The World

Norodoms and Kennedys, Castros, Kenyattas and Obamas

THE YOUNG KING OF CAMBODIA

Yet Zahedi and his cohorts were at large; Mosaddegh’s refusal to arm the Communists lost him their support, while his negotiations with the westerners alienated Kashani. On 19 August the ayatollah brought a mob to the city, aided by $100,000 of CIA funds, just as Zahedi re-emerged, sending troops to bombard Mosaddegh’s house. Old Bugger fled over his wall in his pyjamas, but was quickly arrested. In Rome, at the Excelsior Hotel, Soraya wept with relief. ‘I knew,’ said the shah, ‘they loved me.’^*

Flying home, Shah Mohammad spared Mosaddegh, who was confined to one of his estates, and dismissed Zahedi within a year, revealing himself as a steelier player than the west had expected. Vigilant and paranoid, he privately hated both superpowers, but played off the Soviets and Americans to the extent that Khrushchev ordered his assassination and Eisenhower threatened his deposition. He believed he could out-fox them both. At home he emulated Mosaddegh, commandeering his land reforms and nationalist rhetoric for a modern monarchy, planning to launch his own revolution.

Nasser too was playing the superpowers against each other – ‘Food from the Americans, money from the Arabs, guns from Russia, a veritable magician,’ joked the shah later. Now Nasser demanded funding for a huge project, the Aswan Dam. At first Eisenhower and Dulles were sympathetic, but, suspicious of Nasser’s Soviet links, they withdrew. As Nasser encouraged Palestinian attacks on Israeli borders, in July 1956 he nationalized the Suez Canal, using the resulting funds for the Dam. The British prime minister Anthony Eden, who after waiting for fifteen years to succeed Churchill was now addicted to painkillers and too ill to do the job, absurdly regarded Nasser as a new Hitler – a regular flaw in leaders of the Second World War generation. Meanwhile the French were suffering even more than the British from imperial decline.

On 7 May 1954, the commander of 11,000 French troops at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam sent a final message – ‘The enemy has overrun us. We are blowing up everything. Vive la France!’ – and surrendered to the forces of Ho Chi Minh. Faced with French reconquest, Ho and Giap had always believed that however much blood was spilt they would defeat the westerners. ‘You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours,’ Ho supposedly told a Frenchman. ‘But even at those odds, you’ll lose and I’ll win.’ Giap had exploited French incompetence by secretly using thousands of bearers to convey artillery through jungles to surround a French army – winning independence for North Vietnam.^*

In neighbouring Cambodia, an extraordinary young king was also striving for independence. Blessed with good looks, impulsive spirit, limitless ambitions and boundless egotism, King Norodom Sihanouk had spent his youth riding horses, playing football, studying films and chasing girls, fathering many children by many lovers from two of his own aunts to actresses and courtesans, and playing saxophone and clarinet in his own royal band. But he was determined to escape French rule. For the next fifty years, Sihanouk would variously be king, premier, president, autocrat as well as figurehead, victim and prisoner of Pol Pot, a career that started in 1941 when Paris selected Sihanouk to be king because he combined the two rival branches of the royal Norodom family.

As the prince was growing up, he was closely connected to a boy who would one day control him and kill a million of his people, including several of his children. Saloth Sar, son of well-off peasant farmers, arrived from the countryside with his brother to live with their cousin, who was a ballerina and mistress of then King Monivong; for eighteen months he trained as a novice Buddhist monk. Later, after an education at a privileged new boarding school, the future Pol Pot won a scholarship to study electronics in Paris.

The French–Vietnamese war helped push the playboy King Sihanouk into front-line politics. After triumphantly winning independence in 1953 following a tour through France and the USA, Sihanouk leaned towards socialism and rejected American hegemony. ‘Had I been born to an ordinary family,’ he said, ‘I’d have been leftist, but I was born a prince … I can’t detach myself.’ Yet Saloth Sar did detach himself. In Paris, he read Stalin, Mao, Rousseau, Sartre, and met his best friend Ieng Sary; they married sisters, and returned as fanatical Marxists. Saloth immediately joined a Viet Minh unit, but then emerged in Phnom Penh as a teacher. It seemed as though Saloth had returned to normal life.

