new runway was added to Los Angeles airport between 1970 and 2000. Health care in the United States became yet another piece of black-humour surrealism: a great deal of money spent, but 50 million people not covered by the existing system, such that infant mortality was greater than in blockaded Cuba.
The Great Society was running into the sand, and so were the Democrats, now badly divided between Northern, liberal wing, Southern illiberal wing, and corrupted city-boss body. By this time, there was no commanding figure on the Democrat side to stand for the presidency, and ‘Jimmy’ Carter emerged, from a peanut farm; he had been Governor of Georgia. When his mother was told that he was standing for the presidency, she reacted: president of what? He scraped in with 40.8 million votes to Ford’s 39.1 million. Carter’s regime symbolized the era (1976-80). It was desperately well-meaning. It jogged; it held hands everywhere it went with its scrawny wife; it prayed, Baptist-fashion; it banned smoking where it could; it sent bossy women to preach human rights in places where bossy women were regarded as an affront to them. There was a whole lobby around these in the Carter administration, and it took over part of the State Department. Carter’s initial idea was to make the presidency popular: hence jumpers and jeans, and a dispersal of the Nixon trappings (the parade ground uniforms were sold to Bolivia). The man started his day at 6 a.m. and was generally exhausted; his wife was somewhat more ordered, and sometimes attended Cabinet meetings. There was fighting between the State Secretary, Cyrus Vance, who had had direct experience of Vietnam, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as National Security Adviser, who resented the world’s not putting him on the same level as Henry Kissinger. He was one for verbiage: ‘the need is not for acrobatics but for architecture’ were his words of wisdom to the world. Carter was a hapless fellow, everything, sunny side up, curdling: even after his lengthy retirement, as he kept pushing himself forward as a sort of sexless Clinton, the pattern prevailed, as North Korea fired missiles over Japan about two weeks after Carter had announced that she did not have any, and as Haiti collapsed into mayhem after he had announced that the great and good had come to power there. There was a similarly naive attitude to matters Soviet. Carter scrapped the B1 bomber unilaterally, and cancelled the neutron bomb (telling an enraged Schmidt only later). There was also an absurd neglect of the Soviet navy — the expansion of which went back to the Cuban Crisis in 1962, after which 1,323 ships of all classes were built, to the Americans’ 120 major surface battleships and 188 nuclear submarines. In 1975, through Cuban proxies, the Soviets moved into Angola; and Ethiopia collapsed, on the edge of the now volcanic Middle East.
This regime will be remembered only for its failures. Of these, inflation and the mismanagement of the oil problem were the worst, and together they badly weakened the country. The only success of the time was the Egyptian-Israeli agreement (Camp David in September 1978, followed by the treaty in March 1979, but its Egyptian maker, Sadat, despised Carter so much that he did not even say in advance that he proposed to visit Israel). Carter’s worst failure came over energy policy. The great problem was American. There was huge demand for the oil companies to be controlled because of what were said to be ‘obscene’ profits (the word probably intended was ‘obese’ but the misuse has stuck). True, the profits had been enormous, rising from $7bn in 1972 to $16.5bn two years later, because oil which had been bought at the old price was sold at the new, and chemical operations had also flourished, given the weakness of the dollar, which encouraged exports. But the companies had been nationalized abroad, and their profits overall were, if anything, somewhat below the American average. Besides, oil policy had become a terrible tangle. Nixon had imposed price controls in 1971, to stop the then prevailing inflation of 5 per cent, and these had been kept, with extraordinarily complicated rules, for oil. The standard reporting requirements for the Federal Register required 200,000 respondents and five million man-hours; and ‘for the oil industry [it] became more important than the geologist’s report’. The direct costs ran into thousands of millions, and there were tales of extraordinary waste and maladministration. The regulation was meant to ensure fair shares, and to bring back refineries that had been kept out of service. It seems only to have profited lawyers. Administrations lurched, unwilling to accept that the price mechanism was in the end valuable. President Gerald Ford, in January 1975, talked nuclear power and coal; ecologists went to town. However, two things were at last put through. The Alaskan Pipeline, set to cost $10bn, was allowed; and in 1975 American automobiles had to have fuel efficiency standards. In 1977 Carter took over, appointing a multipurpose warhorse, James Schlesinger, as his maker of energy policy, in effect hoping for rationing because a CIA report of 1976 had predicted another oil shortage. In his plaintive moralizing way, Carter wanted oil use to be subject to even greater regulation, and proclaimed (April 1977) ‘the moral equivalent of war’, subsequently dismissed as the acronym ‘MEOW’. The point was that US oil prices were well below the world level, with absurd effects — the US at times even subsidized imports. A complicated effort was now made to revive coal, and to loosen the controls on natural gas: a very good time for lobbyists. Utility companies, oil producers, liberals, ecologists, coal producers all fought, and Schlesinger himself said that the decontrolling of natural gas had been ‘Chinese water torture’.
