Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia

Privately, Nixon wouldn’t have disagreed. But he was now aware that he should strive to present a less toxic persona to the general public: while visiting the Pentagon on the day after his Cambodia speech he had been caught on microphone dismissing student rioters as ‘bums’, which had earned him bucketloads of opprobrium from editorial writers. The struggle to conceal his inner rage became so painful that on Wednesday, two days after the Kent State shootings, he summoned his psychotherapist to the White House. Although he had often consulted Dr Arnold Hutschnecker in the 1950s and 1960s, this was only the second visit since his election as President in 1968, and it was arranged in great secrecy. Nixon feared that if their relationship was exposed people would think him ‘cuckoo’ or ‘nuts’. As Hutschnecker once said, ‘It is safer for a politician to go to a whorehouse than to see a psychiatrist’ – an assessment that would be confirmed in 1972 by the enforced resignation of Senator Thomas Eagleton as the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate after newspapers revealed that in the 1960s he had electric shock treatment for depression. Not realising that the President wanted a professional consultation rather than a chat with an old friend, Hutschnecker held forth blithely about his schemes for world peace. He was soon ushered out.

Even so, as the clamour of opposition swelled, Nixon persevered with his retreat from Pattonesque belligerence into a more emollient style. On 7 May he invited eight university presidents to the Oval Office and, according to the official minutes of the meeting, assured them that he ‘absolutely respects everyone’s right to disagree … The President went on to say that no one believes more strongly in the right to dissent than he does.’ Dr Kissinger, not to be outdone in bogus humility, told the academics that ‘we are listening and certainly have compassion with their anguish’. Little did the visitors know that at a meeting the previous afternoon Kissinger had urged the President to ‘just let the students go on a tear for a couple of weeks, then move in and clobber them’.

The university grandees doubted if Nixon yet appreciated the scale of the crisis. Nathan Pusey, the President of Harvard, warned him that ‘the situation on campus this week seems new, different, and terribly serious. The question has become whether or not we can get through the week … No longer are we dealing with a small group of radicals, but rather a broad base of students and faculty who are upset. Even the conservatives are filled with anxiety.’ Allen Wallis, from the University of Rochester, wondered whether the nation’s universities ‘will even hold together ‘til Monday without more people getting killed’. He likened Nixon to a man discussing future insurance policies while his building was ablaze.

As if to prove the point, the very next afternoon a gang of hard-hat construction workers in New York beat up anti-war demonstrators outside City Hall. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of protesters were descending on Washington DC for a rally that weekend, many of them camping out on the Ellipse, a patch of grass across the street from the White House. Nixon’s military adviser, Alexander Haig, observed them with contempt – ‘waving their Vietcong flags and shouting their slogans and obscenities … a combination of demonic ceremony, class picnic, collective tantrum, and mating ritual … They were a herd.’ Two concentric rings of buses surrounded the White House fence in circled-wagons formation, to block any invasion. Inside the executive office building, troops were bivouacked in the fourth-floor hall, prepared for a siege.

‘I knew the division that would be caused in this country,’ Nixon conceded at a press conference that evening, which he postponed by an hour to avoid clashing with a basketball game on ABC. However, he hoped his opponents would eventually understand that he was on their side: his aim was not to extend the war to Cambodia but to end the war in Vietnam and win ‘the just peace we all desire’. Asked by Nancy Dickerson of NBC News about another incendiary speech delivered that day by Spiro Agnew, he expressed his hope that ‘all the members of this administration would have in mind the fact, a rule that I have always had, and it is a very simple one: when the action is hot, keep the rhetoric cool’.

His own rhetoric that evening was not so much cool as tepid. ‘Rarely has a news conference been as pallid or synthetic a ritual,’ the New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith complained, ‘a pale shadow of the passion and trauma of the nation. It was as real-life as a minuet, as illuminating as a multiplication table … more a fusillade of spitballs at 50 paces than a searching examination of the President’s mood and motives at a moment of crisis … Mr Nixon [was] as smooth as a cueball, and about as communicative.’

The mangy old fox had evaded his circling predators once again. Or had he? Unable to sleep, he sat up until the small hours telephoning cronies (and even a few near-strangers) to ask how they thought it had gone. The White House log reveals that between 9.30 p.m. and 2 a.m. he made almost fifty calls, including seven to Kissinger and another seven to Haldeman. Nancy Dickerson was woken just after 1 a.m. by Nixon ringing to enquire plaintively why the media couldn’t learn to love him. ‘I’m the best thing they’ve got,’ he whined. ‘I’m the only President they have.’ He then asked suddenly if she’d be at the White House church service on Sunday. ‘That man has not been drinking,’ Dickerson told her husband when she put down the phone, ‘but I would feel better if he had been.’