A natural showman, Sihanouk revelled in the limelight but craved real power. On 2 March 1955, he suddenly abdicated (succeeded by his father) and, coining the title Samdech Upayuvareach – Prince Who Was King – he won the premiership. France was gone, and Sihanouk planned to navigate neutral peace for Cambodia.

Defeated in Asia, France was not willing to give up Africa, but many of its soldiers fighting the Vietnamese were Algerians. Algeria, French since 1830, was part of Metropolitan France; a million French settlers, the pieds-noirs or colons, lived there, but in 1945, in Sétif, Algerians demonstrated for rights, and French troops and colons fired into the crowds. Revenge attacks on the colons provoked the French to murder thousands of Algerians. On 1 November 1954, the Algerian FLN – Front de Libération Nationale – murdered Frenchmen across Algeria. The French army and the colon militias responded with brutality in a war that would rebound to threaten the very existence of French democracy.

While France struggled, Khrushchev and Mao were prevailing on all fronts. But now the Soviet leader almost destroyed his own empire.

AN ISRAELI IN PARIS

On 25 February 1956, Khrushchev defined his own supremacy by denouncing Stalin’s crimes to the Central Committee, a ‘secret speech’ that provoked first Polish unrest then, on 23 October, a Hungarian revolution against Soviet rule. Barely sleeping for weeks, facing the loss of Stalin’s empire, Khrushchev threatened to invade Poland, restrained himself, but then, nervously consulting Mao and even Tito, prepared to invade Hungary. Its revolution thrilled America: Stalin’s empire was tottering. Yet, the very next day, three powers met secretly in Paris to collude in a plan that let Khrushchev off the hook.

On 24 October, in a villa in Sèvres, the representatives of the old world – the declining empires Britain and France – and the new world – the energetic, tiny Israel – cooperated to humble another new force, Nasser, who had signed a massive arms deal with the Soviet Union and nationalized the Suez Canal. His troops were increasingly clashing with the Israelis – and he was backing Algerian rebels against France.

The British, French and Israelis shared the same enemy. An Israeli, Shimon Peres, protégé of Ben-Gurion, born Szymon Perski in Poland before arriving in Palestine in 1934, a master negotiator with a poetical streak, was already buying French weapons. ‘I was seduced by the French, nation of seduction,’ he told this author. ‘To me, a rough kibbutznik, Paris was the most beautiful city of dreams and literature.’ The US had refused to sell arms to Israel; France supplied them.

Now in Sèvres, Ben-Gurion, accompanied by his one-eyed chief of staff Moshe Dayan and Peres, secretly agreed with the French premier Guy Mollet and the British foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd to kill several birds with one stone: in an operation appropriately codenamed Musketeer, Israel would attack Egypt, whereupon France and Britain would intervene to impose peace. Within the secret Sèvres negotiations lurked a deeper secret. Peres explained that Israel was a tiny new state taking a risk: ‘We need a force of deterrence,’ he said. ‘France can give us this deterrent.’ France agreed. A country eight years old was getting the Bomb, developed at Dimona in the Negev. Peres never admitted that Israel had the Bomb. ‘War and peace are always a dance of the mysteries,’ he told this author, but it changed the balance of power in west Asia.

On 29 October, Ben-Gurion sent his army racing across Sinai; Anglo-French paratroopers seized the Canal; Nasser and his commander Abdel Hakim Amer bickered about the imminent downfall of Egypt. But the plan fell apart: Eden had not consulted Eisenhower, who, fearing that the Arabs would rally to the Soviets, demanded an Anglo-French withdrawal, sparking a run on the pound and the resignation of Eden. Ironically, Khrushchev also demanded their withdrawal, threatening nuclear war if they did not. Suez helped doom the Hungarians and save Khrushchev.

