Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia

His theory rested on two assumptions: that the conspiracy theorists were dangerous and deluded; and that in America they were almost invariably ‘extreme right-wingers’ such as the John Birch Society, which had denounced President Eisenhower as ‘a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy’. In a published version of his lecture a couple of years later, Hofstadter wrote in a footnote that ‘conspiratorial explanations of Kennedy’s assassination have a far wider currency in Europe than they do in the United States’.

He spoke too soon. Even in the US, perhaps especially in the US, by the end of the Seventies the Kennedy assassination had spawned a vast shoal of conspiratorial literature and obsessive investigations. As more light was shed on the devilish schemes concocted inside the HQs of corporations and government agencies (those nameless, featureless office blocks that loom so forbiddingly in many Seventies films), the paranoid style became almost the default mode of thinking: it seemed a reasonable working assumption that there was indeed a clandestine collusion between vested interests which thought themselves above the law. If the Central Intelligence Agency had tried to bump off President Fidel Castro in the 1960s, then why not President John F. Kennedy? ‘I was very paranoid about the CIA,’ Norman Mailer recalled, ‘and so I thought it perfectly possible that the CIA had pulled it off.’ Or perhaps the Mafia, given that the Church committee listed the many phone calls made by JFK to Judith Campbell Exner, who was also the lover of the leading mobster Sam Giancana? As Mailer admitted: ‘Like most conspiratorialists, I wanted there to be a conspiracy.’

Some old radicals had begged their younger comrades not to head down this road, warning that it could only lead to the paranoia gulch inhabited by McCarthyites in the Fifties. ‘All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting in defence of the Left and of sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology,’ the veteran muckraker I. F. Stone wrote in October 1964. ‘Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report.’

The tumult of the next ten years drowned out this admonitory voice. Soon after President Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the former student leader Carl Oglesby wrote an article for Ramparts magazine titled ‘In Defence of Paranoia’, arguing that recent events had demolished the assumptions of Stone and Hofstadter: instead of leading to political madness, the paranoid style might be the necessary prerequisite for retaining one’s political sanity – an echo of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ popularised at the time by R.D. Laing, who held that schizophrenics and paranoids were the only people sane enough to see that the world is deranged. The Hofstadter paradigm was shattered, and has been irreparable ever since. ‘Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy,’ Norman Mailer wrote in 1992, ‘we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia.’ The Illuminatus! Trilogy, that key to all mythologies of the early Seventies, features an anarchist sect called the Crazies whose political position is deliberately unintelligible but seems to encompass worship of Bugs Bunny and study of the Tarot as well as ‘mass orgies of pot-smoking and fucking on every street corner’. One of the Crazies explains: ‘What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises and insanity is the only viable alternative.’

Despite the foreignness of that era to twenty-first-century eyes and ears, we are its children. (Literally so for Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, who meets his six-year-old self in 1973.) And in the first decade of the twenty-first century, just as the nation succumbed to a craze for genealogy, British novelists suddenly began scrutinising this forgotten ancestor.^* ‘Just think of it!’ Jonathan Coe writes in The Rotters’ Club (2001), which pioneered the fictional fashion. ‘A world without mobiles or videos or Playstations or even faxes. A world that had never heard of Princess Diana or Tony Blair, never thought for a moment of going to war in Kosovo or Afghanistan. There were only three television channels … And the unions were so powerful that, if they wanted to, they could close one of them down for a whole night. Sometimes people even had to do without electricity. Imagine!’ Towards the end of Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby (2007), having progressed from the 1970s to the present day, the eponymous anti-hero protests at this new fascination even though the book itself exemplifies it: ‘Eventually I stopped reading the coverage. I couldn’t stand another article about 1970s fashions, ABBA or tank tops. This kind of decade-drivel used to be the territory of Chick’s Own or Bunty but has now run through whole sections of serious newspapers.’ And serious novels, one could add. Here is Engleby’s description of his student room at Oxford in 1973: ‘As well as the Quicksilver Messenger Service poster, there is one for Procol Harum live at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. I have on my cork board a picture of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, taken from a magazine; one of David Bowie with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop …’ Ah yes, I remember it well: I queued all night on the pavement outside the Rainbow that year with my friend Nick Rayne, son of the Queen’s shoemaker, for tickets to a gig by Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. Our hippy credentials took a plummeting nosedive at about 8 a.m. when the Rayne family chauffeur pulled up beside us in a Rolls-Royce and asked if he should bring some breakfast for Master Nicholas and his companion.