Nixon snatched some sleep at about 2.15 a.m., but was up again within an hour, still restless and wired. He moved to the Lincoln Sitting Room, next to his bedroom, and listened to a Rachmaninov piano concerto to calm his nerves. Hearing the music, his valet, Manolo Sanchez, came in to ask if he’d like a cup of coffee. But Nixon wanted only company. He started talking about the beauty of the Lincoln Memorial at night and asked if the valet had ever seen it. Sanchez hadn’t. Very well, said the President: ‘Let’s get dressed and go.’

Egil Krogh, the young White House aide on the night shift, was dozing at his post when the Secret Service rang before dawn with the alarming news that ‘Searchlight’ – Nixon’s code-name – had wandered on to the White House lawn. Conscious that thousands of Nixon-haters were camped nearby, Krogh dashed out to shoo him back inside, but by the time he reached the lawn Nixon had disappeared. Soon afterwards a small group of student protesters at the Lincoln Memorial noticed a man advancing towards them, arms outstretched in greeting. ‘There’s the President,’ one whispered. ‘What President?’ asked another. Krogh arrived to witness a ‘surrealistic kind of scene’: Nixon was chatting to these ‘obviously tired and obviously dishevelled young people’ about the importance of seeing the sights of the capital while they were in town, about the vastness of China, about Neville Chamberlain and the Munich agreement, about his love of American football, even about which Californian beaches were best for surfing. What struck the bemused audience wasn’t what he said but how he said it. ‘His hands were in his pockets,’ one recalled. ‘He didn’t look anyone in the eyes; he was mumbling; when people asked him to speak up he would boom one word out and no more.’ Another student found it ‘freaky’: ‘Nothing he was saying was coherent … At first I felt awe, and then that changed right away to respect. Then as he kept talking, it went to disappointment and disillusionment. Then I felt pity because he was so pathetic, and then just plain fear to think that he’s running the country.’

When Krogh finally managed to hustle the President and the valet into a limousine, a bearded youth rushed up to the car window and gave Nixon the finger. Nixon, snapping out of his trance, returned the gesture. ‘That son-of-a-bitch will go through the rest of his life telling everybody that the President of the United States gave him the finger,’ he chuckled. ‘And nobody will believe him.’ Despite Krogh’s pleas the President still refused to go home, asking the driver to head for the Capitol instead. Apart from a few guards and janitors, the only people in the deserted congressional buildings at that hour were three black cleaning women – one of whom, Carrie Moore, asked Nixon to autograph the Bible she always carried with her. Her piety was apparently contagious. ‘You know,’ he confided, taking her by the hand, ‘my mother was a saint. She died two years ago. She was a saint. You be a saint, too.’ He then strolled into the chamber of the House, installed himself in the seat he used to occupy in the 1940s and invited his valet to step up to the podium and make a speech. Krogh watched the extraordinary tableau: ‘Richard Nixon, exhausted, his face drawn … sitting there by himself telling the valet, “Manolo, say something!” Manolo was embarrassed – he was a dear, sweet man – but he did try to talk a little. And Nixon started to clap. Clap, clap, clap, echoing in the chamber. I tell you, at that moment I wasn’t quite sure what was going on … I did question his mental stability.’

More aides and Secret Service agents were arriving by now, and Nixon decided they should all accompany him to breakfast in the Rib Room at the Mayflower Hotel. Bob Haldeman, who had also joined the posse, found the President ‘completely beat and just rambling on, but obviously too tired to go to sleep’. After breakfast he strode off in the direction of the White House, through the gaggles of demonstrators who were gathering on the street. ‘The President kept walking,’ Krogh recalled, ‘and the car was sort of moving along trying to keep close to him. Haldeman hissed, “Stop him!” and I kind of grabbed Nixon by the arm. He pulled his arm away and glowered, and then he got in the back of the car.’

