Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia

The decade’s birthdate may be debatable, but what of its character? ‘If it were not for our quasi-religious modern obsession with anniversaries, decades and other arbitrary spans of time, it might at first sight seem a crazy proposition to essay an account of the Nineteen Seventies,’ Christopher Booker declared on the first page of The Seventies. ‘Of all the decades of the twentieth century, it would be hard to pick out one with a less distinctive, recognisable character.’ We could easily summon up a picture of, say, the Twenties – the Charleston, Model T Fords, Charlie Chaplin, the Wall Street boom. Similarly, the Thirties, Forties and Fifties all carried their own packages of associations, while the Sixties instantly evoked perhaps the clearest images of all – Beatlemania and mini-skirts, JFK and Vietnam, Swinging London and LSD. ‘But what in years to come will evoke the sober, gloomy Seventies,’ Booker wondered, ‘which in so many ways seemed like little more than a prolonged anti-climax to the manic excitements of the Sixties?’

Well, ‘gloomy’ is a good start, and not just for those of us who were peeved at having missed the frolicsome Sixties because we were still at school. (‘The Seventies generation has forever been the victim of the nostalgia of others,’ the British disc jockey Dave Haslam complains. ‘We arrived too late, the generation before us told us then, and have been telling us ever since.’) But sober? Even when I first read Booker’s account, in 1980, I remember wondering if he’d spent the previous few years hibernating in a Somerset hay barn: the Seventies were about as sober as a meths-swilling vagrant waylaying passers-by to tell them that the Archbishop of Canterbury has planted electrodes in his brain. The adjective applied by Booker to the Sixties – ‘manic’ – seems nearer the mark. ‘Unless the British government transforms itself into a ruthless dictatorship, one is forced to predict the eventual breakdown of political control,’ the ecologist Teddy Goldsmith wrote in Can Britain Survive?, published in 1971. ‘The social system most likely to emerge is best described as feudal. People will gather round whichever strong men can provide the basic necessities of life, and offer protection against marauding bands from the dying cities.’ Never mind Britain: could the world survive? ‘Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable,’ Professor Peter Gunter of North Texas State University wrote in 1970, on the occasion of the first Earth Day. ‘By 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions … By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America and Australia, will be in famine.’ In the bestseller lists of the early Seventies, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb jostled for top place with B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (‘If all of modern science and technology cannot change man’s environment, can man be saved?’) and Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (which foresaw ‘the coming of an Antichrist’ and ‘a war which will bring man to the brink of destruction’). ‘I’m scared,’ Ehrlich said in 1970. ‘I have a 14-year-old daughter whom I love very much. I know a lot of young people, and their world is being destroyed. My world is being destroyed. I’m 37 and I’d kind of like to live to be 67 in a reasonably pleasant world, and not die in some kind of holocaust in the next decade.’

Slice the Seventies where you will, the flavour is unmistakable – a pungent mélange of apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial fever. You can find it in the words of Chairman Mao’s wife in 1971: ‘I have been feeling as if I am going to die any minute, as if some catastrophe is about to happen tomorrow. I feel full of terror all the time.’ Or in the advice given by Harold Wilson to two BBC reporters in 1976, weeks after his resignation as British prime minister, as he urged them to investigate plots against him by the security services: ‘I see myself as a big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.’ It is omnipresent in the private conversations of President Richard Nixon, preserved for posterity by the White House’s voice-activated recording system which he installed in 1971 – and which provided the evidence that compelled his resignation three years later. ‘Homosexuality, dope, immorality in general – these are the enemies of strong societies,’ he tells his aide Bob Haldeman, in a typical exchange. ‘That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they’re trying to destroy us! … You know it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalising marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them?’ You can see it, at its bleakest, in the closing scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974): the surveillance expert Harry Caul sits alone in the ruins of his own apartment, which he has comprehensively dissected in a vain search for the hidden bugs which he knows must be there. ‘The Watergate affair makes it quite plain,’ Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1974, ‘that the entire planet has become a whispering gallery, with a large portion of mankind engaged in making its living by keeping the rest of mankind under surveillance.’

