Clinton and Tiberius - 14 July 1995

I have never forgotten a phrase used, invented I don't doubt, by a rather literary friend of mine while we were stuck fuming in a New York traffic jam, hands trembling, motor throbbing – not my motor, like the huge majority of New Yorkers, we gave up owning a car 40 years ago – anyway while, I was sighing and tapping my teeth, I asked him what did this sort of daily frustration do to him? And he said, in a fluting, beautifully articulated voice: "It fills me with baffled and unsheddable tears".

It's a good deal more expressive and also more permissible than the sort of phrase that springs to my lips. It so happened that about a week later I had the honour of dining with the mayor of New York, the irascible, irrepressible, incomparable, intolerable Ed Koch, whose retirement, forcibly, from the New York scene – he was beaten two elections ago – has left us deprived and whining, whereas in his day we could always whine in public and he'd come right back at us in salty talk, sometimes as memorable as the sallies and retorts of late and never to be forgotten, Mayor LaGuardia. Ah, Fiorello LaGuardia, the belligerent little midget who grew so enraged by the dirt and corruption of the city that he renounced both political parties, called himself a Fusion candidate and did a breathtaking job of cleansing the administration of New York, routing the gangsters – who had most humdrum services like laundry, meat, vegetable deliveries under the grip of protection rackets – and recruited no less a giant than Moses, Robert that is, to rebuild and convert the whole West Side bank of the river into a leafy highway enclosing playgrounds, to design the first parkways – which are divided highways, banned to commercial traffic – and created on the south shore of Long Island, a public beach, which to this day, is the most splendid example I know of architecting sea and shore in the interest of the frisking summer masses.

Well, if I got carried away by LaGuardia and Robert Moses, it's simply in a fit of nostalgia. For nobody has improved on or even expanded the best of their work and it was being done in the pit of the Depression. However, that awful traffic jam, which I couldn't wait to take up with his honour. Why didn't he follow the Italian example about commercial traffic – and especially the enormous trucks that cluttered up every highway and had long ago invaded and infested Park and Fifth Avenues, where still, every two blocks, rise the quaint printed signs: no commercial traffic. "What had the Italians done?" he asked. Banned all commercial deliveries between dawn and sunset, in other words, only night deliveries of everything except emergency cases to hospitals. He tilted his head and he put on a typical face, that of a sceptical clown. He asked me when did the Italians enforce this. "Well," I said. "The Romans to be exact. They passed the law, I think it was about 30 AD." "Great idea," he said without missing a beat. "Once you've made a deal with the teamsters or the truckers and drivers to receive double pay, golden time for long distance night driving and then of course you'll have budgeted extra accident insurance for everybody, set up a team of lawyers to take care of the mental cruelty suits brought by wives, not to mention divorce proceedings. Also better check with the city controller, the deals to be made, for night pay for warehouse employees, department store freight handlers, night patrols, clerks, floor supervisors, the unions will want to do this thing right. They'll all love it. Great idea, though".

This device of seeking wisdom and solace from the ancients was one I found myself exercising this week in the contemplation of, or desperate impetus about Bosnia and the real prospect – admitted for the first time as the likeliest next move – of withdrawing the whole United Nations effort. All I could find was a well-worn maxim of the most cynical Roman emperors. What I came up with – I believe it was Tiberius who first said it – in the worst time, when the nation is depressed by foreign wars, double the bread ration and start up the circus. Anyway, both Mr Clinton and Mr Major did their small part in following this advice. Mr Clinton, I ought to say, was forced to act not on his own initiative, it was the initiative of Dr Kessler, the crusading commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Dr Kessler has spent much of the last year appearing before congressional committees, to say he's not satisfied with what the government has done, is doing, about putting down, shall we say discouraging, smoking. Dr Kessler and his people have concluded that nicotine is an addictive drug and ought to be regulated. Why not totally and legally forbid the manufacture and sale of a socially dangerous drug, as they did with alcohol. That congressional effort performed right after the end of the First World War was known far and wide as the noble experiment. It produced more alcohol, bad rotgut alcohol, than the nation had ever seen. It seeded a huge, flourishing bootleg industry, run by a ferocious generation of gangsters. It had more teenagers drinking because it was thought cool, than at any time in American history and all in all was the most disastrous and corrupting social experiment in the history of the republic.

Now, Dr Kessler wasn't with us in the 1920s but surely someone has told him about it. Nevertheless he is soldiering on and putting it up to Mr Clinton, to curb tobacco advertising and somehow discourage smoking among the young. So, in the heat of the Bosnian inferno, the inferno of our hopes and initiative, Mr Clinton is now considering banning cigarette vending machines and encouraging laws to punish the people who sell cigarettes to minors and to extend widely, of course, the ban on tobacco advertising which now applies only to television. Whatever Mr Clinton's own inclinations are on this serious, troublesome topic, it does occur to him from time to time, that most American tobacco is grown in the South, that at least a quarter of a million constituents make their livelihood from it and that the South is the region of the country where his own party, the Democrats, who once owned the region, are losing more and more support, and where actually, two or three congressmen have recently switched parties and gone Republican. So if Mr Clinton is inclined to spend too much time pondering this big, national issue, there are political considerations there which are likely to cool his moral fervour.

As for Mr Major, he's responded much more boldly and accurately to Tiberius's maxim. The Colosseum games were later financed by a lottery, Mr Major says the National Lottery will be used to promote sports from the grass roots to the Olympics, from you might say, the kindergarten to the wheelchair. It's clear that Mr Major speaks for England when he implies that he's fed up with Britain's second-rate showing in most of the top sports. This must change. As Augustus's tough wife told the gladiators, it was time they stopped being beaten by provincials and colonials. I don't know if Mr Major ever visits Wimbledon but if he did, he might share the embarrassment of one Englishman replying to the innocent question of a visiting American last week, who saw the statue of Fred Perry. "Who," said the American, not a tennis buff, "is Fred Perry?" "He was," said the Englishman "the last Englishman to win the Men's Singles Championship, 60 years ago." "Oh, so that's why he's up there." No reply. Mr Major hopes, in time, for more, many more statues.

Well you see I've been as reluctant as the politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to say what should be done about the collapse of the so-called Bosnian safe havens. There's reams of talk and commentary here and in Europe and much of it is fair lamentation or indignant recollection of nobody's doing anything three years ago, granting that we're all to blame, unless you believe that the new rash of ethnic and tribal wars should be allowed to run their course on their own. However, as an English commentator remarked this week: history provides little support for the proposition that without external meddlings, wars come speedily to a natural conclusion. If there was to be effective meddling, intervention, you might have expected it from the world's superpower, moving under the umbrella of Nato and that power, need I say, is the United States. But the grim truth is that the United States, and I mean its military establishment, is still paralysed from action by the trauma of Vietnam. Ageing and experienced men in the Pentagon can seriously say that no American troops will be committed to any war unless it can be promised that they'll be home by Thanksgiving or Christmas, whichever comes first. The one turn of events that seems to me to have been fatal to the power and reputation of the United Nations, was the day when an aggressor, Serbia, decided that the arriving UN peacekeeping force was not a police patrol but an enemy combatant and said: let's shoot them down, and or kidnap them. In a stroke the actual powerlessness of the UN was revealed. It was never, and never meant to be, a fighting force, not one capable of putting down even a tinpot Hitler. Only the big boys can do that and if Nato and the United States together or separately, cannot or won't do it, as Othello said: "Chaos is come again" filling all of us with baffled and unsheddable tears.

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