The Atlantic and Its Enemies

16. Atlantic Crisis 1974-1979

Of this period, the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh in April 1975 was the great symbol — the greatest military and economic power on earth defeated by a small and very determined Communist state. It was a symbol of greater resonance than even earlier such instances, such as the evacuation of Canton in 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek had fled to Taiwan, with his broken army (and the museum treasures of ancient China). In Saigon, there was a general panic, for all the world to see on television, as the helicopters whirred off the roof of the American embassy, crowds of people clutching desperately at the struts. Of course, the supposed peace agreement of 27 January 1973 had been fraudulent, a face-saver for the Americans, and there was a considerable Northern presence in the South. Heavy weaponry was moved along the jungle roads, and 100,000 men came in from the North, with tanks and SAMs. The total force available stood at a million men, regulars and guerrilleros, most of whom did front-line service, whereas Thieu’s American-trained 750,000 men suffered for the enormous ‘tail’ on which the Americans insisted: in effect six men in the rear for every one at the front. Thieu tried to extend his own control in the Mekong Delta, but that only overextended his forces — by now, at least partially, far better than before, and offering one of the might-have-beens of the affair. Then came the oil crisis, depriving the South Vietnamese air force of fuel, which the Americans would only dole out from watering cans; and inflation became much worse. By autumn 1974 the Northern leaders had decided upon a two-year ‘general uprising’ and early in 1975 seized territory adjoining Cambodia, capturing huge amounts of supplies, at that only eighty miles from Saigon. Nixon had promised to ‘respond with decisive military force’, but he was now politically dead, and Thieu was abandoned, to the cheers of Congress.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail, no longer the romantic Guevara pathway, was now double-tracked and paved, with intersections that required traffic managers, and ended close to Saigon. In fact the South could be cut in half, and the North had another advantage, that small attacks in the centre would drive hordes of refugees in panic towards the sea and Saigon, blocking all the roads and preventing the Southern army from moving effectively. That is what happened — a chief city bombarded and isolated, with refugees crowding the roads and even the ports, paralysing the ships. South Vietnamese soldiers themselves panicked, rushing to save their families. A truly ruthless regime would just have machine-gunned the refugees and driven them in a different direction, but Thieu was not made of such stuff, and instead just ordered complete retreat out of the Central Highlands. Masses of troops picked their way through masses of refugees, moving in buses, lorries, private cars, bicycles, all overloaded with people, from babies to aged ancestors, those who fell being crushed by the vehicle behind, while the North Vietnamese threw shells into the crowds. Forty thousand people are said to have died on this exodus, and over $1bn of materiel fell into North Vietnamese hands.

Now came collapse. Thieu hoped to hold on with enclaves that would get American support — Da Nang on the coast, together with Saigon and the Mekong Delta. But, once again, the Northern commanders applied ruthless methods, using refugees to paralyse the defenders’ movements, and attacked towards Hue, a city already vastly demoralized by the Buddhist troubles and swamped in refugees by the North Vietnamese attack of 1972. On 24 March the old fake-imperial city, tinkling bells and all, collapsed, and a million refugees now fled towards Da Nang, where the Americans had had their fortress-port, or tried to get away by sea, clinging to anything that might float. By 29 March Da Nang was falling as well, as official America turned a disdainful back (the ambassador even tried to prevent a decent man, Edward J. Daly, president of World Airways, from sending two Boeing 727s to the city, flying on the first one himself. After landing, his aeroplane was mobbed by thousands of people, some 270 of whom were finally jammed in, under gunfire, and, badly damaged, the aircraft limped heroically back). Then all the other coastal towns fell, Cam Ranh Bay, the great American base, after only thirty minutes of fighting; one airport was captured with more than sixty grounded aircraft. By early April the North Viet namese had cut off Saigon, and were able to shell Bien Hoa airfield. Cambodia was collapsing as well: on 12 April 276 Americans were evacuated from Phnom Penh, which should have been a sign to the still disbelieving Thieu. He hung on to office for another week, desperate to see the B52s return. Instead, he learned on 23 April that President Ford, speaking at a university, had announced that the war in Vietnam ‘is finished as far as America is concerned’. His audience stood up and clapped.

The evacuation of Saigon had itself been held off, to forestall panic, but panic then took hold, as a formation of captured Cessna A-37s bombed the presidential palace. The famous scene came on 29 April, with the helicopter evacuation from the embassy compound itself. Up and down, on film, 6,236 people were taken off through crossfire, the large machines lifting off from the walled-in yard, the smaller ones from the roof; 662 flights were made between Saigon and ships eighty miles away, the crews managing matters with great efficiency and such decency as could be mustered; and the end came at 5 a.m. on 30 April, when the ambassador left. Now, every South Vietnamese who could get away made for the American Seventh Fleet, helicopters landing so fast that they had to be pushed overboard as soon as the occupants had been got out, to make space for the next one: 675,000 refugees were brought to the United States. On 30 April a North Vietnamese tank smashed through the gates of the presidential palace. The stand-in president, the selfsame Duong Van Minh who had once destroyed Ngo Dinh Diem at the Americans’ behest, wanted formally to capitulate. He was told that he no longer had anything to give up, but was allowed, on the radio, to say a few words to the effect that that was that. In Cambodia, at the same moment, there was a similar collapse, as the Khmer Rouge moved in to a silent Phnom Penh, filled with a foreboding that was entirely justified.

