Fleet Street on Reagan

Send In the Clowns” was the heading in the London Daily Express above a report from Washington at the beginning of the presidential campaign. “Smoothie Ron lines up against Dim Jim.” The Daily Express, a great newspaper when the late Lord Beaverbrook owned it, has recently gone downmarket and been vulgarized to a lamentable extent. These headlines —the story underneath was rather more sophisticated—are not really a fair sample of the very comprehensive, and on the whole accurate, coverage which the British press and television nowadays give to American affairs (considerably more comprehensive and accurate than American coverage of British affairs): but, in a crude way, they did represent the general drift of comment on the forthcoming election and the candidates.

“Are Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan really the best that America can produce?” people asked. America, suggested one wry commentator, is turning “soft and second-rate almost without noticing the smooth descent to inferior status.” When Richard Nixon was in London a little while ago, he was quite impressive on television and at several private meetings; which evoked the sour observation that things had come to a pretty pass when it was almost possible to wish Nixon back in the White House.

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Anthony Lejeune

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Send In the Clowns” was the heading in the London Daily Express above a report from Washington at the beginning of the presidential campaign. “Smoothie Ron lines up against Dim Jim.” The Daily Express, a great newspaper when the late Lord Beaverbrook owned it, has recently gone downmarket and been vulgarized to a lamentable extent. These headlines —the story underneath was rather more sophisticated—are not really a fair sample of the very comprehensive, and on the whole accurate, coverage which the British press and television nowadays give to American affairs (considerably more comprehensive and accurate than American coverage of British affairs): but, in a crude way, they did represent the general drift of comment on the forthcoming election and the candidates.

“Are Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan really the best that America can produce?” people asked. America, suggested one wry commentator, is turning “soft and second-rate almost without noticing the smooth descent to inferior status.” When Richard Nixon was in London a little while ago, he was quite impressive on television and at several private meetings; which evoked the sour observation that things had come to a pretty pass when it was almost possible to wish Nixon back in the White House.