Like Howard Sounes, the novelists season their texts with titles of sitcoms and rock albums for period verisimilitude, but they also essay a rough impression of the social and political mood. ‘People were always on strike,’ Hanif Kureishi writes in Something to Tell You (2008). ‘The lights crashed almost every week … there were food or petrol shortages, along with some sort of national crisis with ministers resigning … Then there’d be an IRA bomb.’ In The Partisan’s Daughter (2008) Louis de Bernières gives this thumbnail sketch of Britain’s winter of discontent in the early months of 1979: ‘The streets were piled high with rubbish, you couldn’t buy bread or the Sunday Times, and in Liverpool no one would bury the dead.’

The world we now inhabit, and often take for granted, was gestated in that unpromising decade. The first call on a handheld mobile phone was made on 3 April 1973 in New York City by its inventor, Martin Cooper of Motorola, who had been inspired by Captain Kirk’s portable ‘communicator’ in Star Trek. The first personal computer, the MITS Altair, appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975, prompting a nineteen-year-old Harvard student, Bill Gates, and his friend Paul Allen to design a Basic operating system for it. Their partnership, initially called Micro-soft (sic), had total earnings that year of $16,005. (By the end of the century, its annual revenue was more than $20 billion.) On April Fool’s Day 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak unveiled their Apple I computer.

The gestation occurred partly because we inhabited a world that could no longer be taken for granted, or indeed taken at all. Throughout the Seventies there was a rising hubbub of discontent, a swelling chorus of voices saying it couldn’t go on like this – whether ‘it’ was a sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy, a jackbooted Latin American dictatorship, an enfeebled British corporatist democracy, or merely the quotidian headache of trying to make a phone call without a mechanical chorus of clicks, wheezes and crossed lines, as of a thousand boiled sweets being unwrapped simultaneously during a tuberculosis epidemic. Even the steady drip of small daily frustrations felt like torture, as in this litany from Douglas Hurd’s diary during the autumn of 1971, when he was the British prime minister’s political secretary: ‘All the mechanics of life crumbling around us – heating, cars, telephone etc … Telephone mended, light fuses blow. No progress on cars or heating … Demented by no progress at all on selling car or repairing heating … The bloody paper fails to insert my ad … Still getting nowhere on central heating … Finally we have two cars which work, and boilers, taps and radiators ditto. This has taken three months.’

The frustration seemed almost universal.^* You can hear it in the howl of Peter Finch’s messianic TV anchorman in Network (1976) as he exhorts viewers to lean out of their windows and yell: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!’ Or in the New Statesman’s front-page headline on the day after the fall of the Labour government in 1979: ‘NO CONFIDENCE. This time, something’s got to give.’ Something did: the British elected Margaret Thatcher, the Americans installed Ronald Reagan, and within little more than a decade much of the creaky but apparently immovable furniture of the old world had been consigned to the bonfire – South American military dictators, the Soviet bloc, even prices and incomes policies.

Which brings me to the starting point of my earlier book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: that although 1979 may not have the same historical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too marks a moment when a complacent and exhausted status quo reached the end of the road. That book began in 1979; this one recounts how we got there, and what a bizarre journey it was. Fasten your seatbelts: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

* Whitlam’s premiership was itself snuffed out by Her Majesty the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor General Sir John Kerr, who sacked him in November 1975. In true Seventies fashion, some furious Whitlam supporters claimed that Kerr had acted on orders from the CIA.

* ‘This particular house on the sea had itself been very much a part of the Sixties, and for some months after we took possession I would come across souvenirs of that period in its history – a piece of Scientology literature beneath a drawer lining, a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land stuck deep on a closet shelf – but after a while we did some construction, and between the power saws and the sea wind we got the place exorcised.’