To start with, the opponents of the Vietnam War were jubilant: the ‘People’ had triumphed, the Americans and their lackeys were scuttling ignominiously away, as ‘Whites’, in this scenario, were supposed to do. The Communists were even on a best behaviour that comes as a curious shock after the experiences of mismanaged American triumphs, a quarter-century later, in Kosovo or Baghdad, when army engineers were replaced by private contractors. The North Vietnamese worked to get the electricity and water in Saigon going, and for a time there was recovery. But this solicitude for the Saigon population did not last for very long. The usual tyrannical procedures were applied, with attempts at heavy industrialization, and collectivization of agriculture, in a country wrecked by a quarter-century of war. Even the Mekong Delta, from which rice had been exported, saw famine. Anyone connected to the ‘old order’ was ‘re-educated’ in gruesome camps and a secret police had the usual field day. Vietnam was distinguished only by a phenomenon known as the ‘boat people’, as a million people (estimates differ) bribed their way onto open boats to escape, over pirate-ridden seas, to countries such as Malaysia or even Australia, where they were not greatly wanted. About 750,000 of the Chinese minority were floated off from 1978 onwards, taking years to become, eventually very successfully, integrated elsewhere. Meanwhile, Vietnam relapsed into the traditional hostility towards China, and there was even an absurd war. In Cambodia matters were even worse. A provincial peasant and largely teenage Communist Cambodian guerrilla force had started up: the Khmer Rouge. These were led by one Pol Pot, who, though not a great academic success in France, had learned the usual stew of exterminatory Communism that flourished in those parts (Enver Hodža in Albania, and for that matter Andreas Papandreou in Greece, had had the same training). Maoism had glorified the revolutionary peasant, whereas Marx had regarded peasants with contempt — ‘quadrupeds’ (as the French Left saw them). Mao had demonstrated that the peasants were after all revolutionary, that the evil really lay in the towns, where money was made, and foreigners flourished. A sort of mad peasant ideology resulted. On 17 April 1975 the Khmer Rouge invaded the Cambodian capital and declared that townspeople were abolished: 2.5 million people were killed, sometimes horribly, or starved, or worked to death, until the Vietnamese invaded. In later years, ‘boat people’ and the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia (revealed by an enterprising Hungarian television journalist, Aladár Chrudinak) counted as glaring evidence that the Americans had been right in fighting the Vietnam War, and wrong only in the method with which they had fought it. This is a debate that goes on.

There was another great symbol of this period — ‘Watergate’, and the fall of Richard Nixon. It was as if the gods had wanted to take a revenge, in black humour, for Nixon’s weaselly behaviour over Vietnam, for the original offence was comic, and we might even apply Hegel’s remark as to ‘the terrifying infinity of the particular’. Nixon’s staff were caricature business school types, sandwich lunches, work-out sessions, confusing efficiency with efficacy: no imagination at all. John Ehrlichman was a Christian Scientist lawyer who objected to Nixon’s drinking and refused to work with him unless it stopped. The drinking did in fact stop, more or less, and Nixon’s judgement did not improve: without a drink he became charmless and gauche. The Chief of Staff, John Mitchell, exuded silent strength, misleadingly, but he had a first-class record that made Nixon feel inferior, and brought out the nasty, frustrated and unscrupulous side of the President. Junior staff, tails wagging, organized a break-in at Democrat headquarters in the Watergate office building, in the hope of finding discreditable papers. The affair was bungled, lies were told, and Nixon, his head in Chinese clouds, did not follow the trivialities. Then he lied as well. Then the lies were recorded, as well as his reactions to the revelation of this. Then the people who tried to find out about the recordings were harassed, and then more lies were told.

Lying about (and obsession with) trivialities, and subjecting opponents to this or that survivable illegality, were not new in American politics, or for that matter the politics of most other countries. Roosevelt himself had been guilty. The Watergate break-in had even occurred in a defensible context, because secret documents had been ‘leaked’ to The New York Times (about Vietnam) and national security was threatened. But Nixon depended upon a wooden, two-dimensional staff, and National Security people who might have understood something about proportion had been cold-shouldered. The Republican establishment’s candidate had been Nelson Rockefeller (who lost, because he had divorced a wife of thirty years’ standing, and discovered the sixties in his own sixties) and they did not like Nixon: ‘such a common little man’, said Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter. Over Watergate, they may even have stabbed Nixon in the back. At any rate, a huge fuss in the media, preoccupying them as the internal and external affairs of the United States went from bad to worse, led to a threat to Nixon of impeachment, a formal condemnation by Congress which might have led to bankruptcy and imprisonment. On 9 August 1974 Nixon resigned. He was given a formal pardon in exchange, by his unchosen successor, Gerald Ford, who was next in line, mainly because he was not a thief, like the previous Vice-President, or an alcoholic, like the other alternative. Not America’s brightest moment.