The paranoid style exemplified by Nixon and Wilson – and Madame Mao and Harry Caul, Idi Amin and Bobby Fischer, the Rev. Jim Jones and the Baader-Meinhof gang, Taxi Driver and Gravity’s Rainbow – saturated the 1970s. Conservatives feared that the very fabric of the state was under imminent threat – whether from Communists, gays, dope-smokers or even rock stars. (Elvis Presley warned Nixon that the Beatles had been ‘a real force for anti-American spirit’; John Lennon was duly added to the President’s ‘enemies’ list’ and put under surveillance by the FBI.) In Britain, retired generals formed private armies to save the country from anarchy, industrial moguls plotted coups against the government and malcontents in the security services bugged and burgled their way across London in a quest for proof that the Prime Minister was employed by the KGB.

On the Left, mistrust of political, military and business institutions found violent new expression. Groups such as the Weather Underground in the US or the Angry Brigade in Britain had few active members but forced themselves into public consciousness and official demonology through spectacular stunts – the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. In 1971 an opinion poll found that 20 per cent of West Germans under the age of thirty had ‘a certain sympathy’ with the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof group, whose avowed aim was to overthrow the government by force.

(#ulink_f46fa02b-6daf-54ce-8fad-f0236f3f6fe1) The reborn IRA brought carnage and mayhem to Northern Ireland and mainland Britain; the British state retaliated with a ‘dirty war’ of assassination and misinformation, details of which are only now beginning to emerge. The Provisional IRA was remarkably effective despite being so heavily infiltrated that in due course undercover agents were unwittingly informing on other undercover agents to British intelligence – just as in G.K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), where the police infiltrate a secret society so comprehensively that the anarchists they’re pursuing turn out to be themselves. It was an era of missing persons – the desparacidos in South America, the innumerable Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot, the assassination victims in Northern Ireland whose final resting places are still unknown. The British politician John Stonehouse faked his suicide on a Miami beach in November 1974; when the Australian police found him hiding in Melbourne a month later, they assumed he was another missing person, the fugitive Lord Lucan. The Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky was whisked away from his apartment on 15 March 1977, not to reappear again until sixteen months later, on trial for his life.

There was, in short, plenty to be paranoid about. As the Rolling Stone journalist Ralph J. Gleason advised his readers: no matter how paranoid you are, what the government is really doing is worse than you could possibly imagine. A committee chaired by Senator Frank Church published a series of reports in the mid-1970s exposing illegal operations conducted by the CIA and the FBI. ‘Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,’ Church wrote. But these dirty tricks went far beyond that: they were ‘a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence’. As Haldeman said to Nixon in 1971 after the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, which showed how the government had misled the public about the Vietnam War: ‘To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say.’ A year later, in a judgment which concluded that much of the FBI’s surveillance and infiltration of anti-war groups had been illegal, the US Supreme Court spoke of ‘a national seizure of paranoia’.

No wonder this was a golden age of claustrophobic conspiracy thrillers such as The Conversation, Chinatown and Three Days of the Condor. The message of Alan Pakula’s vertiginous ‘paranoia trilogy’ (Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men) was that a moral sickness had infected the heart of America – families, businesses and the government itself. The shadowy, all-powerful corporation organising political assassinations in The Parallax View might once have seemed fantastical; by the time the film was released in 1974, after the ITT corporation and the CIA had been accused of helping to topple Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, it seemed all too plausible. As if to confirm that fact had outpaced fantasy, this was soon followed by All the President’s Men, an equally incredible tale which happened to be the unembellished truth. ‘What a curiosity is our Democracy, what a mystery,’ Norman Mailer said after reading the transcripts of President Nixon’s conversations. ‘No novelist unwinds a narrative so well.’ By the summer of 1973 Watergate had supplanted Coronation Street as my favourite soap opera: the daily plot twists and the rococo cast of characters – G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh, Jeb Stuart Magruder – were far more enthralling than the chatter of Ena Sharples and Albert Tatlock over their glasses of milk stout in the Rover’s Return.

