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