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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.^*

      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.^* 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 СКАЧАТЬ