The truth was stranger than the most outlandish fiction – though there was no shortage of outlandish fiction too, including Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbowy Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy and William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, which remains an inspirational text for right-wingers who see black helicopters everywhere. These fell on fertile ground in a polity whose citizens were obliged to suspend their disbelief every time they opened a newspaper. ‘Always keep them guessing,’ Ishmael Reed said of his novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a post-modern conspiratorial epic about the struggle between black Americans and a secret society of Knights Templar which controls the white Establishment. That way, he explained, ‘they won’t know whether we’re serious or whether we are writing fiction’. Although it was sent to the publishers in April 1971, long before the Watergate scandal, the book included a group photo of three future Watergate conspirators – John Dean, John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst – standing on a balcony, watching Yippies dancing in the street. Asked to explain this prophetic coup, Reed replied: ‘It’s necromancy.’

I’d prefer to call it pre-emptive paranoia. Some novelists seemed to know things that we didn’t, and a glance at their CVs strengthened that impression. E. Howard Hunt, who organised the Watergate burglary, was not only a veteran spook but also a prolific author whose first book, East of Farewell (1942), was praised by the New York Times as ‘a crashing start for a new writer’.

(#ulink_cd8e5add-0174-556b-885f-c6e092009d11) During his two decades as a CIA officer, in spare moments between overthrowing the Guatemalan government and planning the invasion of Cuba, he wrote more than thirty spy thrillers, each of which had to be submitted to his superiors for vetting. ‘I made a conscientious effort to fudge details, blurring locations and identities so they couldn’t be recognised,’ he recalled, but sometimes a scene would be censored ‘and I’d learn that some episode I thought I’d made up from whole cloth had described an actual operation – one that I’d never heard about’. In his novel On Hazardous Duty (1965) he even managed to describe the Watergate break-in, a full seven years before the event:

The agent who had planted the mike in the target office had tested the key, so the first barrier would yield. But the lock on the office door was a later model – pin and tumbler – and they would have to make its key on the spot … ‘All right,’ Peter said curtly, ‘I don’t want heroes, just the contents of the safe.’

Necromancy again – or simply a self-fulfilling paranoid prophecy by a man who was described in his New York Times obituary as ‘totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him’?

In his classic lecture on ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, delivered only a few days before the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, the historian Richard Hofstadter traced the lineage of that style from early anti-Masonism and anti-Catholicism through to McCarthyite anti-Communism in the 1950s. ‘I call it the paranoid style,’ he said, ‘simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.’ He was not using the phrase in a clinical sense, merely borrowing a clinical term for other purposes:

I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to people with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. When I speak of the paranoid style, I use the term much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.

His theory rested on two assumptions: that the conspiracy theorists were dangerous and deluded; and that in America they were almost invariably ‘extreme right-wingers’ such as the John Birch Society, which had denounced President Eisenhower as ‘a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy’. In a published version of his lecture a couple of years later, Hofstadter wrote in a footnote that ‘conspiratorial explanations of Kennedy’s assassination have a far wider currency in Europe than they do in the United States’.

He spoke too soon. Even in the US, perhaps especially in the US, by the end of the Seventies the Kennedy assassination had spawned a vast shoal of conspiratorial literature and obsessive investigations. As more light was shed on the devilish schemes concocted inside the HQs of corporations and government agencies (those nameless, featureless office blocks that loom so forbiddingly in many Seventies films), the paranoid style became almost the default mode of thinking: it seemed a reasonable working assumption that there was indeed a clandestine collusion between vested interests which thought themselves above the law. If the Central Intelligence Agency had tried to bump off President Fidel Castro in the 1960s, then why not President John F. Kennedy? ‘I was very paranoid about the CIA,’ Norman Mailer recalled, ‘and so I thought it perfectly possible that the CIA had pulled it off.’ Or perhaps the Mafia, given that the Church committee listed the many phone calls made by JFK to Judith Campbell Exner, who was also the lover of the leading mobster Sam Giancana? As Mailer admitted: ‘Like most conspiratorialists, I wanted there to be a conspiracy.’

Some old radicals had begged their younger comrades not to head down this road, warning that it could only lead to the paranoia gulch inhabited by McCarthyites in the Fifties. ‘All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting in defence of the Left and of sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology,’ the veteran muckraker I. F. Stone wrote in October 1964. ‘Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report.’