* Baader-Meinhof members waged war against West Germany’s ‘performance society’, claiming that it induced mental illness in its citizens. Perversely, they seemed to think that the remedy was to terrorise the nation into a state of paranoia instead, through a campaign of bombings and assassinations that revived memories of Nazi methods in the 1930s. Jillian Becker’s study of the group, published in 1977, was titled Hitler’s Children.

* In 1946 Hunt was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to finance the writing of his novel Stranger in Town, beating two other up-and-coming authors who applied for the same fellowship. ‘The only thing Truman Capote and I have in common,’ Gore Vidal said, ‘was Howard Hunt beat us out for a Guggenheim.’

* See, for example, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby, Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You, Helen Walsh’s Once Upon a Time in England, Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions, Louis de Bernières’s A Partisan’s Daughter, Richard T. Kelly’s Crusaders, Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency. Hensher discusses these novels in ‘Writing the Nation’, Prospect magazine, April 2008, pp.32–6.

* A diary entry by James Lees-Milne, English aesthete and castle-creeper, for Friday, 21 June 1974: ‘This morning I endeavoured to get a Bath number for three-quarters of an hour. Three times I rang the exchange, three times the supervisor. Finally, I was driven so mad with rage that I shouted abuse down the mouthpiece and smashed the telephone to smithereens on the hearthstone. Pieces of it flew across the room to the windows. Instead of feeling ashamed I felt greatly relieved. And if it costs me £50 to repair it was worth it. I only wish the telephonist who was so obstructive and impertinent to me had been the hearthstone.’

ONE
Sleepless Nights

I never knew a man could tell so many lies. He had a different story for every pair of eyes. How can he remember who he’s talking to? ’Cause I know it ain’t me, and I hope it isn’t you.

Neil Young, ‘Ambulance Blues’ (1974)

On 25 April 1970 President Nixon enjoyed a private screening of Pattony in which George C. Scott portrayed the belligerent World War II general known as ‘Old Blood and Guts’. He had watched the film three weeks earlier with his family at Camp David, for pleasure. This time, at the White House, it was business: he insisted on the attendance of his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. In a televised address five days later, the President announced that American and South Vietnamese troops were moving into Cambodia at once to destroy the sanctuaries of the Vietcong. ‘We will not be humiliated,’ he promised the nation. ‘We will not be defeated.’

In his 1977 interview with the disgraced ex-President – the encounter re-enacted for a later generation in Frost/Nixon – David Frost asked if seeing Patton twice had any influence on his decision. ‘Well, I’ve seen The Sound of Music twice,’ Nixon replied.^* ‘The war part of the Patton movie didn’t particularly interest me. The character sketch was fascinating. And as far as that was concerned, it had no effect whatever on my decisions.’ Yet at the time he seemed obsessed with it. He advised his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, to follow General Patton’s example if he wanted to inspire people. Secretary of State William Rogers, who thought Nixon behaved like ‘a walking ad for that movie’, told the head of 20th Century-Fox that ‘it comes up in every conversation’. Word of this Patton fixation even reached Zhou Enlai, the Chinese prime minister, who acquired a copy of the film in the hope of understanding Nixon’s character. Speaking to a group of businessmen at the White House soon after the Cambodian incursion, the President reminded them that Patton had achieved what other generals thought impossible. The moral of the story? ‘You have to have the will and determination to go out and do what’s right for America.’

Nixon, a deeply insecure man with an ineradicable inferiority complex, always envied the easy, strutting confidence of strong characters such as John F. Kennedy or Henry Kissinger. He was awestruck by Patton – the whipcord riding breeches, the gleaming cavalry boots, the brass-buttoned battle jacket festooned with medals, the long riding crop which he waved for emphasis while urging his men on. Although the contrast with the shifty-looking President could hardly be starker (‘Would You Buy a Used Car from this Man?’ a famous anti-Nixon poster had asked), while gazing at the cinema screen even Tricky Dick could imagine that he too was spurred and booted, a dauntless warrior bound for glory. Hugh Sidey, then the White House correspondent for Life magazine, reckoned that Patton came along at exactly the right moment. ‘Here’s a man in battle. Here is an argument for boldness, innovation, ready-made … It was just a marvellously articulated argument for precisely what Nixon fancied he was doing in Cambodia.’ As Nixon put it in a memo to Kissinger a few days before his announcement: ‘I think we need a bold move in Cambodia, assuming that I feel the way today (it is 5am, 22 April) at our meeting as I feel this morning.’