THE MINER AND THE SWIMMER: KHRUSHCHEV AND MAO

On 4 November, Khrushchev ordered Soviet forces to invade Hungary: they killed 10,000 rebels and restored Soviet rule before the capitalists could intervene. Yet his political bungling and drunken jabbering had alarmed his Stalinist comrades, who tried to overthrow him. Khrushchev was rescued by Marshal Zhukov, who flew in regional leaders to back him. But Zhukov was too popular, and Khrushchev soon denounced him for ‘Bonapartism’. Initially self-deprecating, Khrushchev, now both Party secretary and premier, changed into a swaggering autocrat who never stopped talking and believed himself expert on all matters, from literature to science. Now he was ready to break the impasse with the west. ‘Like it or not, history is on our side,’ he told ambassadors after the crushing of Budapest. ‘We will bury you!’ His nuclear threats during Suez had worked: ‘The winner has the strongest nerves.’

Yet he failed to keep the Communist world together. Mao was both horrified by and contemptuous of the cloddish Khrushchev, regarding himself as the paramount Marxist leader. His performance in Korea had demonstrated that China needed nuclear protection; now his shelling of Taiwanese territory provoked a nuclear threat from Eisenhower. ‘In today’s world, if we don’t want to be bullied,’ said Mao in January 1955, ‘we have to have this thing.’ In 1957, Khrushchev started to hand over nuclear technology to Mao, a process that led to the explosion of the Chinese Bomb. ‘If the worst came to the worst [nuclear war], and half of mankind died,’ Mao told the Russians in Moscow, ‘the other half would remain, imperialism razed, and the world would become socialist.’ Khrushchev was aghast. ‘I couldn’t tell if he was joking.’ He was not.

Mao was ungrateful. When Khrushchev requested listening posts on the Chinese coast, Mao reacted so menacingly that the Russian flew to Beijing. In a series of screaming rows, Mao humiliated and mocked him. ‘You’ve talked a long time,’ said Mao, ‘but you still haven’t got to the point,’ then forced him to come swimming where the floundering Russian struggled like a drowning pig to keep up with the Chinese shark. ‘I’m a miner, he’s a prize-winning swimmer,’ said Khrushchev. Mao, noticed his doctor Li Zhisui, ‘was deliberately playing the emperor, treating Khrushchev like a barbarian come to pay tribute.’

Khrushchev realized that Mao was like Stalin: ‘They were the same.’ Human life meant nothing. Challenged from within, Mao now launched a terror that took China out of the world game for a decade. Back in Moscow, the arrogant Khrushchev was scarcely chastened by this setback in Beijing. He backed the production of missiles to catch up with America – using the technology to launch space exploration, in October 1957, sending a satellite, Sputnik, then Laika the dog, the first mammal to orbit the earth (though she was probably already dead), and four years later the Vostok 3KA, in which a cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, orbited and returned. Eisenhower, in response, established NASA to catch up. Khrushchev decided the way to defeat the west was a monumental bluff that would take the world to the edge of cataclysm.

Suez destroyed Eden, but it empowered Nasser. In July 1958, the Egyptian leader’s reach was demonstrated when the Iraq mob played football with the head of the young king Faisal of Iraq …

DISEMBOWELLED IN BAGHDAD: EL RAIS AND THE LAST KING OF IRAQ

Nasser – wildly popular as El Rais, the Boss – threatened western allies, the Saudis of Arabia and the Hashemites of Jordan and Iraq. In Arabia, the founding king, Abdulaziz, died in 1953, choosing as heir, out of his forty-five sons, Saud, unwise and extravagant, who was soon embroiled in a costly war in Yemen against Egyptian troops. Saud and Nasser planned each other’s assassinations. In the Saud family, the brothers removed Saud and put the steely Faisal in control.

The Hashemites were more vulnerable. On 1 February 1958, Nasser and the Syrian president agreed to fuse their states into a single United Arab Republic with Nasser as panjandrum. The Hashemites panicked and planned a united kingdom of Jordan and Iraq, but this British-backed Arab Union was unpopular, especially in Baghdad. Its king Faisal II, a genial twenty-three-year-old, happiest playing cricket at Harrow, was dominated by the Anglophile strongman Nuri al-Said, who had fought with Lawrence of Arabia and been premier fourteen times. The Arab Union accelerated the plot of Iraq’s Free Officers, encouraged and inspired by Nasser.