‘I am concerned about his condition,’ Haldeman wrote in his diary. ‘The decision, the speech, the aftermath killings, riots, press, etc; the press conference, the student confrontation have all taken their toll, and he has had very little sleep for a long time and his judgment, temper and mood suffer badly as a result.’ He described it as ‘the weirdest day so far’, but there would be many almost as weird: Kissinger thought the incident revealed ‘only the tip of the psychological iceberg’. Fortunately for Nixon, the media still had enough respect for the office, if not the incumbent, to refrain from alleging in public what they suspected privately: that the President of the United States was cracking up. John Osborne of the New Republic came closest to breaking the taboo when he mentioned the President’s ‘alternating moods of anger and euphoria’ in a book published a few months later. After Nixon’s resignation, Osborne told the whole truth: many White House correspondents felt that ‘he might go bats in front of them at any time’.

Although Nixon said that the point of meeting the students was ‘to try to lift them a bit out of the miserable intellectual wasteland in which they now wander aimlessly around’, the effect of his own aimless wandering was to drag him deeper into the pit of paranoia that he had dug for himself. Over the next few days he bombarded aides with demands for retribution against his innumerable foes: universities which ‘caved into demonstrators’ by closing down should have all their defence funds stopped; State Department officials who opposed the Cambodian invasion must be sacked. He instructed Haldeman to ‘put the hook into the Jewish boys’, as none of the Jews in Congress had supported his invasion of Cambodia.

The uproar on campuses and the lack of any visible gains from the Cambodian adventure prompted a slump on the stock market: after their own fashion, institutional investors were on strike just as emphatically as the students. At the behest of Bernard J. Lasker, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, Nixon hastily arranged a White House dinner on 27 May for anxious bankers and company chairmen. ‘It probably is safe to say that rarely in modern history have so many of the nation’s financial leaders assembled together in the same room,’ the New York Times reported. ‘The fact that they were all there indicates the urgency of the situation.’ The columnist William Janeway described it as the most expensive dinner in American history, as investors had to lose nearly $30 billion before the invitations went in the post. One guest bragged that he and his fellow diners ‘had the fate of the stock market in their hands’.

After lobster cocktails and beef Wellington, served with Château Lafite-Rothschild 1962, Nixon rose to address these financial demigods. If peace meant a revival of confidence, he said, they ought to be very bullish indeed: the Cambodian adventure was going well, and when the Communist bases there had been wiped out a full withdrawal from Vietnam would at last be possible. He then launched into a self-pitying riff about the loneliness of leadership and the burdens of command, looking down the rectangular table in the State Dining Room at his audience of burdened commanders and lonely leaders. The perfect analogy came to him instantly. ‘Anybody here see the movie Patton?’ he asked.

No American President has a character or career so inextricably entwined with the cinema as Richard Nixon. Jack Kennedy looked and behaved like a Hollywood star, hanging out with Frank Sinatra and sleeping with Marilyn Monroe; Ronald Reagan actually was a Hollywood star. Yet Nixon surpassed them both. One could tell the story of his life purely through the films he watched and the films he inspired – and indeed the American critic Mark Feeney has done so, in his brilliant study Nixon at the Movies. As Feeney writes:

The moviegoer’s fundamental yearning and loneliness – why else sit for two hours in the dark if not in pursuit of yearning’s fulfilment and loneliness’s abolition? – find an unmistakeable embodiment in Nixon. Growing up hard by Hollywood as Hollywood itself grew up, he added a particularly vivid strand to the pattern of outsiderdom that would define him all his life: indeed, it was a pattern that helped elevate him to the White House and then remove him from it. The standard road to political success is to ape the lineaments of stardom: glamour, grace, assurance. However unwittingly, Nixon followed another route: representing the rest of us – drab, clumsy, anxious – the great silent majority of moviegoers who don’t decorate the screen but stare at it.

He was born in 1913, the year before Cecil B. DeMille made the first feature film in Hollywood – then a small town of unpaved streets and parched fields, twenty-five miles from Nixon’s birthplace in the citrus groves of Yorba Linda – and from boyhood onwards he was an avid moviegoer. During the sixty-seven months of his presidency he arranged private screenings of more than five hundred films at the White House, Camp David and his ‘western White House’ in San Clemente. Most were old favourites from the 1940s and 1950s, produced by the studio moguls who had financed his early election campaigns in California, men such as Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox and Jack Warner of Warner Brothers.