The telling detail here is the revelation that Nixon was dreaming up policies at five in the morning. They say the darkest hour is just before the dawn, and caliginous thoughts often swirled through his murky, insomniac mind as he lay awake fretting about his waning leadership quotient and brooding on his colleagues’ disloyalty. During the night of 23 April he rang Kissinger at least ten times to rant about the ‘disobedience’ of CIA operatives and American diplomats in South-East Asia. ‘He flew into a monumental rage,’ Kissinger wrote. ‘As was his habit when extremely agitated he would bark an order and immediately hang up the phone … In these circumstances it was usually prudent to wait twenty-four hours to see on which of these orders Nixon would insist after he calmed down.’^* The diktats were sometimes apocalyptic – verging on a declaration of nuclear war – but often startlingly petty. When several members of the Cabinet, including the Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State, argued against the invasion of Cambodia Nixon retaliated by ordering the removal of the White House tennis court – ‘a spiteful way to take a jab at the Cabinet by removing one of the “perks” many of them enjoyed’, Haldeman explained. Since Nixon didn’t play tennis, the court was of no use to him.

The motives for the ‘bold move in Cambodia’ can thus be found more easily in Washington DC, and in Nixon’s own vindictive psyche, than in the battlefields of South-East Asia. Pauline Kael commented in her New Yorker review of Patton that George C. Scott portrays the general ‘as if he were the spirit of war, yet the movie begs the fundamental question about its hero: Is this the kind of man a country needs when it’s at war?’ In that 5 a.m. memo to Kissinger Nixon envisaged the Cambodian invasion as his way of getting one over ‘State Department jerks’ and ‘lily-livered ambassadors from our so-called friends in the world’. Better still, it would infuriate the perfidious US Senate, which had just rejected his nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy, G. Harrold Carswell, because of Carswell’s support for racial segregation. Haldeman recorded Nixon’s reaction to the vote:

Wants to step up political attack. Investigators on [Senators] Kennedy and Muskie and Bayh and Proxmire. Also get dope on all key Senatorial candidates, and especially crack the anti-Carswell groups … Have to declare war.

The investigators were two former cops from New York, Jack Caulfield and Tony Ulasciewicz – who, in Haldeman’s delicate euphemism, handled projects ‘that were outside the normal scope of the Federal investigative agencies’. They had spent much of the previous summer and autumn snooping on Edward Kennedy in the hope of catching the skirt-chasing Senator in flagrante, though without much to show for it. ‘An extensive survey of hotels, discreet cocktail lounges and other hideaways was conducted,’ Caulfield reported dejectedly to his White House superiors after a weekend tailing Kennedy in Hawaii. ‘No evidence was developed to indicate that his conduct was improper.’

If his gumshoes couldn’t hurt Kennedy, Nixon would do the job himself. ‘We’re going into Cambodia,’ he told Kissinger, ‘and I’ll show those fucking Senators who’s tough.’ On the eve of his broadcast he spent all day and most of the night working on the text – interrupting his labours only to call Haldeman for a discussion about where to put his new pool table, since there wasn’t enough room in the White House solarium. ‘Absolutely astonishing he could get into trivia on brink of biggest step he’s taken so far,’ Haldeman wrote in his diary. Not all that astonishing: the only surprise is that he didn’t suspect his enemies of somehow contriving the pool-table crisis as a reprisal for the tennis-court ban.

The phraseology throughout Nixon’s address to the nation was pure Patton, though his slurred delivery and sweaty countenance sabotaged any intended resemblance. ‘I would rather be a one-term President and do what I believe was right,’ he intoned, ‘than to be a 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 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.’