There was far, far more in the background. The October crisis of 1973 introduced a period of terrible instability, when quite sober commentators could assume that the End was Nigh. OPEC now appeared to be almost a villainous operation from James Bond, with a palace headquarters on the Vienna Ringstrasse. The earnings of oil exporters rose from $23bn in 1972 to $140bn in 1977. There was a fourfold inflation of oil prices, and then an eightfold one; stock exchanges collapsed, banks failed, and a tidal wave of petro-dollars engulfed the world, enriching by far the least worthy recipients. Golda Meir, in Israel, remarked that Moses had wandered in the desert for forty years, leading his people to the only place in the Middle East that had no oil. But it was on the whole America’s own doing. The oil producers, left to themselves, would have been far too disunited for common action, and their common strategy at OPEC did not in fact last for very long. But the fall of the dollar in 1971 pushed them together: why accept valueless paper dollars? The same was true, though not to the same extent, for producers of other raw materials — coffee, tobacco, copper, rubber, iron ore, meat as well — and prices shot up, even in 1971, two years before the oil shock. The problem was symbolized by the Brazilian city of Manaos, deep in the jungle. There, once upon a time, rubber had appeared, and the place became opulent: famously Dame Adeline Patti, the great opera singer of the 1890s, appeared there. Then rubber was produced elsewhere, and Manaos relapsed back into semi-jungle. Now, the Middle East was becoming a huge Manaos.

At least in the epoch of Manaos, there was one commodity that ruled everything else, including money: gold. International prices were stable, or even inclined to go down gently, because the main trading countries’ currencies were based on the Gold Standard. If more gold had been produced then no doubt prices would have risen, but there was a very limited supply of it — roughly what could have been stored in a house (silver was far more plentiful, and therefore unreliable). Up to 1914, and in most ways even 1931, most currencies could be exchanged into gold on demand. In practice it was of course inconvenient and unsafe for gold to be carried around in any quantity, but paper money based on it was trusted, and there were few openings for the manufacture of paper money on the scale that occurred in the 1960s. If you had a profit, you might keep it safely in paper — and very handsome, dignified paper at that. Now, the inflation of the paper dollar meant that, on top of low prices, the producers were getting money of questionable value, itself declining in purchasing power (and looking more and more crumpled and grubby). The only answer was for them to combine and to create scarcities, as the oil producers in 1973 elected to do.

But the volume of paper-money purchasing power in the Atlantic countries meant that an increasing amount of money chased goods, with the inflationary results that would follow. Primary produce of all sorts, including food, now rose in price: in the USA even in 1971 wheat went up by 50 per cent. As an instance of what happened, there is the index of prices paid for ‘Omaha Choice Steer’ of roughly one ton in weight. In 1951, at a time of rising prices in the Korean War, the price was $35. In the 1960s it varied around $25. Then in 1969, 1970 and 1971 it started to rise — $30 and above — reaching $36 in 1972 and $45 in 1973, where it stabilized until 1978, when it reached $50, and then in 1979 almost $70 (the figure then stuck for almost a quarter-century). Inflation was telling and prices since 1956 have risen ten times: a Florida bungalow in the early 1960s cost $35,000 with interest at 5 per cent, but a decade later stood at four times as much with a higher rate of interest, and there was more to come. Inflation on this scale was general, and when it affected oil prices, it threatened the existing order at its base. From August 1972 to August 1973 meat and fish rose by 40 per cent and Business Week feared that the USA would become another Brazil, a place with endless zeros on the torn and smudgy banknotes. An ounce of gold reached $875 in 1980 (as against $35 in 1970) and the dollar, having stood at four Marks, fell close to two, with a somewhat lesser fall against the yen. In August 1971 it had finally come off gold, and had gone down. Sharp-sighted foreigners could see the dimensions of the problem to come, though Nixon and the advisers at Camp David ‘closed the gold window’ apparently quite casually, the Secretary of the Treasury dismissing complaints: the dollar is our currency but it’s your problem. American exports then flourished at the expense of other countries’. Weaselling protection against them then set in, and unemployment increased all round. Late in 1972, in the library of the White House, the German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, tried to sort things out, and for a time the foreign exchange desk officer of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, even flew around in a windowless aircraft from place to place, with a view to fixing things. It was no good: there was a tidal wave of money moving against the dollar, and lines in the sand were engulfed. By now there was so much money held in places quite beyond the West’s control that nothing much could be done, and the speculators were just given their heads. Currencies now, in March 1973, floated against each other, the values yo-yo-ing; in June the dollar fell to 2.28 Marks from 2.83, then rose again because the Americans had oil, then fell again in 1975, and fell drastically when the Shah of Iran ran into trouble at the turn of 1978-9. With such uncertainty as regards money, trade suffered, and unemployment grew. But so did prices.