‘People need to laugh, to cry, to dream, to be taken away from the dull lives they lead,’ Nixon told a gathering of Hollywood bigwigs in 1972, pleading for a return to good old-fashioned escapism and entertainment. ‘The difficulty we have at present,’ he wrote to the actress Jane Wyman a few months later, ‘is that so many of the movies coming out of Hollywood, not to mention those that come out of Europe, are so inferior that we just don’t enjoy them.’ He didn’t like most contemporary films – too earnest, too angry, too political – but he seems not to have twigged that what he recoiled from might be his own reflection. Nixon was fascinated by cinema, and cinema has reciprocated the fascination. He turns up in the most surprising and unpolitical settings: Shampoo takes place on election day in 1968, when he first won the presidency; in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Brad and Janet are listening to his 1974 resignation speech on the car radio moments before they fall into the corrupting embrace of Frank’n’Furter, the transsexual transvestite from the distant galaxy of Transylvania. George Lucas says that the evil emperor in his Star Wars trilogy was modelled on Nixon. While he was shooting The Killer Elite, Sam Peckinpah yelled at Robert Duvall, who played the villain: ‘HE’S NIXON. YOU HATE HIM.’ (Duvall, annoyed by the presumption, replied: ‘How d’you know how I vote?’) And so it has continued ever since. ‘What has happened to us?’ someone asks in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, a Hollywood blockbuster released in the spring of 2009 but set in 1985. ‘What has happened to the American dream?’ Not a difficult question to answer: Nixon has just started his fifth term in the White House and is madder than ever, limbering up for a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

It isn’t only film-makers who have been inspired by this implausible creative muse: from John Adams’s opera Nixon in China through Muriel Spark’s satirical novel The Abbess of Crewe to Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon, he stalks post-modern culture like a hybrid of Dracula and Banquo’s ghost. He even haunts the imagination of my twelve-year-old son because of Matt Groening’s cartoon series Futurama, in which Nixon’s disembodied head (kept inside a preserving jar, still very much alive) babbles on about bugging and burglaries. In one episode Nixon is elected president of the earth in the year 3000 AD, whereupon he attaches his head to a huge cyborg body and stomps towards the White House, trampling everything in his path. ‘Who’s kicking who around now?’ he cackles.

It’s Nixon’s ultimate victory over John F. Kennedy, the man who beat him in 1960. After their televised debates that year, everyone remarked on the contrast between the sleek glamour of JFK and the furtive shabbiness of Nixon, but how often do you see John Kennedy in feature films, let alone TV cartoons? When he does have a role it’s as an absence, a flame snuffed out. Richard Nixon, both after Watergate and even after his death, remains irresistibly vital, the first resort of any author or director in need of a shorthand symbol for ruthless ambition and moral corruption.

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A victory, perhaps, but not one that Nixon could celebrate. He may have loathed the style of those Seventies films in which the good guys didn’t win, the bad guys went unpunished and good guys often turned out to be bad guys anyway – but here too le style c’est l’homme même. Thanks to the pardon granted by his successor, Gerald Ford, Nixon never had to stand trial for his crimes. Instead of trudging round a prison yard he could spend his retirement cultivating the pose of a sober statesman who had somehow, unaccountably, once been mistaken for a bad guy. And it worked: his interment turned into something like a state funeral, with President Bill Clinton delivering the eulogy. In death, as in life, Nixon was a star – an unlikely star, to be sure, but Hollywood studios had discovered in the Seventies that the leading man needn’t be a matinee idol. He could look like Gene Hackman, or George C. Scott. Or, come to that, the old stagers who have portrayed Nixon himself: Anthony Hopkins in Nixon, Philip Baker Hall in Secret Honor, Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon. (Fittingly enough, Langella was previously best known – by me, anyway – for playing Dracula.) No one was required to impersonate Nixon in All the President’s Men: a few TV clips were enough to resonate through the rest of the film and establish him as the unseen progenitor, the absent signifier – a latter-day Wizard of Oz pulling the levers from behind a curtain.

Even if he isn’t on screen, he is a palpable presence in many productions of that ‘Silver Age of Hollywood’ which coincided – uncoincidentally – with his presidency. ‘Nixon was that age’s tutelary deity,’ Mark Feeny writes, ‘as FDR was of Hollywood’s Golden Age.’ While the President sat hunched in the White House watching The Maltese Falcon or The Searchers for the umpteenth time, American cinemagoers absorbed the paranoia and vengeful suspicion with which he had become synonymous in films such as Klute, The Godfather, Chinatown, The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View. The setting for these and many others is essentially ‘Nixonland’, a territory first mapped in the 1950s by his Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson, who characterised it as ‘a land of slander and scare, of sly innuendo, of poison pen and anonymous phone call and bustling, pushing, shoving – the land of smash and grab and anything to win’. The opening shot of Klute, which Nixon watched at Camp David in 1971, shows the spools turning on a tape recorder, secretly recording a conversation.