On 14 July 1958, the night before King Faisal’s wedding, officers led by Abd al-Karim Qasim stormed the Rihab Palace. Faisal surrendered but was forced with his aunt, uncle and mother to stand in the courtyard, where they were machine-gunned down. ‘All I did was remember Palestine,’ said one of the assassins, ‘and the trigger on the machine gun just set itself off.’ The bodies were dragged down al-Rashid Street, stripped, mutilated, beheaded, stomped on, dismembered, gutted and dangled from balconies before being burned.

As the mob stormed his mansion, Premier Nuri escaped in women’s clothes, but his male shoes were spotted and he was shot and buried, only to be exhumed by the mob, emasculated, hanged and driven over repeatedly by buses. Nasser was delighted. The west was shocked, sending troops into Lebanon, while Khrushchev warned against any interference. In neighbouring Jordan, Hussein, now the last Hashemite monarch and surrounded by Nasserist officers, submitted himself to Nasser as Iraq was enveloped in a spiral of extremism. Qasim and his successors struggled to control a Baath (Resurrection) Party, founded in Syria by a Christian, which preached a violent mix of socialism, nationalism and anti-imperialism.

Within five years, in February 1963, the Baathists seized power in Syria and then in Iraq, where the bluff new premier, Colonel Ahmed al-Bakr, used his implacable cousin for special murderous tasks: the thirty-one-year-old Saddam Hussein.

Suez accelerated the African crisis that France and Britain handled very differently. Their vast African empires had existed for only around seventy years, but their power was haemorrhaging. Now France suffered an existential crisis that led to a military coup and the near destruction of democracy.

LA GRANDEUR: DE GAULLE AND HOUPHOUëT

In 1956, an Ivorian leader, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, joined the French cabinet as a minister, the first African, the first person of colour, in any European or North American government ever, something that would have been unthinkable in London, let alone in the US. Formidable, playful and shrewd, Houphouët was a phenomenon, son and successor of a tribal chief, who had converted to Catholicism and qualified as a doctor; he had served as a chef de canton in the Côte d’Ivoire, became grand propriétaire of a cocoa plantation and then in 1945 was elected to the French Assembly to represent his country, campaigning for independence with Machiavellian artistry. When he allied with the French Communists, he teased anyone who accused him of Communism: ‘How can we say I, Houphouët, traditional leader, doctor, grand propriétaire, Catholic, am a Communist?’

France had traditionally been brutal in crushing any challenge to its empire, but after Indo-China and Suez the French embraced Houphouët and other black African nationalists and, instead of fighting the rise of African potentates in British style, they chose their favourites and promoted them. Houphouët, soon president of independent Côte d’Ivoire and known as Papa or Le Vieux, became the intimate of French presidents as did the absolute kings of Morocco.^* But there was a glaring exception to this generous approach: the agony of Algeria.

As de Gaulle watched and waited in his Colombey house, the Algerian revolt deteriorated into a sectarian bloodbath. Yet it was Algeria that had brought him back to power. The French army and colons destroyed and deported whole villages, waterboarded and electrocuted prisoners or threw them out of helicopters, and assassinated leaders, while the FLN murdered, kidnapped, mutilated, raped civilians, terrorized Algerians and executed their own activists: in eight years, around 900,000 Algerians, 25,000 soldiers and 10,000 colons were killed. On 13 May 1958, as Parisian governments failed to cope, in Algiers French generals, backed by pieds-noirs, launched an insurrection against Paris and declared a Committee of Public Safety, feeling out de Gaulle, whom they called Le Grand Charles. He regarded the restoration of France as his destiny: ‘There was no moment in my life when I wasn’t certain one day I would rule France.’ It was not easy: ‘How can one govern a country,’ he said, ‘that has 258 cheeses?’ Now that country was on the verge of disintegrating. This strange-looking giant was born for conflict. ‘To be great,’ he paraphrased Shakespeare, ‘is to sustain a great quarrel.’ He believed that ‘France cannot be France without la grandeur.’ His definition of grandeur was himself. The Napoleons were on his mind: ‘I want 18 Brumaire [Napoleon’s 1799 coup] without the methods of 18 Brumaire.’ Yet by inclination and conviction he was a monarch. ‘The leader is he,’ he wrote while held in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1917, ‘who does not speak.’

