A Day Like Today

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.

What made the Nixon convention of 1972 memorable for me was not so much the big speech itself as how it reached us. The party managers always make sure that the candidate’s speech is distributed to the media an hour or so before the candidate himself delivers it. It is eagerly awaited. We were in the BBC office – perhaps a dozen of us including Charles Wheeler – when our copy was handed to us by a couple of Nixon’s staff. Charles started to read it. He stopped, looked puzzled, and began again. And then he started laughing.

‘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.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I am going to report this and there’s absolutely no way you are going to stop me. If you bring in security guards you’ll get it back in the end but there’s going to be an almighty stink. Freedom of the press remember? So leave it with me for another few minutes and I’ll give it back to you.’

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.

But he won the presidency in 1968 and again four years later. I followed him and the Democratic contender George McGovern around the country in 1972 from one rally to another and the result was never in doubt. McGovern himself knew he had no chance. It was one of the biggest landslides in American history. I remember one rally in a Midwestern state that removed any doubts I might have had. We filmed McGovern getting off his plane and walking through the obligatory, but pretty sparse, crowd of supporters. Most were cheering but one of them was clearly not a McGovern fan. He hurled some abuse at the candidate as he walked past. McGovern stopped, went back to him, and said something that left the man silent and looking stunned. Later I asked him what McGovern had said. ‘He told me: “Suck my cock buddy!”’ I swear he looked impressed. But a candidate who can do that knows he’s not going to be president.

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.

When I first went to the States for three months to set up the New York bureau I left my family at home in Britain and lived in a small apartment in midtown Manhattan. But then, when I got the correspondent’s job, I had to find a house big enough for my wife and two young children to join me – preferably outside the city but not too far. It wasn’t proving easy. And then I fell into conversation with a wealthy businessman who told me that his mother had a house in the small, delightful town of Irvington just a few miles north of the city. Would I care to rent it? It sounds perfect, I told him. But then he described it. It was a mansion. The servants’ quarters were bigger than our house in England. It was fully furnished down to the Steinway grand piano in the library and the Tiffany silver in the butler’s pantry. The lawns ran down to the Hudson River.

I told him that not only could I not afford the rent, I couldn’t even afford the heating bills. He looked shocked. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘we’re not interested in making any money from it. Mother is living there alone with just the servants and 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.

What Peter did was phone me on the morning of 9 August 1974 as the Watergate crisis seemed to be approaching some sort of climax to tell me he’d just come from a prayer breakfast at the White House. Would I perhaps be interested in what President Nixon had told him? I rather think I might be, I said. Well, he said, the president had told him he would be going on television this very evening to make an announcement.

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.

A White House press pass entitles the holder to strictly limited access to the briefing room, and if you are ever foolish enough to try to stray off-limits without an official invitation the secret-service agents make sure you don’t get far. But on that historic morning, as we waited for Nixon to make his last appearance as president of the United States and board the helicopter waiting to fly him to political exile, the rules broke down. I remember wandering into the Blue Room and spotting one of Nixon’s two daughters sitting in a corner by herself looking out at the gardens of the great house. Five extraordinary years with all those memories: the triumphs and the humiliations and finally the most spectacular fall from grace any president had ever suffered. The journalist in me wanted to try to coax her into doing an interview – but the soppy father in me won. She clearly wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

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.

I stayed on in the United States to see Gerald Ford become president and then lose the White House to a relatively unknown peanut farmer from the Deep South: Jimmy Carter. Washington winters can be pretty miserable and Gerald Ford was about as boring as an American president can be. The most interesting thing about him was the claim that he was so dumb he couldn’t chew gum and walk at the same time. True or not I was keen to get out of Washington and, ideally, spend a few days in the sun. It so happened that Carter had just begun campaigning in Florida. I persuaded my boss in London that he was an intriguing character and just about a dead cert to win the Democratic nomination. He fell for it. I got my few days in the sun to do the interview as well as the chance to boast about spotting Carter’s potential before most of my British colleagues. Thus are reputations cemented.

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.

BBC Television News had a problem reporting from South Africa. We were not allowed to open a news bureau there. The apartheid regime tolerated radio, but drew the line at letting in a television correspondent. Then, in 1976, they changed their mind. Nobody knew why. Maybe they calculated that if only the rest of the world could see what problems the country was facing they would change their hostile attitude to apartheid and remove the iniquitous sanctions. Whatever their reasoning the BBC leaped at the offer and I got a call from my boss Alan Protheroe.

‘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.

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