(#ulink_e258a2df-c147-5d7a-a676-ae1e25bcbc31)The Conversation begins with an aerial shot of Union Square in San Francisco; then we see a sniper on a roof, pointing what appears to be a rifle at the crowd below. For a moment we’re in JFK-land, the realm of lone assassins on rooftops – but on closer inspection the rifle turns out to be a directional microphone and we recognise that this is Nixonland after all. The chief eavesdropper, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), looks like a White House plumber; his place of work looks like the underground garage in which Bob Woodward met Deep Throat. When handing over the tape of the Union Square conversation to the man who paid for it, Martin Stett (a young Harrison Ford), he hesitates for a moment as if suffering pangs of conscience. ‘Don’t get involved in this, Mr Caul,’ Stett warns. ‘Those tapes are dangerous. You know what I mean. Someone may get hurt.’

Nixon would have known what he meant. Soon after moving into the White House he had ripped out the microphones which his predecessor Lyndon Johnson used to record phone calls and Oval Office conversations. (J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, warned him after the 1968 election not to make private calls through the switchboard. ‘We’ll get that goddamn bugging crap out of the White House in a hurry,’ Nixon replied.) In February 1971, however, he suddenly changed his mind, ordering the Secret Service to install a bigger and more sophisticated system than Johnson’s, using voice-activated microphones. Five were concealed in his Oval Office desk and another two by the fireplace; two more under the table in the Cabinet room, and four in the President’s ‘hideaway’ in the Executive Office Building next to the White House. His phones were miked up as well. A trail of hidden wires led to a locker room in the basement, where Sony 800B reel-to-reel recorders dutifully recorded every presidential cough or expletive.

Why did this secretive politician voluntarily create an archive that would supply all the evidence required to condemn him? Nixon’s explanation is that Lyndon Johnson sent him a message saying how exceedingly valuable his tapes had been while he was writing his autobiography. This set Nixon thinking. ‘He seemed to me to be preoccupied with his place in history, with his presidency as history would see it,’ said Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who supervised the taping system. ‘The concept is normal, but the preoccupation is not. My honest opinion is that it was a bit abnormal.’ If proof were needed of Nixon’s astonishing delusions, his utter inability to see himself as others saw him, and indeed as he really was, here it is: he convinced himself that a complete record of his private conversations with cronies – peppered with obscenities and insults, marinaded in paranoia and rage – would guarantee his historical reputation, not only as raw material for his own memoirs but also as ammunition against the memoirs of colleagues. If, years later, they tried to exculpate themselves from mistakes or misdemeanours by holding the President solely responsible, he could demonstrate their complicity; if they claimed the credit for successes (here he had Henry Kissinger in mind) he would snatch it back from them. According to Haldeman, he ‘particularly wanted the White House taping system installed in order to demonstrate that the foreign policy initiatives of his presidency were in fact his own, not Henry’s. At times he despaired of Henry.’

Intellectually self-assured, charming when he needed to be, Henry Kissinger was in outward appearance as different from Richard Nixon as one could imagine. Yet they shared several personality traits – belligerence, petulance, mistrust of subordinates, meanness of spirit – that made for a partnership as combustible as it was enduring. They were like a husband and wife who hurl abuse and throw crockery at each other in the privacy of their own kitchen but then arrive at someone else’s party an hour later arm-in-arm, the very picture of inseparability. ‘Kissinger and Nixon both had degrees of paranoia,’ says Lawrence Eagleburger, Kissinger’s former deputy at the National Security Council. ‘It led them to worry about each other, but it also led them to make common cause on perceived mutual enemies.’ Whenever Kissinger asked the FBI to tap the phones of reporters who seemed to have inside information, and of staff in his own department whom he suspected of leaking it, Nixon cheered him on. But the crockery throwing soon started again. ‘Marvin, you see him as the President of the United States,’ Kissinger said to one of his favourite journalists, Marvin Kalb of CBS. ‘I see him as a madman.’