It was a strange inflation. Ordinarily, when prices started rising, there was a heightening of activity as people worked harder to make ends meet, or for that matter dealt in the black economy (as had happened in post-war France, Italy or Germany). In 1974 this did not happen. The American economy declined by 6 per cent between 1973 and 1975, and unemployment rose to 9 per cent. This was in defiance of the rules, because money had indeed been spent — and spent, and spent, and not just on Vietnam. Nixon had not reversed the sixties programme — quite the contrary. A budget of $5.5bn in 1964-5 became $144bn by 1993; welfare spending rose twenty-five times by the end of the seventies, taking half of the budget and three times the earlier share of the GNP (12 per cent). Under Johnson, permanent deficit-financing had become the rule, as distinct from conscious additions strategically thought through: $3.7bn in 1966 became $8.6bn in 1967 and $25.1bn in 1968. In March 1968 the Treasury Secretary protested that this would bring down the dollar, and so taxes were put up, such that there was even a surplus in 1969 — the last time for a generation. Thereafter control was lost, and by 1975 federal spending had reached $332bn, the deficit being over $50bn. By then government spending was taking almost 25 per cent of the entire output of the economy. All of this added to the national debt, which started to climb. It had reached $271m after the war, fell somewhat as a proportion of GNP until 1965, and then, under Johnson, grew and grew.

Nixon had to wrestle endlessly with the external problems, including of course that of the dollar’s world role, and he neglected the internal problems — finding Congress difficult to deal with, and anyway lacking powers to deal with it head-on. The Constitution itself in effect left the State sometimes paralysed: it was weaker in many ways even than the Swiss central state (where on occasion the cabinet had nothing to do but play cards). By contrast, the legal machinery was much more developed: there were 312 lawyers per 100,000 people, as against 190 in Germany and 134 in England. Given that the President could be frustrated by Congress and/or the Supreme Court, if they so decided, the very system of government was not well-equipped to deal with a general crisis, and in 1973 much went wrong.

With Nixon’s resignation, the United States went into a sort of tailspin. The inflation — or rather ‘stagflation’ — went together with a, for the USA, very strange phenomenon, that much of business now appeared to fail: some of the greatest names in American business got into trouble, symbolized by the fall of one of the largest modernizing enterprises of all, the Penn Central railway. Chrysler itself was saved by the Republicans only as a national symbol: by 1980 the collapse of public services was such that 88 per cent of Americans went to work by automobile. ‘The pursuit of happiness’, in the foundation charter of the United States, has always struck foreigners as funny. That is a misunderstanding of the original, which was just a polite way of saying ‘money’ (‘commodity’ is a similar euphemism, and in English ‘honorarium’, ‘remuneration’, etc. have the same function). As the seventies went on, the expression could only be used with irony. Much of the country — in its way, the real part — was still innocent and old-fashioned: churches got a billion dollars for building, twice what public hospitals got, and the modern ills of family breakdown and drug addiction passed these parts by. But overall the country was paying for the very obverse of the pursuit of happiness, and there was a sort of civil war. It was an extremely strange period. Hollywood became anti-patriotic, and embarked upon a campaign of anti-American film-making, with Robert Redford in the lead, though he had several less talented imitators. But there was hysteria at large. Senators George McGovern and Ed Muskie referred to Nixon in apocalyptic terms: ‘one-man rule’, ‘this tyrant’. The ‘Pentagon Papers’ affair, in 1971, which had then led to Watergate, was a disaster for the whole concept of national security, encouraging babyish attention-seeking among journalists without the talent of the pioneers in the business; and a campaign was launched against the old CIA, its assorted enemies being cast as martyrs (e.g. Seymour Hersh’s work on the Chilean coup in The New York Times in 1974). Various radicals were acquitted, and there were the usual conspiracy theories as to the Kennedy assassination, even a House committee accepting primitive legendry as to how the Mafia had caused it. Tom Wolfe wrote a superb little essay, ‘Radical Chic’, on the attitudinizing of New York money at social events staged on behalf of grotesque killers.

Politics fell into paralysis, and foreign policy for a time became mouthings. Congress was now cutting the powers of the presidency. In November 1973, even before he fell, Nixon had faced a Resolution preventing him from sending troops overseas for any length of time if Congress did not formally give support, and the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1973-4 put an obstacle in the way of his policies towards the Soviet Union, by cancelling favourable trade arrangements if Moscow did not cease harassing Jewish would-be emigrants. In July-August 1974 Congress again paralysed US handling of another strategic headache, on Cyprus, where first Greeks and then Turks had intervened. Both were in NATO, and each had treaty rights to invoke; Cyprus mattered because there were British bases there, and the island was on the very edge of the Middle East. One set of Greeks attacked another set of Greeks, and there was a Turkish minority with paper rights, which the Turkish army then invoked, occupying a third of the island. The enraged Greek lobby intervened, against the advice of Kissinger, who felt that it was giving up the chance of a long-term solution in order to vent short-term steam, a judgement proven correct. That autumn Congress restricted the CIA, and in 1975 frustrated any positive policy towards Angola, where a civil war killed off a fifth of the population. Endless new committees in both Houses now supervised aspects of foreign affairs, and the old congressional committees which had been notorious for insider dealings, with long-term chairmen who knew which levers to pull, were replaced by an allegedly open system in which nothing worked at all. The staff monitoring the White House rose to 3,000.

