Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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.’^* 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.

* 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.

* 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.’

* 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.

СКАЧАТЬ