The Washington View

C.R. Charlton

Honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen: It would seem to me that, for a journalist, making a transition from the printed word to the spoken, from newspaper to television, must be a difficult thing to do. The distinguished journalist on my right seems to have made it with apparent ease and great success. But then, he has had to make many transitions in his life following a turbulent profession in a turbulent world.

Born in Vienna in 1928, Joe Schlesinger lived in Czechoslovakia until, when he was just eleven years old, World War II erupted all around him. The war years were spent in Britain with his family. On what some cynic has termed "the outbreak of peace" in 1945, he returned to Czechoslovakia.

He began his journalistic career in the Prague bureau of the Associated Press. When Russia invaded his native country, he again was forced to flee - this time to Canada, where he arrived in 1950. He worked at various jobs in Vancouver; attended the University of British Columbia; became a reporter for the Vancouver Province, and later for the Toronto Star. Then came another transition - back to England to accept a post in the London bureau of the United Press. In two years came yet another transition - a move to Paris to join the European staff of the New York Herald Tribune, where he was soon promoted to Assistant Managing Editor. In 1966 he returned to Canada and took root in the news department of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Although "taking root" is perhaps not an apt phrase; it implies a sedentary life, which was not for Joe Schlesinger. After serving as the Executive Producer of "The National", and later as head of the CBC Television News Department, he moved to Hong Kong to become CBC's Far Eastern correspondent. In 1979 the CBC appointed him Television News correspondent in Washington, D.C.

During his long and varied journalistic career, Joe Schlesinger has covered wars, revolutions, Papal elections, earthquakes and their cousins - national elections! He has travelled with both Reagan and Mondale in last year's U.S. election campaign and with Pierre Trudeau through China, with Gerald Ford through Europe, and Richard Nixon to Moscow. He was with Jimmy Carter on his visit to the Middle East. He covered the fall of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and the imprisonment of the American hostages.

The more I reflect on it, the more I wish I had not used that phrase - taking root with the CBC! Maybe now he has taken root in Washington. He has a home there, where he lives with his wife and two college-age daughters.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Washington Correspondent for the CBC Television, and one of Canada's most noted journalists, Mr. Joe Schlesinger.

Joe Schlesinger

When I first came to the television business from newspapers, I was slightly younger and to make me look authoritative they insisted I put on a pair of glasses. I did not need them, but instead of giving me airline tickets and sending me to places, they thought I could talk authoritatively about things if I just had thick horn-rimmed glasses. I did not need them then, but now I do. And they will not let me put them on again, because they say it reflects the lights, and this and that.

However, I am here in Toronto with the rest of my colleagues of CBC staff of foreign correspondents. Between the English and French networks, there is a whole army of us - ten of us, four French and six English. You were talking about the beats I had before; right now I have everything from Niagara Falls down to the South Pole. When I was in Hong Kong I covered everything from the north of Japan to the Khyber Pass between Pakistan and Afghanistan. You missed out that I was in Paris for six years for CBC and I covered everything from Calais to the Khyber Pass again. We came back to Canada this time and, as some of you may have seen or heard, we have been covering the American election campaigns and we covered the famine in Ethiopia. Jean-F rangois Lepine did an absolutely amazing, brave and journalistically superb trip into Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge, walking miles into the country with electronic gear with battery packs and tripods and supplies of cassettes. If you have ever carried the stuff for a hundred yards you know what it means to walk into the jungle with it for eighty kilometres.

We come back and, of course, we are told all sorts of things: Do we have $75 million to spare? The buzzword this year in CBC Toronto seems to be something called "downsizing", whatever that is. I do not know how we will do it but evidently the South Pole to Niagara Falls is not an area big enough any longer. The one thing I have got to say is that I love my job. I love working for the CBC. I have stated my bias. Also, as a reporter who has observed the world, I can tell you that one of the things that Canada does better than most other countries is broadcasting-the CBC and other organizations. And I am sure, despite downsizing and all the other tribulations, that the CBC will continue doing it, and that not only 1, but also you, will be able to be proud of it. So much for the commercial message.

... sometimes, listening to the speeches in the House ofRepresentatives makes the debate question period time on Parliament Hill in Ottawa sound almost like a renaissance ofAthenian oratory ...