The seventies were a period when the formula of fifties America appeared to be failing, and there was a symbol of this. The very capital of capitalism was in trouble. New York was reigned over by a Mayor John Lindsay, a man in the Kennedy mould, who shrank from making enemies. The city’s workers were collecting wages that, with inflation, bought less and less; in 1968 the rubbish was not collected for a week, and rats ran through the streets of Manhattan. The sewage workers then struck, and from Harlem hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage floated along the river. This (1971) was the background to the famous riot, in which ‘hard hats’ working on building sites near Wall Street and the World Trade Center attacked anti-war protestors demonstrating there. The protestors fled, to fight (successfully) another day. Lindsay had attitudinized in their direction, decreeing that the city administration’s flag should, in mourning, be put at half-mast. He was forced to restore it to celebration mode, but then found another and much more damaging way to deal with the situation. He made bargains with the unions. In the USA these often had some association with organized crime, and might turn into protection rackets. The transport workers got an 18 per cent salary increase, an extra week of vacation, and fully paid pensions; the district councils, bureaucrats, had higher wages and were allowed retirement after twenty years; the teachers received increases of 22-37 per cent. Lindsay made New York the capital of crime. In the 1960s it had 7.6 murders per 100,000 people and from 1971 to 1975 21.7.

^{1. and 2. Old business. The former Chief of the High Command, Wilhelm Keitel, fails to persuade the Nuremberg judges not to hang him, while a delighted former finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, signs autographs after his acquittal, September and October 1946}

^{3. and 4. Germany in 1946. Berliners collecting firewood in the Berlin Tiergarten, and a tram filling with passengers in Dresden}

^{5. and 6. The chilly Communist future. The young Erich Honecker being voted first chairman of the Free German Youth; a post-Christmas meeting of the French Communist Party at the Vel d’Hiv, Paris, complete with gloomy Christmas tree, both January 1946}

^{7. and 8. Aftershocks. Surviving Jewish families fleeing from Poland in the summer of 1946 following anti-Semitic violence; the origins of the American space programme: a V2 rocket being fired in New Mexico, August 1946}

^{9. and 10. The end of the British Empire. British troops pulling casualties from the rubble of their headquarters at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, July 1946, and Greek Communist prisoners in Salonica with ‘The British Must Go’ spelled out in French on their shirts, March 1947}

^{11. and 12. and 13. The Cold War coalesces. George C. Marshall with Vyacheslav Molotov, March 1947; Jan Masaryk and Edvard Beneš in Hradčany Castle, March 1947; Mátyás Rákosi at his desk}

^{14. and 15. Stalin. Stalin celebrates his seventieth birthday at the Bolshoi Theatre, January 1950; from right to left: Beria, Malenkov, Vassily Stalin, Molotov, Bulganin and Kaganovich carrying Stalin’s coffin, March 1953}

^{16. and 17. Communism on the March. Chinese Red Army troops during the assault on Shanghai, May 1949; Korean refugees fleeing from Communists in the north, with frozen rice paddies in the background, January 1951}

^{18. and 19. Hungary 1956. Partisans with the corpses of secret policemen, Budapest, November 1956, and a Soviet tank in Budapest later in the same month}

^{20. and 21. Colonial delusions. French African troops at Port Said (the shortly to be blown up statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps in the background); British troops posing for a street photographer in a different part of the same town, November 1956}

^{22. and 23. and 24. Leaders. Georgy Malenkov about to watch Arsenal play Manchester United during a visit to London, March 1956; Nikita Khrushchev and Władysław Gomułka at the United Nations, September 1960; John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower leave the White House for the former’s inauguration, January 1960}

^{25. and 26. The non-Atlantic in the ascendant. Two symbols of Communist glamour: Yuri Gagarin and Fidel Castro; the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer-Platz, August 1962}

^{27. and 28. The Atlantic in trouble. Some of the hundreds of thousands of white settlers fleeing Algeria, May 1962; captured American airmen being paraded through the streets of Hanoi, July 1966}

^{29. and 30. The new Europe. Ludwig Erhard and Charles de Gaulle at a dinner hosted by Konrad Adenauer, September 1962; Willi Stoph and Willy Brandt, May 1970}

^{31. and 32. Prague 1968. Nicolae Ceauşescu and Alexandr Dubček, Prague, August 1968; Prague later in the same month}

^{33. and 34. The 1970s. Leonid Brezhnev, southern Russia, summer 1971; Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Paris, December 1972}

^{35. and 36. Cold War spin-offs. Salvador Allende with his new head of the Chilean armed forces, Augusto Pinochet, August 1973; Sheikh Yamani and Edward Heath in London to discuss the oil crisis, November 1973}

^{37. and 38. Awkward social occasions. President Carter, King Hussein and the Shah, Teheran, January 1978; President Tito and the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, Heathrow, March 1978}

^{39. and 40 and 41. Good and bad populism. Helmut Schmidt, April 1977; Jimmy Carter, September 1978; Süleyman Demirel, the great Turkish survivor, May 1977}

^{42. and 43. The men who made Thatcher. General Galtieri (centre) with Admiral Lambruschini (left) and Brigadier General Graffigna, Buenos Aires cathedral, May 1980; Arthur Scargill, Orgreave colliery, May 1984}

