in precise detail, but this was gold dust for Charles. One of Nixon’s big PR problems was that so many Americans believed he did not have a sincere bone in his body. Not for nothing was he known across the nation as ‘Tricky Dickie’. This would be deeply embarrassing. If he had to be instructed in how to react to words that were supposed to be coming from the heart, what would America make of it? Charles was scribbling furiously, trying to get as much of it down as possible, and then the inevitable happened. The door to our little office burst open and a posse of red-faced Nixon staffers barged in.

      ‘Give it back!’ they shouted.

      ‘Not on your life!’ we shouted back.

      Then they saw it on the table and made a grab for it. Charles got there first. They tried to snatch it from his hands and he threw it across the office. Chris Drake, one of my radio colleagues, caught it and they tried to grab it from him so he threw it to me and I threw it to someone else. The farcical scene must have lasted for a few minutes and Charles (by now holding it again) tried to make peace.

      What else could they do?

      An hour later Charles was sitting in front of a BBC camera not just telling his audience what Nixon had to say at the convention, but also what his team did not want us to know. This was television gold.

      Part of the problem for any journalist covering the Watergate story – let alone a new boy like me, taking over from the great Charles Wheeler, who was being sent to Brussels – was trying to come to terms with the notion that the president of the United States, with his vast experience of politics, could have been so breathtakingly stupid as to destroy everything he had spent his life trying to achieve. And in such a crass manner. This was a man who had been written off by most of America when he was defeated by John F. Kennedy in 1960 and who had fought back in the face of an often viciously hostile press. The Washington establishment, who worshipped the ground Kennedy had walked on, regarded Nixon as a lying, scheming lowlife and they made no attempt to conceal it. They treated him with contempt.

      It was clear even to a novice like me that as the Watergate saga rolled on Nixon was in deep trouble. Once we discovered that he had been secretly recording everything that was said in the Oval Office we knew how deep. So did he. For me the most telling moment – and certainly the most surreal – came when he made a trip to, of all places, Disney World in Orlando Florida. It was November 1973 and the country was being rocked by a relentless stream of accusations – mostly unearthed by the Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward – of endless clandestine and illegal activities by members of Nixon’s administration. What nobody had actually said, explicitly, was that Nixon himself was a crook. He was, after all, the president of the United States. ‘Crook’ was not a term to be used lightly – and certainly not without copper-bottomed proof. And yet Nixon used that word himself.

      ‘People have got to know whether their president is a crook,’ he declared. A slight pause and then he went on: ‘Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I’ve got.’

      The room was silent. We journalists looked at each other open-mouthed. Had he really said that? Had he really invited the people of America to consider that he might be a crook but to take his word that he wasn’t? And then to add the bizarre line about ‘earning everything I’ve got’. It was as though someone had accused him of stealing the takings from a drug store. Instead, as we were about to learn over the coming months, what he had been trying to steal was the presidency of the United States.

      I said earlier that the greatest blessing the gods can bestow upon a journalist is luck. My luck had already played a huge part in my getting the best story in the world by the time I was still in my twenties. But my biggest break was yet to come. And it happened because of yet another piece of luck.

      I told him that not only could I not afford the rent, I couldn’t even afford the heating bills.


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