It was true that America was experiencing tissue regeneration under all of this. Whereas in other countries people tended to stay close to where they were born, Americans packed their bags and moved. Modern industries could shift, given air-conditioning technology, to the old South, the south-west and California, now gaining population at the expense of the north-east, and by 1964 California, with 30 million people, had become the largest state, Texas soon following. Shoots of ultramodern industry were coming up, and much ingenuity was shown as regards substitutes for oil. But the middle and later seventies were a demoralizing period.
17. ‘The British Disease’
The overall Atlantic crisis was displayed at its worst in England, where the entire civilization had — with a Dutch contribution — started. The positive sides were enormous: the rule of law, the Industrial Revolution, a habit of non-violence in politics. France, rights of man and all, had not contributed anything like so much to the world and, comparing British experience with French, Edmund Burke had said, ‘We go from light to light; we compromise, we reconcile, we balance.’ In the nineteenth century the British had had to face the problems of the modern world, the organization of what came to be called ‘mass society’. They had done so, preserving and adapting old institutions, using them for new purposes. For instance, local administration was carried out through the vestry, and the Church of England had a social role; the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, which were originally religious places, of a sort that collapsed on the Continent, made for world-class universities. The oldest and most adaptable of these institutions was of course the monarchy itself, and in 1953, when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, complete with archbishop, sacred oil, orbs and sceptres, it was an extraordinary spectacle, watched by tens of millions on the relatively new black-and-white television sets. A film-maker of genius, Lindsay Anderson, remarked, later on, that the monarchy was a gold filling in a mouthful of rotten teeth. That fitted the England that emerged, a generation after the coronation. However, the early fifties were a good time. Western Europe was not yet quite competitive, British exports did well, and there were good markets in the old imperial area. Decolonization during the 1950s had been, at least in comparison with French experience, a success, and the new Queen became a considerable expert in it. At home, taxes on income were absurdly high, but there was no tax on fortunes made out of equities, and the banks were generous with overdrafts, charging a low rate of interest. The old England (and Scotland) had an Indian summer, and the great Victorian cities, with Glasgow in the lead, were still the great Victorian cities of industry and empire. But the later fifties showed that this could not last.
Her worldwide troubles in 1947 had led to the creation of an Atlantic system; now, her domestic ones revealed its central weaknesses. The great British economist John Maynard Keynes had somehow lent his name to the Pursuit of Happiness: he could reconcile welfare with progress. Government waved its wand, the poor had money transferred to them from the rich, spenders were encouraged rather than savers, the economy grew accordingly, and unemployment was kept low. ‘Keynesianism’, though no-one could quite pin down the Master, reigned, and dissident economists were unfashionable, or even slightly ridiculous. Their chief argument against Keynesianism was that it would promote inflation: if governments overtaxed then money would go abroad, and an overhang of paper money would translate into higher prices; in the end, when workers, through trade unions, wanted higher wages to defend themselves against a rising of basic prices, then they would expect inflation in the future, and want even higher wages. That would in turn add to the paper money and to the inflation. There were a few bright sparks who suggested that there was a relationship between the amount of paper money and pyramids of credit on the one side, and rising prices on the other. This was called ‘monetarism’. Such bright sparks were not fashionable. In the sixties, the Keynesians made the running, had the answers, were constantly in the newspapers and on television, and then, in the seventies, ran into very choppy waters.
The oil crisis had its worst effects here, and the quadrupling of energy prices pushed England into a trouble