^{44. and 45. Couples. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, June 1984; Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu with folkloric Romanian children, c. 1985}

^{46. and 47. More couples. Elizabeth II and Rupert Murdoch, Wapping, February 1985; General Wojciech Jaruzelski and Pope John Paul II, Warsaw, June 1987}

^{48. and 49. Cold War spin-offs. President Mohammed Najibullah meeting Soviet troops, Kabul, October 1986; Prime Minister Turgut Özal meeting Ronald Reagan, April 1985}

^{50. and 51. The end. The East German leader Egon Krenz about to lose his job, with Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow, November 1989; Boris Yeltsin earlier in the same year}

It was of course a racial matter. Crime was associated substantially with non-whites, including the Puerto Ricans. Jonathan Reider, in his well-known study of the white backlash in Canarsie, Brooklyn, said that his interlocutors ‘spoke about crime with more unanimity than they achieved on any other subject, and they spoke often and forcefully… one police officer explained that he earned his living by getting mugged. On his roving beat he had been mugged hundreds of times in five years.’ In a notorious case in 1972 the police chief ordered all white policemen away from a hospital, when he gave in to the black rabble-rousing politicians Louis Farrakhan and Charles Rangel rushing in to defend criminals who had killed a policeman.

The crisis of 1973 wrecked the city’s finances, as stock exchange dealings fell, whereas welfare costs remained fixed. New York City was only narrowly saved from collapse in 1974, though Lindsay himself had by then given up, and in the later 1970s ordinary city services often came apart — snow not shifted; in 1977 a power failure that lasted for almost thirty hours, during which there was a great deal of looting. As was said, the cheerful city of Breakfast at Tiffany’s turned into the bleak battleground of Midnight Cowboy. Around this time, too, came a further extraordinary flouting of ancient rules: the release of mental patients onto the streets, as asylums were closed. Progressive-minded specialists had urged this, and New York acquired a sort of black-humour chorus to its problems. And so any American big city had the horrible sight of mentally ill people roaming the streets and combing through the rubbish. Much of this went back to sixties bestsellers, whether Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965) or Thomas Szasz’s book of 1961, The Myth of Mental Illness, and it was the judges who ruled that this had something to do with human rights. The overall sense of these works — Laing’s the best-known — was to the effect that madness was, in this world, a sane response, and there was something to be said for this view. Much the same happened as regards crime. Progressive-minded criminologists had been arguing quite successfully for non-use of prison, but crime rates doubled in the 1960s whereas the numbers in prison actually fell, from 210,000 to 195,000 (by 1990 they had risen again, to one million), in accordance with modish behaviouralist ideas, and in the later 1970s, although there were 40 million serious crimes every year, only 142,000 criminals were imprisoned. The National Rifle Association membership grew from 600,000 in 1964 to 2 million in 1981. If the police and the courts would not defend Americans, what else were they supposed to do?

Contempt for ordinary Americans also showed in the interpretation of the desegregation laws. The worst cases happened over school segregation. Boston schools that served poor districts were dictated to by judges who unashamedly sent their own children to private schools. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had expressly stated that there would be no enforced bussing of children from one district to another to keep racial quotas. But the Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued regulations in defiance of this. The argument was that if there were not sufficient white children, then segregation must be occurring. The courts backed this in 1972. Almost no-one actually wanted the bussing, but it went ahead, with riots and mayhem, and there was a move out of town, and a rise in private-school enrolment (from one ninth to one eighth). In the north-east racial isolation became worse than before — 67 per cent of black pupils were in black-majority schools in 1968 and 80 per cent in 1980 (more than even in 1954). There were horrible stories at South Boston High, where black children were exempted from fire drills out of fear for their safety if they left the building. A journalist, J. A. Lukas, wrote the classic book on the story, all the more gruesome because the grand liberals did not have to have anything directly to do with their handiwork. Michael Dukakis lived in a decent suburb and sent his children to private school; Edward Kennedy used St Alban’s School, and the liberal journalists of Ben Bradlee’s Washington Post did likewise.

Where was American democracy? Law was passed by an apparent ‘Iron Triangle’ of lobbyists, bureaucrats and tiny subcommittees. The Democrats (now essentially controlled from the north-east) reformed the House in such a way as to remove the old men from committee chairmanships, as from October 1974, when one of them became involved in a sex scandal involving a whore. The old system had been able to deliver votes, for instance for the Marshall Plan, but it could also be used to stop left-Democrat aims because experienced chairmen knew how to do it. A San Francisco congressman, Phil Burton — he supported Pol Pot in Cambodia, in 1976 — was backed by labour, but the result, with many now open committees, was that lobbyists flourished, and the small print of enormous legislative documents contained provisions to satisfy them, quite often unnoticed by scrutineers. It became impossible to get the budget in on time, and there had to be endless ‘Continuing Resolutions’ which simply enabled the government to go on spending as before: in 1974, $30bn more; between 1974 and 1980 spending (beyond defence) rose from $174bn to $444bn.

