Confessions of a fellow-traveller

Spectator, The, Sep 23, 2000 by Reid, Stuart

Former Atlanticist Stuart Reid wonders whether the American Revolution will turn out to have been more harmful than the Russian

THE reason so many people today can't remember where they were when Kennedy was shot is that they were not around at the time. To those of us entering advanced middle age, it is scarcely believable. David Beckham, Leonardo DiCaprio, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Wegg Prosser, Earl Spencer, Britney Spears - none of them was alive, or even kicking, on 22 November 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald held his breath, squeezed the trigger of his mail-order carbine and put a bullet through the head of the 35th President of the United States. William Hague was only two-and-a-half and, although he expressed his dis-may and dis-gust in no uncertain terms, his memory of the event is hazy.

Mine is not. To me it all seems like yesterday (which is more than can be said for yesterday). I was in a pub opposite the old Daily Telegraph office in Fleet Street. The French barmaid placed a pint in front of me and said, `Kennedy 'as been shot dead.' `I say,' I said. `That's terrible.'

She shrugged. `Pouf,' she said.

Oo la la would have been more like it. That night I went to a party in Hampstead. There was a lot of excited, not to say excitable, speculation. Emotions ran high. Across London, in the hospitality room of ITV, George Brown had a fight with Eli Wallach, and then went on air with Wallack and Carl Foreman to express his condolences and to place the tragedy in its historical context. He was obviously tight, but was there a slight swelling beneath his right eye? I can't remember.

We all loved Kennedy and we all loved America, most of us anyway. America was rich, cool and sexy; it was Jimmy Dean and rock and roll and Jayne Mansfield and the Seventh Cavalry. Who could ask for anything more? At my school in the 1950s we used to stand around the radio in the common room and listen to American Forces Network. The junior Master of Beagles would strum an imaginary guitar and accompany the Big Bopper in `Chantilly Lace'.

But America was not just rich, cool and sexy. America was high moral purpose and military valour. We could be certain of that because we'd been to the cinema and we'd read the Daily Express. American soldiers, sailors and airmen had won the second world war, and the United States was now all that stood between us and atheistic communism, with its torture chambers, prison camps and repressed teenagers. We were grateful; certainly I was.

Jack Kennedy stood for everything that was true, beautiful and brave in the United States. His inaugural address said it all: `We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.' I signed on the dotted line, bought the ten acres of swamp. From now on it was my country right or wrong, and my country was America. I was a fellow-traveller and I called myself a conservative.

What a difference a decade makes. Ten years after the collapse of communism, America seems repulsive - a land of unprecedented wealth with levels of poverty and infant mortality shocking by Western European standards (and even by third-world standards: the infant mortality rate in Cuba is half that among American blacks). America is certainly no nanny state. There are two million people in jail, often for trivial drug offences, and more than 40 million without health insurance. That's not to say that we Atlanticists were wrong to have supported the United States in its struggle with the Evil Empire. But

America is an empire too, and she is far from virtuous. No man who calls himself a conservative can long entertain the notion that in the Cold War good triumphed over evil. What happened was that an unworkable revolutionary creed, communism, yielded to a workable revolutionary creed, liberal capitalism. Now liberal capitalism has replaced communism as the chief threat to the customs, traditions and decencies of Christendom (or the EU, as it is now called). Capitalism feeds on constant change and unfettered social experimentation; it is, as the great anti-communist Whittaker Chambers noted, `profoundly anticonservative'.

Free-market America is flooding the world with pornography, violence and Robin Williams. Only a pious fraud would say that he hated all modern American cinema. It may be morally reprehensible but much of it is artistically brilliant. That's not the line taken by the family-values advocates, however. They are disgusted and blame creeping socialism or child-centred teaching, or some equally implausible culprit. What they fail to see, because they are wilfully blind, is that everything they profess to hate - but especially the permissive society - is the product of the free market. Our moral guardians in the . Tory press sometimes forget to remind us that Ronald Reagan and his acolyte Margaret Thatcher supported abortion on demand (sorry, abortion in cases where a woman might be psychologically damaged if her pregnancy were not terminated). Abortion is the market solution to teenage pregnancy: it is quick and cost-effective. (That, of course, is also its attraction to communists.)