Sometimes we Canadians look at the Americans, and we look at them as super-achievers. But you have to go down there and live there - and I have lived at the power-centre, at least the political power-centre, if not the financial power-centre - to realize that the superpowers are not really made up of super-men. You realize, when you follow some of the decisions that are made in Washington - some of the world-shaking decisions - that the process by which they are arrived at are at approximately the same level of sophistication as the squabbling I used to encounter a quarter of a century ago when I covered politics at Toronto City Hall and the TTC. I do not know whether any of you have ever listened to a debate in the U.S. House of Representatives, when they read their stuff - they hardly ever make off-the-cuff speeches - and not only that, they can go into the Congressional Record and correct what they have said afterwards, which you cannot do with Hansard. And sometimes, listening to the speeches in the House of Representatives, makes the debate question period time on Parliament Hill in Ottawa sound almost like a renaissance of Athenian oratory.

I have spent much of the past five years recording and explaining some of the differences between us and the Americans. So I do not want to dwell too much on them now. Being in the business I am in, with its emphasis on problems and frictions, many of those differences I dealt with inevitably put the United States and Americans in an unfavourable light. But my over-riding impression of these past five years is of a wonderful country, a vibrantly energetic people and a system of government that is a subtle instrument for democratic change.

Change is really what I would like to talk about today - the changes that I have seen in the United States in the five short years I have been there. Nothing symbolizes these changes better than the recent reelection by a landslide of Ronald Reagan. Many of the changes started long before Ronald Reagan - or for that matter I - came to Washington. But Reagan has articulated some of the changing priorities of Americans and has reaped the benefits.

Much of what I want to talk about is more feeling than fact. For starters, I think Reagan's victory owes as much to the 1981-82 recession as the 1983-84 recovery. Most Americans did not really blame Reagan for the recession. Even many of those who were laid off did not lay the fault at his door. I remember being in a steelworkers' union hall in Baltimore during the 1982 congressional election campaign talking to laid-off steel- workers who were picking up free turkeys for Thanksgiving. Very few of them blamed Reagan for their predicament. They felt things had been going wrong with the American economy and the American society in general long before Reagan arrived at the White House and that it would take a long time and quite a bit of sacrifice to fix it.

I encountered the same sentiment among farmers in Iowa who were in trouble because of a combination of drought, high interest rates and Reagan's farm policies. Here were people who were suffering but were not blaming their government for what was happening to them. I am not trying to say that everybody who was unemployed or in other economic trouble was that philosophical about it. Still, it was remarkable and certainly in stark contrast to Canada where so many people blamed everything from unemployment to their sciatica on Pierre Trudeau. The biggest difference, obviously, was that Trudeau had been around too long to be able to say like Reagan that he just had not had the time to fix things.

But there is more to it than that. The great difference between Canadians and Americans in the sixties and seventies was that Canadians felt better about where they were heading then than did Americans. In the late sixties we had Expo and Trudeaumania; they had Vietnam, assassinations of leaders and race riots. In the seventies, they had Watergate, more Vietnam and the energy crisis.

Sure, we had an energy crisis, too, but a much different one. For us, in its early stages anyway, the energy crisis brought up visions of endless opportunity. We had the raw materials the world was panting for, or so we told ourselves. If we were not all Albertans, we were at least cousins of the blue-eyed sheiks and they could not very well let us freeze, could they? Some of us would be more O.K. than others, but we would be O.K.

Meanwhile, the Americans were suffering through long lines at the gas pumps and two presidents in a row - Ford and Carter - who were perceived as not being able to chew gum and walk at the same time. And to top it all off, there was Iran and the hostage crisis. When Jimmy Carter talked about a malaise among Americans, he was right. But he was the greatest part of that malaise as far as most Americans were, and are still, concerned.

... Reagan's main thesis was that government was not the solution; it was the problem ...

So when Reagan came along and told Americans they had been heading in the wrong direction, they agreed with him and gave him a try. Now, remember Reagan was not just saying that the Democrats were responsible for the wrong direction. By inference, if not by name, he was also blaming his Republican predecessors who may have tinkered with the role of government Roosevelt's New Deal had left behind but kept on expanding it. Reagan's main thesis was that government was not the solution; it was the problem. What the country needed was a smaller, leaner, meaner, tougher government. When the recession hit, many Americans saw it as part of the shakeout of the system to cure the country's ills. And Reagan handled it the old-fashioned way: mostly he did nothing. He let the pain and the fever of deep recession do the curing. There was no rush to job-creation programs. On the contrary, when the Reagan administration levied a fivecent tax on gasoline for a road-building program, Reagan hastened to deny quite vehemently that this was meant as a job-creation program. Job-creation programs, you see, were ideologically bad as far as he was concerned because they usually ended up in fruitless dig-a-hole-then-fill-a-hole schemes and only provided temporary jobs that did not lead to anything. His roadbuilding program was started because the country needed better roads, not because it provided needed work for the jobless. At the same time as there were more of the poor, he trimmed programs for the needy. If there was no great outcry against all the pain, it was surely not because Reagan was so tough that he managed to impose these harsh conditions against the will of the country. Reagan, though he can be stubborn, is not the kind who will batter his head against a stone wall. It was more a case of the country being ready for tough medicine. As we all know, in a democracy a government can only be successful by taking a country in a direction in which it is ready to go. But, if it is lucky and smart, as the Reagan administration has been, it will only nudge the country in the direction in which it is already heading.