(#ulink_159c7e14-4f2c-5fb6-bd99-b6f97b2a0452) The madman reciprocated by calling Kissinger ‘my Jew Boy’, sometimes to his face. ‘It was [Kissinger’s] obsession that no one should appear closer to the President than he,’ said Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon’s domestic affairs adviser, ‘while neither should anyone be seen to hold this President in greater contempt.’

On 23 February 1971, days after activating his new recording system, Nixon spoke to Haldeman about ‘the K problem’ – Kissinger’s efforts to undermine Secretary of State William Rogers, whose job he coveted. ‘Henry’s personality problem is just too goddamn difficult for us to deal with,’ he sighed. ‘Goddamn it, Bob, he’s psychopathic about trying to screw Rogers.’ One complaint led to another: Henry was always making ‘a crisis out of a goddamn molehill’, he had interminable meetings about ‘every goddamn little shit-ass thing that happens’, and he was habitually late for appointments with the President. ‘Frankly it’s Jewish,’ Nixon opined. ‘Jewish and also juvenile … It really is Jewish as hell, isn’t it?’ Two weeks later, chatting to Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, he could talk of nothing but Kissinger’s ‘utter obsession’ with trying to run everything. ‘Did you know that Henry worries every time I talk on the telephone with anybody? His feeling is that he must be present every time I see anybody important.’

Kissinger was indeed a control freak, and he fancied himself as something of an expert on clandestine bugging, having done it to his own staff. But it never crossed his mind that Nixon would bug the White House, even when he received a memo from Haldeman (just after the installation of the microphones) advising that he need no longer ‘pay too much attention to substantive details in [your] records of presidential conversations’. When he heard about the tapes, more than two years later, he was mortified to realise that the drunken madman in the White House – ‘the meatball mind’ – had outsmarted him. ‘We are going to look perfect fools when all of the tapes are released,’ he told Ehrlichman, who had also been out of the loop. ‘Nixon will be heard delivering one of his tirades, saying all sorts of outrageous things, and we will be sitting there quietly, not protesting or disagreeing. You and I know that’s how we had to do business with him, but we will be judged harshly …’ Which was, of course, precisely the intention. Nixon himself described the tapes as ‘my best insurance against the unforeseeable future. I was prepared to believe that others, even people close to me, would turn against me … and in that case the tapes would at least give me some protection.’ This was particularly necessary, he added, because the issues were so controversial and ‘the personalities so volatile’.

For now, however, it was imperative that no one should know: imagine the embarrassment if senators or congressmen discovered the existence of his tapes and demanded to hear them. But how would they ever find out? Certain that his secret was safe, over the next two years he recorded five thousand hours of conversations – some incriminating, others merely shabby, devious and dishonourable. The only people in on the secret were Bob Haldeman, his assistants Alexander Butterfield and Larry Higby, and the three electronics specialists from the Secret Service who set up the system and changed the tape reels every day.

Well, almost. The House Democratic majority leader Tip O’Neill guessed what was afoot when, during an Oval Office meeting, he asked Kissinger a question about Vietnam. ‘I’ll answer that one, Henry,’ the President cut in. As O’Neill recalled, he then ‘did something very strange: he paused, raised his voice, and looked up at the ceiling. I looked up too, to see who he was talking to, but the only thing up there was the chandelier. ‘I want you all to know,’ he announced, ‘that as President of the United States, this was my decision.’ The only other outsider to stumble on the truth, strangely enough, was the elderly British aristocrat Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had served briefly – and to much hilarity from satirists – as prime minister in 1963, having disowned his earldom to take the job. Home was a simple soul, described by his Etonian contemporary Cyril Connolly as a ‘graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy’ who appeared ‘honourably ineligible for the struggle of life’, but after Edward Heath’s election victory in 1970 he returned to the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary, playing the part of Lord Emsworth to Heath’s Empress of Blandings. Visiting the White House soon after the bugging equipment was installed in 1971, he was surprised that Nixon took no notes during their discussion of British policy in the Middle East. Resisting the obvious explanation – that he’d said nothing noteworthy – Douglas-Home asked the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Cromer, if there was a concealed recording system. Cromer told MI6’s resident officer at the Embassy to ask his contacts at the CIA. This was the first they had heard of it, but after checking (presumably with the Secret Service) they confirmed the story and kept demanding how on earth MI6 had found out. Thus it was that the supposedly omniscient Central Intelligence Agency learned of Nixon’s best-kept secret through a thirteenth Earl whose duties as one of Heath’s ministers had to be fitted in between assignments on Scottish grouse moors.

