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