His inscrutability allowed both sides, the floundering politicians and the rebellious generals, to believe he was theirs. A maestro of clandestine intrigue, much of it organized by a plump, bland ex-spy, Jacques Foccart, he kept the military threat simmering until the politicians accepted his return. ‘The national crisis’, he announced, could be ‘the start of a resurrection … Now I’m going to return to my village and hold myself at the disposal of the country.’

On 1 June 1958, as premier, he asked the National Assembly for full powers for six months, which they approved – giving his coup legality. Three days later he flew to Algeria to tell the ecstatic crowds: ‘I’ve understood you.’ He had, but not in the way they hoped. Eighty-five per cent of the French ‘Community’ (France and the African colonies) ratified a constitution that created what he called ‘a kind of popular monarchy which is the only system compatible with the character and perils of our epoch’.^*

One of his first acts was to invite the chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, to Colombey, where these two old men created a new Europe. His predecessor Mollet had already forged a European Economic Community. Initially de Gaulle was suspicious but a partnership with Adenauer placed France at the centre of an increasingly federal Europe. He kept Britain out with a haughty ‘Non!’ – and America at a distance, while he created France’s own nuclear force de frappe.

His priority was Algeria, where he surprised the colons, coolly betraying Algérie Française and granting Algeria independence. ‘We move,’ insisted the president, ‘or we die.’ In response, in April 1959, generals, paratroopers and Foreign Legionaries took over central Algiers, while at home the army planned to seize power. Addressing the nation in uniform, de Gaulle denounced this ‘handful of retired generals … We see the state flouted, the nation defied, our power degraded … Alas! Alas! Alas!’ He added, ‘Look where France risks going, compared to what she is in the process of becoming.’ The brutality intensified in Algeria and France; the FLN launched terrorist attacks in Paris; the pied-noir terrorist organization, the OAS, tried to kill de Gaulle. On 22 April 1961, French generals launched a coup d’état in Algiers against the French president. Soon afterwards French terrorists tried to kill him with a bomb. A year later on 22 August 1962, de Gaulle’s Citroën was ambushed by terrorists with a bullet narrowly missing his head. In Paris, on 17 October 1961, French police attacked an Algerian demonstration with such savagery that over fifty were killed, an atrocity unparalleled in any western democracy.

‘Napoleon said that in love,’ remarked de Gaulle, ‘the only victory is flight. In decolonization too, the only victory is to leave.’ On 1 July 1962, Algeria became independent. Yet if France was to remain great, the general said, ‘It is thanks to Africa.’

The general placed his éminence grise Foccart in charge of Françafrique, and Foccart duly became the godfather of the Francophone autocrats, most of whom worshipped de Gaulle. For thirty-five years under four presidents, Foccart policed African politics, sending in French troops and spies whenever French-backed autocrats were threatened. ‘Let’s put an end to this comedy,’ de Gaulle said to Foccart, who ordered troops into Gabon. When African dictators faked their elections, they were told, ‘The General finds 99.8 per cent a bit too much.’ In 1966, in the Central African Republic, a murderous officer, Jean-Bedél Bokassa, who worshipped de Gaulle as ‘papa’, seized power: Foccart advised that he was ‘reliable’.

‘Yes,’ answered de Gaulle, ‘but an idiot.’ Bokassa was backed by France as he crowned himself a Napoleonic emperor: only after thirteen years of tyranny, when he murdered hundreds of schoolchildren, did French troops remove him.^*

There was success too: Papa Houphouët did not expel French colonialists, praised ‘the human relationship between the French and Africans’ and ruled for thirty-three years as a French-backed autocrat, masterfully cooperating with French presidents. He was so close to de Gaulle that he helped draft the 1958 constitution. Houphouët, accompanied by his beautiful, free-spirited wife Marie-Thérèse, twenty-five years younger than Le Vieux, frequently saw de Gaulle and Foccart (the latter was godfather to their adopted children). The two Frenchmen backed Houphouët even when in old age he moved the Ivorian capital to his home village, where he built a cathedral larger than St Peter’s. It was said its French architect became too close to Marie-Thérèse: he died soon afterwards in a helicopter crash. Unembarrassed by his wealth – ‘People are surprised that I like gold; it’s simply that I was born in it’ – Houphouët helped Foccart overthrow Communist leaders all over Africa. Even in the twenty-first century, French troops were fighting in west Africa and presiding over successions. Such was France decolonization: ‘Everything had to change,’ writes Julian Jackson, ‘so everything could stay the same.’^*

Britain’s world-weary, unflappable new prime minister, Harold Macmillan, did things very differently – with a dance.