* (#ulink_f20983ce-2f5c-5cb5-bb5d-e0091eb2c915) Prompting the thought (in this viewer at least) that instead of invading Cambodia he could have given an impromptu performance of ‘Climb Every Mountain’ on the White House lawn, with Pat, Julie and Tricia Nixon togged out in dirndl skirts.

* (#ulink_448420bf-ed5e-5e94-a560-41bada986350) Kissinger, revealingly, was bored rigid by Patton: his boundless self-confidence needed no such buttresses to prop it up, then or ever. Years later, after President Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, an acquaintance of mine suggested to Kissinger that Clinton was behaving like a war criminal. ‘No,’ the former secretary of state corrected him, in that unmistakeable Teutonic growl. ‘He hasn’t got the strength of character to be a war criminal.’

* (#ulink_7561a946-396f-5220-beaf-e56ba37ca84f) In the film Misery (1990), a best-selling novelist is rescued from a road accident by his ‘greatest fan’. He gradually begins to suspect that she is deranged, a suspicion that is confirmed when he finds an ‘Elect Nixon’ pennant in her scrapbook.

* (#ulink_a231a175-fe61-5f36-b31c-28c8417d69ec) On the tape a prostitute is talking to a client about what he might want to do with her: ‘There’s nothing wrong with any of that. Nothing is wrong.’ This had long been Nixon’s motto, too. It seems unlikely that he enjoyed Klute: the prostitute was played by Jane Fonda, one of the Hollywood stars named on his ‘enemies list’. He’d have enjoyed it even less had he realised that the director, Alan J. Pakula, would go on to direct All the President’s Men.

* (#ulink_48818441-c891-51a6-b94b-63f7748cc2dc) Nixon knew about the friendship with Kalb, and yearned to know what Kissinger was telling him: in September 1969 he asked the FBI to place a wire-tap on Kalb’s phone and initiate ‘around-the-clock physical surveillance’, though the second half of the request was dropped when J. Edgar Hoover pointed out that it would tie up six agents every day.

TWO (#ulink_6680c0cf-fd2b-5f63-897c-4f11ee9a044c)

Stick it to the End, Sir (#ulink_6680c0cf-fd2b-5f63-897c-4f11ee9a044c)

ABSOLUTE CHAOS TONIGHT – OFFICIAL

London Evening Standard headline, 7 March 1973

In the autumn of 1970 a chubby thirteen-year-old chorister named Francis Wheen was selected from that year’s intake of young squits at Harrow School to sing the new boy’s solo at the annual Churchill Songs. I was delighted, for about ten minutes. Then my suffering began. No one had warned me that whoever won the auditions was instantly nicknamed ‘the school eunuch’ and taunted for the rest of term as a sexual retard whose voice hadn’t broken. I had one consoling promise to keep my spirits up: Lady Churchill, Sir Winston’s darling Clementine, always brought a distinguished guest with her, and the distinguished guest always gave the young soloist a £5 note after the concert. Given that my termly pocket money was two quid, this prospect of riches – enough for two LPs – helped to numb the pain of the blows and raillery that my fluting treble voice had earned me. I spent many happy hours, while nursing my wounds, deciding which albums to buy. The Who’s Live at Leeds had to be one, surely. And maybe Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, or Neil Young’s After the Goldrush, or even Al Stewart’s Zero She Flies, so I could play along to them on my guitar. Then again, it was hard to resist The Groundhogs’ Thank Christ for the Bomb, whose title track I’d heard on John Peel’s Radio One show. My politics at the time were inchoate (‘wishy-washy liberal’ was how I defined myself if asked), but I was enough of a hippy – insofar as one could be a hippy at a school where short hair was obligatory and the dress code included straw hats and tailcoats – to know that the Bomb was a bummer, man. It amused and puzzled me that three hairy scruffs in an electric blues band were singing in praise of nuclear deterrence and the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction, rightly known as MAD, and implying that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn’t been all bad: ‘Since that day it’s been stalemate,/Everyone’s scared to obliterate./So it seems for peace we can thank the Bomb …’ If I bought the LP and listened to it every evening on my Dansette portable gramophone with the requisite brow-furrowed intensity, I’d deconstruct its meaning sooner or later. Was ‘Thank Christ for the Bomb’ somehow ironic, in a fashion beyond my teenage comprehension? Or so robustly conservative that it could be added to the Harrow School songbook without any parent – not even Margaret Thatcher, then the Secretary of State for Education – having a fit of the vapours?