It was not surprising that so many Americans felt hostile to the whole process, and a radical, Christopher Lasch, wrote powerfully as to how a bureaucracy-dominating elite had taken power from people to run their own lives. He particularly despised the endless fuss made about cigarette-smoking — it started with a ban in Arizona, in 1973, on smoking in public buildings — but this was a frivolous period, the landmarks down. What Leszek Kołakowski called the politics of infantilism went ahead. Alvin Toffler pronounced in 1970 that the future would amount to endless leisure. For some, it did. In 1970, 1.5 million drew a disability pension, but 3 million in 1980; one tenth of the nation’s families was headed by a single woman, living on welfare. Paul Ehrlich in 1968 looked at The Population Bomb and asserted that there would be famine in the 1970s, and thought that pets should be killed, to save resources. One man made his name in the seventies with the claim that there would be a new Ice Age, and made his name again twenty years later with a further claim that global warming would mean apocalyptic floods. The wilder shores of the sexual revolution were explored, Niall Ferguson remarking that the only people who wanted to join the army were women, and the only people who wanted to get married were gays. Feminism, a cause that went back to hesitant beginnings under Kennedy, was vigorously promoted through the courts, and quotas for ‘positive discrimination’ were allowed — although Congress had never voted for this. Equality was applied, with many absurdities resulting (Edward Luttwak got himself off guest lists when he pointed out that heavy military lorries, driven by women, might crash because the driver’s legs were not strong enough for the controls). In Ohio women were at last ‘allowed’ to lift weights heavier than 25 pounds; in February 1972 the ghastly little word ‘Ms’ was allowed in government documents; women were ‘allowed’ to enter sports teams’ locker rooms; in New York women were permitted to become firemen; and in 1978 women were allowed to serve on naval vessels, ten of the first fifty-five becoming pregnant. Here was America at its witches-of-Salem weirdest.

The economy itself was losing the lead that it had had over all others, and, again, inflation had much to do with this. Unions, on the whole, could resist it, at least in the big industrial firms, where blue-collar wages kept up. Labour was all-important for the Democrats, and AFL-CIO grew, up to 1978, as ‘corporatism’ prevailed, but it was increasingly not so much blue-collar workers as soft-professional teachers in the lead. There were alarms as to the competitiveness of American industry. Kenneth Hopper, a Harvard Scottish warhorse, noted (‘American Machinist Special Report’ of July 1970) that output per hour in factories had increased by 20.1 per cent between 1961 and 1965, but by less than half of this figure in the following five years; the growth in take-home earnings fell from 23 per cent to −1.5. The point was that ‘of the major nations of the world, the US reinvests the lowest proportion of its GNP’ — 16.6 per cent as against 23 per cent in Germany and somewhat more in France, or 34 per cent in Japan, such investment including machinery and housing. In engineering, from the mid-fifties onwards, investment was far lower, per $1,000 deliveries, than in Europe or Japan (about $12 as against $60-80), and fixed assets were even below England’s. There was some official dishonesty involved in defence of this: a strange myth was propagated by the OECD that American equipment was only four to five years old, that investment had really been quite adequate, that overinvestment needed to be taxed. The Department of Commerce knew better. America, or parts of it, had been vastly spoiled and had not had to work; even in 1968 some essential structures were over fourteen years old. Congress sometimes ascribed the inflation to business’s desire for capital investment, but in fact new equipment was indeed needed, and what had confused the figures was tax. Depreciation allowances were unreal, and old equipment was recorded as relatively recent. There was also much grumbling that Americans had a low propensity to save (6.1 per cent of their income, whereas the German figure was 13 per cent and the Japanese 20 per cent). But only a fool would have saved in countries where inflation ran in double figures and interest rates in single (or, after tax, half of these).

This was an era when the vast industries and dam projects of the New Deal era lost ground. General Motors, ITT, Union Carbide, US Steel went on in the old way: Cadillacs and Chevrolets were much the same as before, representing strange and classless aspirations for boat-like motor cars; but the Japanese were more subtle. The American share of automobile sales went down from 32 to 19 per cent, of steel from 20 to 12 per cent, and in manufacturing generally from 26 to 20 per cent (1981). The standard of living fell below that of Germany or Sweden, as the GDP per head stood at $6,000 to Switzerland’s $7,000. All in all, much of American industry was now ‘rust belt’. The trade deficit with Japan rose ten times in a few years (to 1978) to $11bn and Japanese goods accounted for a quarter of imports. A good part of the economy appeared anyway to be unreal. In January 1968 credit card debt amounted to $1.5bn, 5 per cent of which went on car loans, and by 1982 grew to $64bn (and by 2004 $576bn). The great new fortunes were built on borrowed money, and inflation now helped to wipe out the debts. Meanwhile, governments struggled to find money for essentials, and America’s infrastructure was shockingly bad. The notion of a direct rail link between Kennedy airport and Manhattan was beyond America’s powers, and no new runway was added to Los Angeles airport between 1970 and 2000. Health care in the United States became yet another piece of black-humour surrealism: a great deal of money spent, but 50 million people not covered by the existing system, such that infant mortality was greater than in blockaded Cuba.