The tumult of the next ten years drowned out this admonitory voice. Soon after President Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the former student leader Carl Oglesby wrote an article for Ramparts magazine titled ‘In Defence of Paranoia’, arguing that recent events had demolished the assumptions of Stone and Hofstadter: instead of leading to political madness, the paranoid style might be the necessary prerequisite for retaining one’s political sanity – an echo of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ popularised at the time by R.D. Laing, who held that schizophrenics and paranoids were the only people sane enough to see that the world is deranged. The Hofstadter paradigm was shattered, and has been irreparable ever since. ‘Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy,’ Norman Mailer wrote in 1992, ‘we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia.’ The Illuminatus! Trilogy, that key to all mythologies of the early Seventies, features an anarchist sect called the Crazies whose political position is deliberately unintelligible but seems to encompass worship of Bugs Bunny and study of the Tarot as well as ‘mass orgies of pot-smoking and fucking on every street corner’. One of the Crazies explains: ‘What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises and insanity is the only viable alternative.’

Despite the foreignness of that era to twenty-first-century eyes and ears, we are its children. (Literally so for Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, who meets his six-year-old self in 1973.) And in the first decade of the twenty-first century, just as the nation succumbed to a craze for genealogy, British novelists suddenly began scrutinising this forgotten ancestor.

(#ulink_e72b81b2-95ac-503b-9ae3-d790f75bfd38) ‘Just think of it!’ Jonathan Coe writes in The Rotters’ Club (2001), which pioneered the fictional fashion. ‘A world without mobiles or videos or Playstations or even faxes. A world that had never heard of Princess Diana or Tony Blair, never thought for a moment of going to war in Kosovo or Afghanistan. There were only three television channels … And the unions were so powerful that, if they wanted to, they could close one of them down for a whole night. Sometimes people even had to do without electricity. Imagine!’ Towards the end of Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby (2007), having progressed from the 1970s to the present day, the eponymous anti-hero protests at this new fascination even though the book itself exemplifies it: ‘Eventually I stopped reading the coverage. I couldn’t stand another article about 1970s fashions, ABBA or tank tops. This kind of decade-drivel used to be the territory of Chick’s Own or Bunty but has now run through whole sections of serious newspapers.’ And serious novels, one could add. Here is Engleby’s description of his student room at Oxford in 1973: ‘As well as the Quicksilver Messenger Service poster, there is one for Procol Harum live at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. I have on my cork board a picture of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, taken from a magazine; one of David Bowie with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop …’ Ah yes, I remember it well: I queued all night on the pavement outside the Rainbow that year with my friend Nick Rayne, son of the Queen’s shoemaker, for tickets to a gig by Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. Our hippy credentials took a plummeting nosedive at about 8 a.m. when the Rayne family chauffeur pulled up beside us in a Rolls-Royce and asked if he should bring some breakfast for Master Nicholas and his companion.

Like Howard Sounes, the novelists season their texts with titles of sitcoms and rock albums for period verisimilitude, but they also essay a rough impression of the social and political mood. ‘People were always on strike,’ Hanif Kureishi writes in Something to Tell You (2008). ‘The lights crashed almost every week … there were food or petrol shortages, along with some sort of national crisis with ministers resigning … Then there’d be an IRA bomb.’ In The Partisan’s Daughter (2008) Louis de Bernières gives this thumbnail sketch of Britain’s winter of discontent in the early months of 1979: ‘The streets were piled high with rubbish, you couldn’t buy bread or the Sunday Times, and in Liverpool no one would bury the dead.’

The world we now inhabit, and often take for granted, was gestated in that unpromising decade. The first call on a handheld mobile phone was made on 3 April 1973 in New York City by its inventor, Martin Cooper of Motorola, who had been inspired by Captain Kirk’s portable ‘communicator’ in Star Trek. The first personal computer, the MITS Altair, appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975, prompting a nineteen-year-old Harvard student, Bill Gates, and his friend Paul Allen to design a Basic operating system for it. Their partnership, initially called Micro-soft (sic), had total earnings that year of $16,005. (By the end of the century, its annual revenue was more than $20 billion.) On April Fool’s Day 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak unveiled their Apple I computer.