Winston Churchill loved his old school songs. During the Second World War many of them had extra verses added in his honour, which we still sang a quarter of a century later:

Nor less we praise in sterner days the leader of our nation, And Churchill’s name shall win acclaim from each new generation. While in this fight to guard the right our country you defend, sir, Here grim and gay we mean to stay and stick it to the end, sir!

The man invited by Churchill’s widow as her escort on 4 December 1970 was the latest leader of our nation, Edward Heath, who had won a most unexpected victory in the general election that June. I remember wondering, during rehearsals, if he too would win acclaim from future generations. It seemed rather unlikely on his performance so far. Still, give the man a chance. Who could tell what wonders this plodding galoot might yet accomplish by staying grim and gay and sticking it to the end?

There were two things everyone knew about Ted Heath: he was a great sailor and a talented orchestral conductor, or at least so he thought. At Churchill Songs he insisted on taking the baton for a while, though thankfully not while I sang my new boy’s solo: ‘Five hundred faces and all so strange./Life in front of me, home behind./I felt like a waif before the wind,/Tossed on an ocean of shock and change …’ Then he made a short speech, in which he confessed that he’d felt nervous about conducting the school orchestra – ‘far less confident than the young Mr Wheen, who sang so beautifully’. All most gratifying, but where was my fiver? Perhaps no one had told him what was expected, or perhaps (as I concluded) he was a graceless and ungenerous oaf. Either way, the Prime Minister scuttled back to 10 Downing Street leaving the school eunuch penniless.

Which is a pretty fair summary of what he did to the rest of the country over the next three years or so, as he and his ministers struggled like waifs before the wind, tossed on an ocean of shock and change. In the twenty years between 1950 and 1970, when British economic policy followed the neo-Keynesian route known as Butskellism,

(#ulink_ed40424e-7a5d-5974-aa56-0ccc8f5bb1c9) a state of emergency had been declared only twice, for the national rail strike of 1955 and the seamen’s strike of 1966. During Ted Heath’s brief and calamitous premiership, between June 1970 and February 1974, he declared no fewer than five. The first occurred within a month of his election. Another came in December 1970, soon after his visit to Harrow School songs, when a go-slow in the electricity supply industry gave Britons their first experience in a generation of regular power cuts, soon to become indelibly synonymous with the Heath era. (Rather enjoyable they were, too, for those of us still at school: an unimpeachable new excuse for late homework.) The national miners’ strike of January 1972 – the first since 1926 – brought yet another state of emergency, though this time the Prime Minister dithered for a full month before imposing it. What eventually panicked him into action was the closure of the Saltley coke depot in Birmingham on 10 February after a six-day struggle between eight hundred police and fifteen thousand ‘flying pickets’ led by a bolshie young Lenin from the Yorkshire coalfields, Arthur Scargill. ‘We took the view that we were in a class war,’ Scargill said. ‘We were not playing cricket on the village green like they did in ’26. We were out to defeat Heath and Heath’s policies … We had to declare war on them and the only way you could declare war was to attack the vulnerable points.’

As usual at times of crisis, everything seemed to be happening at once. A few months earlier Heath had introduced internment without trial in Northern Ireland, hoping to thwart the renascent IRA by rounding up its commanders, but intelligence on the terrorists was so erratic that dozens of innocent people were caught in the net as well. Appalling stories soon began to emerge. The civil rights leader Michael Farrell described being kicked and thumped as he and other prisoners were made to run between two lines of baton-wielding soldiers. Some internees had to stand on a tea chest and sing ‘God Save the Queen’, and were beaten if they refused; others were attacked by military guard dogs. Eleven suspects, known as the guinea pigs, were subjected to ‘disorientation techniques’ which the British Army had developed during colonial wars in Kenya and Aden, and which would be revived more than thirty years later by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. ‘All were blindfolded by having a hood, two layers of fabric thick, placed over their heads,’ the Sunday Times revealed in October 1971. ‘These hoods remained on their heads for up to six days. Each man was then flown by helicopter to an unknown destination – in fact Palace Barracks. During the period of their interrogation they were continuously hooded, barefoot, dressed only in an over-large boiler suit and spread-eagled against a wall … The only sound that filled the room was a high-pitched throb … The noise literally drove them out of their minds.’