A Day Like Today: Memoirs. John Humphrys

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A Day Like Today: Memoirs - John  Humphrys


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we want to persuade her to move out for a year or so in the hope that she’ll agree to sell the wretched place. It’s just too big.’

      So we did a deal there and then. He settled happily for my meagre BBC rent allowance and I rang my wife to prepare herself for a shock. That was pretty lucky. But the really big luck came when I met my neighbours. One of them just happened to be a Republican congressman called Peter Peyser. It may be overstating it a bit to say that I owe him my career, but not by much. The fact is that he was to give me the greatest gift a politician can bestow on a journalist: a tip-off. Not just any old tip-off. This was a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted tip-off that any journalist would have offered his soul for.

      With this president at this time there could be only one reason for it. Never in the history of the United States had a president been forced to resign but that is what Richard Nixon was planning to do before the sun had set over the White House. At least, that’s what I told my editor in London as soon as I’d hung up on Peter. ‘How can you be sure he’s going to resign?’ the editor asked me.

      ‘I can’t but …’

      ‘You know how much a satellite feed costs? Ten thousand dollars – that’s how much – and you can’t be sure?’

      ‘No, but it’s worth every cent if—’

      He finished the sentence for me: ‘If you’re right, maybe. But if you’re not we’ll be ten grand out of pocket and the BBC will be an international laughing stock and your career will be toast before you’ve even hit thirty.’

      ‘And if we don’t do it and Nixon resigns tonight we’ll have thrown away a sensational scoop and it’ll be you standing outside your local supermarket begging for a crust to feed your starving children.’

      Maybe I didn’t put it quite as strongly as that – editors are powerful people – but after a few minutes of heated discussion, he agreed and pretty soon I was sitting in front of a camera informing the British people that President Nixon was on the point of resigning. Twenty-four hours later, standing on the lawn of the White House, I understood the meaning of that old cliché so often applied to journalists: the privilege of a ringside seat at history.

      Watergate and the downfall of the most powerful man in the world was – and remains – the biggest story of my career. Even as I write that sentence I question it. Bigger than the earthquake in Nicaragua which I reported in 1972? More than 10,000 people lost their lives, 20,000 were badly injured, 300,000 lost their homes. Bigger than mass famine in sub-Saharan Africa or revolutions in Latin America or wars on the Indian subcontinent? I reported on them all and neither I nor anyone else could even begin to put a figure on the number who died. Nobody died in Watergate.

      And yet none of those massive human tragedies had even a fraction of the coverage given to the story of one flawed human being who tried to subvert an election by authorising a handful of shabby characters to break into the offices of his opponent and try to dig some dirt that might gain him a few extra votes in an election which, as it turned out, he won by one of the biggest landslides in American presidential history. What a supreme irony.

      If Nixon had played by the rules he would have stayed in power for another four years instead of being thrown out in disgrace and quite possibly earned himself a place in the history books in the top rank of American presidents. Instead his name is synonymous with lying and deceit. And the name of an unremarkable office building in Washington has become the prefix for every serious scandal in the Western world ever since. It is the yardstick by which stories of political skulduggery are measured.

      But by then my family was getting restive. Or, at least, my wife was. My children were, to all intents and purposes, native Americans. They spoke with an American accent, knew every word of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and thought it perfectly normal that our delightful, friendly neighbours kept his ’n’ hers pistols in their bedside tables. All they knew about the United Kingdom was that every time they went there for a holiday it rained. But I had promised their mother that we would return home before they went to secondary school and she was keeping me to that promise. A date was set. And then the big story (for the BBC at any rate) switched from the United States to another country on another continent. Two countries in fact: Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then known) and its powerful neighbour, South Africa.

      ‘Hi John … looking forward to leaving Washington?’

      ‘You bet! My wife is counting the days … packing the suitcases already.’

      There was a slight pause and then …

      ‘Umm … that’s good. Just one slight snag …’

      ‘Stop right there Alan! I’ve told her we’re leaving the States and that’s that.’

      ‘Of course … of course … no question about leaving the States … it’s just that I’d like you to make a bit of a diversion en route to London.’

      The diversion was 8,000 miles.

       A sub-machine gun on expenses

      There were two huge and simultaneous stories on the African continent closely connected to Britain. One was the growing threat to the apartheid regime in South Africa and the fear that the country would collapse into lawlessness. The other was the bush war in Rhodesia, which would end with the sun finally setting on Britain’s last colonial outpost on the African continent. I had first been to South Africa in the 1960s


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