The gestation occurred partly because we inhabited a world that could no longer be taken for granted, or indeed taken at all. Throughout the Seventies there was a rising hubbub of discontent, a swelling chorus of voices saying it couldn’t go on like this – whether ‘it’ was a sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy, a jackbooted Latin American dictatorship, an enfeebled British corporatist democracy, or merely the quotidian headache of trying to make a phone call without a mechanical chorus of clicks, wheezes and crossed lines, as of a thousand boiled sweets being unwrapped simultaneously during a tuberculosis epidemic. Even the steady drip of small daily frustrations felt like torture, as in this litany from Douglas Hurd’s diary during the autumn of 1971, when he was the British prime minister’s political secretary: ‘All the mechanics of life crumbling around us – heating, cars, telephone etc … Telephone mended, light fuses blow. No progress on cars or heating … Demented by no progress at all on selling car or repairing heating … The bloody paper fails to insert my ad … Still getting nowhere on central heating … Finally we have two cars which work, and boilers, taps and radiators ditto. This has taken three months.’

The frustration seemed almost universal.

(#ulink_7224dba8-ad2e-5205-8517-6fa0fea1f569) You can hear it in the howl of Peter Finch’s messianic TV anchorman in Network (1976) as he exhorts viewers to lean out of their windows and yell: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!’ Or in the New Statesman’s front-page headline on the day after the fall of the Labour government in 1979: ‘NO CONFIDENCE. This time, something’s got to give.’ Something did: the British elected Margaret Thatcher, the Americans installed Ronald Reagan, and within little more than a decade much of the creaky but apparently immovable furniture of the old world had been consigned to the bonfire – South American military dictators, the Soviet bloc, even prices and incomes policies.

Which brings me to the starting point of my earlier book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: that although 1979 may not have the same historical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too marks a moment when a complacent and exhausted status quo reached the end of the road. That book began in 1979; this one recounts how we got there, and what a bizarre journey it was. Fasten your seatbelts: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

* (#ulink_9213b736-70a5-532c-ae66-f25d67508c22) Whitlam’s premiership was itself snuffed out by Her Majesty the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor General Sir John Kerr, who sacked him in November 1975. In true Seventies fashion, some furious Whitlam supporters claimed that Kerr had acted on orders from the CIA.

* (#ulink_c00cadce-385f-5920-b7dc-3a8a4098b490) ‘This particular house on the sea had itself been very much a part of the Sixties, and for some months after we took possession I would come across souvenirs of that period in its history – a piece of Scientology literature beneath a drawer lining, a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land stuck deep on a closet shelf – but after a while we did some construction, and between the power saws and the sea wind we got the place exorcised.’

* (#ulink_7d822ab8-24a0-5a79-9546-7c7e6d6df476) Baader-Meinhof members waged war against West Germany’s ‘performance society’, claiming that it induced mental illness in its citizens. Perversely, they seemed to think that the remedy was to terrorise the nation into a state of paranoia instead, through a campaign of bombings and assassinations that revived memories of Nazi methods in the 1930s. Jillian Becker’s study of the group, published in 1977, was titled Hitler’s Children.

* (#ulink_723ebc1b-841e-5523-827d-13a5fd862fd7) In 1946 Hunt was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to finance the writing of his novel Stranger in Town, beating two other up-and-coming authors who applied for the same fellowship. ‘The only thing Truman Capote and I have in common,’ Gore Vidal said, ‘was Howard Hunt beat us out for a Guggenheim.’

* (#ulink_ecda6ccd-68e2-58c3-a34c-5cfb4888fdcd) See, for example, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby, Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You, Helen Walsh’s Once Upon a Time in England, Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions, Louis de Bernières’s A Partisan’s Daughter, Richard T. Kelly’s Crusaders, Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency. Hensher discusses these novels in ‘Writing the Nation’, Prospect magazine, April 2008, pp.32–6.

* (#ulink_08a21c44-e1f2-5e49-b226-3aaab21c34e8) A diary entry by James Lees-Milne, English aesthete and castle-creeper, for Friday, 21 June 1974: ‘This morning I endeavoured to get a Bath number for three-quarters of an hour. Three times I rang the exchange, three times the supervisor. Finally, I was driven so mad with rage that I shouted abuse down the mouthpiece and smashed the telephone to smithereens on the hearthstone. Pieces of it flew across the room to the windows. Instead of feeling ashamed I felt greatly relieved. And if it costs me £50 to repair it was worth it. I only wish the telephonist who was so obstructive and impertinent to me had been the hearthstone.’