... in a democracy a government can only be successful by taking a country in a direction in which it is ready to go ...

Let me give you a few examples: Reagan has been preaching the same rightist message for years. Yet since he has got to the White House he has been careful which of his causes to act on and which to keep in his back pocket to be taken out and shown only to his most faithful ideological followers. While he has cut welfare programs for the poor, he has been careful not to cut the welfare programs of the middle classes because security for the middle classes is where it is all at in politics. He has been strong in acting abroad because Americans want their president to be strong. But he has been careful not to commit American troops to combat because, since Vietnam, Americans have shown a great sensitivity to having American boys fighting and dying overseas.

I know I have had a great deal of difficulty explaining a man like Cap Weinberger, the U.S. Secretary of Defence, who is portrayed as a "hawk" but who, on the other hand, is always the voice that speaks against deploying U.S. troops in a place, whether it is in Beirut or elsewhere. He does not want the U.S. troops somewhere where they will be fighting and dying without popular support in Congress and in the public. The one instance where he has put troops into a combat situation - the Marines in Lebanon - he pulled them out quickly even while saying that he was not "cutting and running", which he had promised he would never do, but only "re-deploying" the Marines.

Reagan has been pushing for prayer in schools for which there is a considerable constituency in the country. But, though he has continued to oppose abortion, he has soft-pedalled his stand on it because a ban on abortion would be highly unpopular. On the one abortion front that he has acted on - cutting funds for statepaid abortions - it was as much a measure against government handouts as against abortion. But if Reagan has trimmed acting on his beliefs to suit the country's mood, the country has also become more receptive to his general philosophy. Let us take the South as an example. The southern states, once the backbone of the New Deal coalition, have become a Reagan stronghold. In fact, of course, the South had been changing long before Reagan came along. In the last five presidential elections the South has voted Republican all but once and that exception was 1976, when a southerner, Jimmy Carter, was running. The South was always a conservative place. But Roosevelt managed to harness the segregationist southerners to his Democratic coalition - despite the fact that it contained blacks, Jews, Catholics and unions and just about everything else southern conservatives hated-because the New Deal's big government programs meant economic progress for the South. There was government subsidized electricity from the Tennessee Valley Authority. There were subsidies for cotton, peanuts and tobacco. There were military bases and defence industries all over the South.

But now the South has grown up. Industry has been attracted to the sunbelt, not just by the weather but also by cheap non-unionized labour. All of a sudden, the South does not need all that government money as much as it used to. It is more concerned about paying too much in taxes and the Democrats paving the way for blacks to take their places first in buses, then in desegregated schools and better jobs. And now, the blacks were demanding more and more political power. So the South has turned back to its original conservative roots with a vengeance. In this election, the Democratic party in the South has been turned largely into a party of blacks. Close to eighty per cent of southern white males voted for Reagan. And it is likely to get worse for the Democrats. With blacks supplying so much of the Democratic vote, they will naturally demand more say in the party, and the more they get, the more it will drive white voters away.

And that is not just in the South. Every time Jesse Jackson was seen on television crying emotionally, "our time has come, our time has come", it sent shockwaves through White America. In the election nationally, a quarter of Walter Mondale's support came from blacks. By any standard that gives blacks - and more specifically Jesse Jackson - the right for a larger role in the party's affairs. And yet, such a role could in the end cripple the Democrats for years to come.

While race and racism helped Reagan, the main reason he won so big was the economy. Inflation and interest rates were down, employment was up. And if it can be debated whether he was responsible for these things, it did happen on his watch; he did predict the turnaround even while around him doomsayers were saying it was not going to happen. So he deserved the credit. But, of course, the recovery is not all that solid; there are all these budget deficits and unemployment is still as high as it was when Reagan was running around four years ago decrying it.

When Americans in this election answered Reagan's campaign question - "Are you better off than you were four years ago" - with a resounding YES, I am convinced that they were not really so much remembering how well off or not they were four years ago. Nobody, except the rich, is all that better of than four years ago; statistically the lower middle class has only kept even; the poor are worse off. What most Americans remember and react to is that they are a lot better off than they were two years ago and that they have a lot less fear now about becoming worse off than they had four years ago. The recession that the Democrats kept beating Reagan over the head with worked in Reagan's favour. It scared the pants off Americans.