The Great Society was running into the sand, and so were the Democrats, now badly divided between Northern, liberal wing, Southern illiberal wing, and corrupted city-boss body. By this time, there was no commanding figure on the Democrat side to stand for the presidency, and ‘Jimmy’ Carter emerged, from a peanut farm; he had been Governor of Georgia. When his mother was told that he was standing for the presidency, she reacted: president of what? He scraped in with 40.8 million votes to Ford’s 39.1 million. Carter’s regime symbolized the era (1976-80). It was desperately well-meaning. It jogged; it held hands everywhere it went with its scrawny wife; it prayed, Baptist-fashion; it banned smoking where it could; it sent bossy women to preach human rights in places where bossy women were regarded as an affront to them. There was a whole lobby around these in the Carter administration, and it took over part of the State Department. Carter’s initial idea was to make the presidency popular: hence jumpers and jeans, and a dispersal of the Nixon trappings (the parade ground uniforms were sold to Bolivia). The man started his day at 6 a.m. and was generally exhausted; his wife was somewhat more ordered, and sometimes attended Cabinet meetings. There was fighting between the State Secretary, Cyrus Vance, who had had direct experience of Vietnam, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as National Security Adviser, who resented the world’s not putting him on the same level as Henry Kissinger. He was one for verbiage: ‘the need is not for acrobatics but for architecture’ were his words of wisdom to the world. Carter was a hapless fellow, everything, sunny side up, curdling: even after his lengthy retirement, as he kept pushing himself forward as a sort of sexless Clinton, the pattern prevailed, as North Korea fired missiles over Japan about two weeks after Carter had announced that she did not have any, and as Haiti collapsed into mayhem after he had announced that the great and good had come to power there. There was a similarly naïve attitude to matters Soviet. Carter scrapped the B1 bomber unilaterally, and cancelled the neutron bomb (telling an enraged Schmidt only later). There was also an absurd neglect of the Soviet navy — the expansion of which went back to the Cuban Crisis in 1962, after which 1,323 ships of all classes were built, to the Americans’ 120 major surface battleships and 188 nuclear submarines. In 1975, through Cuban proxies, the Soviets moved into Angola; and Ethiopia collapsed, on the edge of the now volcanic Middle East.

This regime will be remembered only for its failures. Of these, inflation and the mismanagement of the oil problem were the worst, and together they badly weakened the country. The only success of the time was the Egyptian-Israeli agreement (Camp David in September 1978, followed by the treaty in March 1979, but its Egyptian maker, Sadat, despised Carter so much that he did not even say in advance that he proposed to visit Israel). Carter’s worst failure came over energy policy. The great problem was American. There was huge demand for the oil companies to be controlled because of what were said to be ‘obscene’ profits (the word probably intended was ‘obese’ but the misuse has stuck). True, the profits had been enormous, rising from $7bn in 1972 to $16.5bn two years later, because oil which had been bought at the old price was sold at the new, and chemical operations had also flourished, given the weakness of the dollar, which encouraged exports. But the companies had been nationalized abroad, and their profits overall were, if anything, somewhat below the American average. Besides, oil policy had become a terrible tangle. Nixon had imposed price controls in 1971, to stop the then prevailing inflation of 5 per cent, and these had been kept, with extraordinarily complicated rules, for oil. The standard reporting requirements for the Federal Register required 200,000 respondents and five million man-hours; and ‘for the oil industry [it] became more important than the geologist’s report’. The direct costs ran into thousands of millions, and there were tales of extraordinary waste and maladministration. The regulation was meant to ensure fair shares, and to bring back refineries that had been kept out of service. It seems only to have profited lawyers. Administrations lurched, unwilling to accept that the price mechanism was in the end valuable. President Gerald Ford, in January 1975, talked nuclear power and coal; ecologists went to town. However, two things were at last put through. The Alaskan Pipeline, set to cost $10bn, was allowed; and in 1975 American automobiles had to have fuel efficiency standards. In 1977 Carter took over, appointing a multipurpose warhorse, James Schlesinger, as his maker of energy policy, in effect hoping for rationing because a CIA report of 1976 had predicted another oil shortage. In his plaintive moralizing way, Carter wanted oil use to be subject to even greater regulation, and proclaimed (April 1977) ‘the moral equivalent of war’, subsequently dismissed as the acronym ‘MEOW’. The point was that US oil prices were well below the world level, with absurd effects — the US at times even subsidized imports. A complicated effort was now made to revive coal, and to loosen the controls on natural gas: a very good time for lobbyists. Utility companies, oil producers, liberals, ecologists, coal producers all fought, and Schlesinger himself said that the decontrolling of natural gas had been ‘Chinese water torture’.

It was true that America was experiencing tissue regeneration under all of this. Whereas in other countries people tended to stay close to where they were born, Americans packed their bags and moved. Modern industries could shift, given air-conditioning technology, to the old South, the south-west and California, now gaining population at the expense of the north-east, and by 1964 California, with 30 million people, had become the largest state, Texas soon following. Shoots of ultramodern industry were coming up, and much ingenuity was shown as regards substitutes for oil. But the middle and later seventies were a demoralizing period.