ONE (#ulink_c30e067d-0004-5e75-978b-4825ccaf20c8)

Sleepless Nights (#ulink_c30e067d-0004-5e75-978b-4825ccaf20c8)

I never knew a man could tell so many lies.He had a different story for every pair of eyes.How can he remember who he’s talking to?’Cause I know it ain’t me, and I hope it isn’t you.

Neil Young, ‘Ambulance Blues’ (1974)

On 25 April 1970 President Nixon enjoyed a private screening of Pattony in which George C. Scott portrayed the belligerent World War II general known as ‘Old Blood and Guts’. He had watched the film three weeks earlier with his family at Camp David, for pleasure. This time, at the White House, it was business: he insisted on the attendance of his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. In a televised address five days later, the President announced that American and South Vietnamese troops were moving into Cambodia at once to destroy the sanctuaries of the Vietcong. ‘We will not be humiliated,’ he promised the nation. ‘We will not be defeated.’

In his 1977 interview with the disgraced ex-President – the encounter re-enacted for a later generation in Frost/Nixon – David Frost asked if seeing Patton twice had any influence on his decision. ‘Well, I’ve seen The Sound of Music twice,’ Nixon replied.

(#ulink_90997bd3-9601-51e8-a5aa-d59386174923) ‘The war part of the Patton movie didn’t particularly interest me. The character sketch was fascinating. And as far as that was concerned, it had no effect whatever on my decisions.’ Yet at the time he seemed obsessed with it. He advised his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, to follow General Patton’s example if he wanted to inspire people. Secretary of State William Rogers, who thought Nixon behaved like ‘a walking ad for that movie’, told the head of 20th Century-Fox that ‘it comes up in every conversation’. Word of this Patton fixation even reached Zhou Enlai, the Chinese prime minister, who acquired a copy of the film in the hope of understanding Nixon’s character. Speaking to a group of businessmen at the White House soon after the Cambodian incursion, the President reminded them that Patton had achieved what other generals thought impossible. The moral of the story? ‘You have to have the will and determination to go out and do what’s right for America.’

Nixon, a deeply insecure man with an ineradicable inferiority complex, always envied the easy, strutting confidence of strong characters such as John F. Kennedy or Henry Kissinger. He was awestruck by Patton – the whipcord riding breeches, the gleaming cavalry boots, the brass-buttoned battle jacket festooned with medals, the long riding crop which he waved for emphasis while urging his men on. Although the contrast with the shifty-looking President could hardly be starker (‘Would You Buy a Used Car from this Man?’ a famous anti-Nixon poster had asked), while gazing at the cinema screen even Tricky Dick could imagine that he too was spurred and booted, a dauntless warrior bound for glory. Hugh Sidey, then the White House correspondent for Life magazine, reckoned that Patton came along at exactly the right moment. ‘Here’s a man in battle. Here is an argument for boldness, innovation, ready-made … It was just a marvellously articulated argument for precisely what Nixon fancied he was doing in Cambodia.’ As Nixon put it in a memo to Kissinger a few days before his announcement: ‘I think we need a bold move in Cambodia, assuming that I feel the way today (it is 5am, 22 April) at our meeting as I feel this morning.’

The telling detail here is the revelation that Nixon was dreaming up policies at five in the morning. They say the darkest hour is just before the dawn, and caliginous thoughts often swirled through his murky, insomniac mind as he lay awake fretting about his waning leadership quotient and brooding on his colleagues’ disloyalty. During the night of 23 April he rang Kissinger at least ten times to rant about the ‘disobedience’ of CIA operatives and American diplomats in South-East Asia. ‘He flew into a monumental rage,’ Kissinger wrote. ‘As was his habit when extremely agitated he would bark an order and immediately hang up the phone … In these circumstances it was usually prudent to wait twenty-four hours to see on which of these orders Nixon would insist after he calmed down.’

(#ulink_7656e9fd-3f88-544e-956e-daa7ee6ace6f) The diktats were sometimes apocalyptic – verging on a declaration of nuclear war – but often startlingly petty. When several members of the Cabinet, including the Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State, argued against the invasion of Cambodia Nixon retaliated by ordering the removal of the White House tennis court – ‘a spiteful way to take a jab at the Cabinet by removing one of the “perks” many of them enjoyed’, Haldeman explained. Since Nixon didn’t play tennis, the court was of no use to him.