Union voters, who used to be the backbone of the Democratic party in the North, saw that their unions could not avert layoffs, stave off shutdowns or avoid contract givebacks. They saw that the government could not and would not pull off an endless series of Chrysler bailouts to save all of their jobs. They saw new plants starting elsewhere with non-unionized labour and prospering to the point where their workers perhaps were not making union rates but were at least better positioned to keep their jobs and get new and better ones. So they listened to Reagan's message that they could only get more if the pie grew bigger and the pie would only grow if investors could be sure of making money and not have to fork it all over to Uncle Sam in taxes. Add to that their dissatisfaction with paying taxes to keep other people - and in many cases that again meant blacks - on welfare and you have a huge bloc of union voters who abandoned Mondale and the AFL-CIO for Reagan.

Add to that the young who saw themselves being squeezed out under the last-in, first-out rule of the job market and opted for Reagan's Opportunity Society with its promise that a free enterprise system unhampered by excessive government regulation or taxes will bring opportunity for all willing to work hard. Add also the men who got tired of what they perceived as being pushed around by feminists. Add also the women who reaped the rewards of the feminist struggle by getting better-paying jobs and then put feminism on the back burner because they now had more urgent concerns, such as losing too big a tax bite out of their incomes, which, thanks to the struggle for women's rights, had grown considerably. All these are human paradoxes, and Reagan was positioned to expoit them. Add, too, the fact the civil rights drive which aroused the support of so many American whites in the sixties had run out of steam and the sympathy of White America. Most whites saw it no longer as giving minorities an equal break. It was now a matter of giving them a better than equal break in the form of affirmative action that meant you could end up losing out on a job to someone less qualified simply because they belonged to some racial minority or were female.

... The United States has turned to the right. But it is still not clear, despite Reagan's stunning victory, how far to the right ...

The United States has turned to the right. But it is still not clear, despite Reagan's stunning victory, how far to the right. The New Deal is obviously dead and Americans are quite evidently tired of the reforms and welfare programs of the sixties and seventies. A whole new generation is growing up more pragmatic, more cautious, less given to flights of self-indulgence than those of the sixties and seventies. But is it a halt, a pause that refreshes, or is it to be a reversal? The fight for the direction of the country after Reagan is already on. The first battle will be over cutting the budget deficits. It has already started. The moderates are letting it be known that the President will have to go back on his election promise not to raise taxes. Of course, it will not be called a tax raise. The last time Reagan raised taxes it was called tax reform so that is out this time. But for a President who can call a military retreat "redeployment" semantics is obviously no obstacle.

On the other hand are the purists of the right who just want to cut down the size of the government and see the deficits as a good excuse for doing it. Just to give you an idea of how far they are willing to go, the main Reaganite think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, is suggesting that controlling air traffic be farmed out to private enterprise. Nobody is laughing so that means that maybe some people here think that in this country we also ought to put air control to private enterpise. Finally, there are the supply-siders who say the President need not worry about the deficit. All he has to do is cut taxes more and the economic boom that will result, as people invest in the economy the money they saved on taxes, will generate so much more tax revenue that the deficits will disappear. All this is going on very loudly in Washington with all sorts of hidden agendas - both ideological and personal.

... another big difference between Canada and the United States ... In Washington, there is a loud and lively public debate ... Ottawa is a pretty quiet and almost decorous place ...

It has struck me since I have been back in Canada this past week that we have here another big difference between Canada and the United States. In both countries, the voters have just spoken with a strong voice. In Washington, there is a loud and lively public debate about what should be done with that mandate. You can hardly escape it. It is done mostly with leaks to the press. Leaks, as some of you may have heard, are used in some of the less developed parts of the world, such as the United States, as an instrument of governance. They are a sounding board to see whether an idea will fly and, if it gets shot at or shot down, who is doing the shooting? By comparison, Ottawa is a pretty quiet and almost decorous place these days.

In Washington, members of the President's cabinet have various conflicting agendas. So have the different factions of the President's own White House staff. The budget director has his own. The Senate majority leader happens to be in agreement with the budget director. But the leader of the Young Turks in the House accuses both of them of being closet welfare statists. The President just cups his hand to his ear as if he could not hear any of the strife. He either says nothing or cracks a joke. No one knows which way he will turn - or be turned - and most people suspect he does not know either. Be that as it may, it sure is lively.

The appreciation of the audience was expressed by Brigadier General S.F Andrunyk, a Past President of the Club.