The motives for the ‘bold move in Cambodia’ can thus be found more easily in Washington DC, and in Nixon’s own vindictive psyche, than in the battlefields of South-East Asia. Pauline Kael commented in her New Yorker review of Patton that George C. Scott portrays the general ‘as if he were the spirit of war, yet the movie begs the fundamental question about its hero: Is this the kind of man a country needs when it’s at war?’ In that 5 a.m. memo to Kissinger Nixon envisaged the Cambodian invasion as his way of getting one over ‘State Department jerks’ and ‘lily-livered ambassadors from our so-called friends in the world’. Better still, it would infuriate the perfidious US Senate, which had just rejected his nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy, G. Harrold Carswell, because of Carswell’s support for racial segregation. Haldeman recorded Nixon’s reaction to the vote:

Wants to step up political attack. Investigators on [Senators] Kennedy and Muskie and Bayh and Proxmire. Also get dope on all key Senatorial candidates, and especially crack the anti-Carswell groups … Have to declare war.

The investigators were two former cops from New York, Jack Caulfield and Tony Ulasciewicz – who, in Haldeman’s delicate euphemism, handled projects ‘that were outside the normal scope of the Federal investigative agencies’. They had spent much of the previous summer and autumn snooping on Edward Kennedy in the hope of catching the skirt-chasing Senator in flagrante, though without much to show for it. ‘An extensive survey of hotels, discreet cocktail lounges and other hideaways was conducted,’ Caulfield reported dejectedly to his White House superiors after a weekend tailing Kennedy in Hawaii. ‘No evidence was developed to indicate that his conduct was improper.’

If his gumshoes couldn’t hurt Kennedy, Nixon would do the job himself. ‘We’re going into Cambodia,’ he told Kissinger, ‘and I’ll show those fucking Senators who’s tough.’ On the eve of his broadcast he spent all day and most of the night working on the text – interrupting his labours only to call Haldeman for a discussion about where to put his new pool table, since there wasn’t enough room in the White House solarium. ‘Absolutely astonishing he could get into trivia on brink of biggest step he’s taken so far,’ Haldeman wrote in his diary. Not all that astonishing: the only surprise is that he didn’t suspect his enemies of somehow contriving the pool-table crisis as a reprisal for the tennis-court ban.

The phraseology throughout Nixon’s address to the nation was pure Patton, though his slurred delivery and sweaty countenance sabotaged any intended resemblance. ‘I would rather be a one-term President and do what I believe was right,’ he intoned, ‘than to be a two-term President at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power and to see this nation accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history.’ Or, as George C. Scott declared in Patton’s opening monologue, delivered against the backdrop of a huge Stars and Stripes: ‘Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and never will lose a war, because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.’

Reaction to the broadcast was immediate and tumultuous. Even the moderate National Student Association called for Nixon’s impeachment, announcing that ‘we plan to rally students throughout the country’. Within a few days, more than four hundred campuses were paralysed by a national student strike. At Yale, four thousand US Marines and paratroopers were deployed to police a huge May Day march; at the University of Maryland, five hundred students invaded the campus branch of the Air Force Officer Training Corps, burning uniforms and smashing typewriters; and at Kent State University in Ohio, just after midday on 4 May, National Guardsmen fired without warning into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four students.

Nixon’s initial response to the deaths, when he phoned Kissinger with the news that afternoon, was almost dismissive. ‘At Kent State there were four or five killed today. But that place has been bad for quite some time – it has been rather violent.’ (In fact it was a fairly conservative campus. As a former student pointed out: ‘That’s why it was so incredible. It wasn’t Columbia or Berkeley.’) His buffoonish Vice President, Spiro Agnew, never one to use a rapier when a misfiring blunderbuss was within reach, attacked the nation’s colleges as ‘circus tents or psychiatric centres for overprivileged, under-disciplined, irresponsible children of the well-to-do blasé permissivists’. He thought the deaths at Kent State were predictable and inevitable, since the permissivists had spawned a generation of ‘traitors and thieves and perverts and irrational and illogical people’.