BURNING SPEARS: KENYATTA, NKRUMAH AND BARACK OBAMA (SENIOR)

On 18 November 1961, the first independent ruler of British Africa asked an English woman to dance the ‘high life’ shuffle at a ball held at Ghana’s State House – formerly the slave castle Fort Christiansborg. The occasion, the location, the characters could not have been more fitting for this moment, which marked a new era in the relations between Europe and Africa. She was Queen Elizabeth II, aged thirty-five, beaming in a bare-shouldered dress; he was the fifty-one-year-old president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, exuberant in black tie.

He was a Marxist, pan-Africanist autocrat and yet he admired the ‘young girl’. When her visit had been cancelled on a previous occasion because Elizabeth was pregnant, he exclaimed, ‘If you told me my mother had died, you couldn’t have caused greater shock.’ As Nkrumah drove a restless Ghana towards a one-party state, seeking a Soviet alliance, Macmillan worried that the queen could be killed. ‘How silly I’d look if I was scared to visit Ghana and then Khrushchev went,’ she grandly told the prime minister. ‘I’m not a film star. I’m the head of the Commonwealth – and I’m paid to face risks.’^*

The dance was the last act in a long movement between Britain and African independence leaders. Until Suez, London had counted on keeping many colonies and imprisoned African leaders and repressed rebellions, though its rule was increasingly undermined by energetic African resistance. But, with Britain bankrupted by world wars and now focused on European defence against Russia, Macmillan released them and allowed elections. This process was very different from what had gone wrong in South Africa. In Cape Town, on 3 February 1960, Macmillan had pointedly welcomed the ‘winds of change’. But South Africa was now ruled by white Afrikaners through a racist system of apartheid. Africans had never had the vote there under British rule, but in 1948 the Afrikaner National Party, campaigning on the slogan die kaffer op sy plek (‘the African in his place’), won power with the backing of the three-million-strong white electorate and proceeded to segregate thirteen million black Africans, to disfranchise mixed-race peoples and to ban interracial sex, measures similar to Jim Crow laws in the southern US states.

Four years earlier, the British had handed Ghana to Nkrumah; ten years before that, he had been in a British prison. An Akan goldsmith’s son who had attended the British Prince of Wales School in Accra as a boarder, then qualified as a teacher before studying in the US and Britain, Nkrumah regarded himself as a philosopher and historian. On his travels, he embraced Marcus Garvey’s dream of a one-state Africa and had met W. E. B. Du Bois.^* Winning elections in 1951, becoming premier of the newly independent Gold Coast in 1957, he renamed his country after the kings (ghanas) of medieval Wagadu. Attacking ‘tribalism’ and sidelining the Asante kings,^* Nkrumah, a lonely, isolated man, quickly instituted a one-party dictatorship with a semi-messianic cult (taking the title Osagyefo – Redeemer) and launched a crusade to make himself president of the united states of Africa.

At the London School of Economics, where he studied anthropology, he had encountered the other great African inspired by Du Bois, Johnstone Kamau, who changed his name to match his country.

Jomo Kenyatta, the strapping son of a Kikuyu farmer, was larger than life: educated by missionaries, he had studied in Moscow – where he disliked Marxism – and the LSE where he dazzled fellow students with his fez, cloak and silver-topped cane, and defined a new Kenyan nation in his anthropological study Facing Mount Kenya. After spending the war raising chickens in Sussex (where he was nicknamed Jumbo in the local pub) he went home. The British had carved several new-fangled entities out of British East Africa: one was Uganda but the largest was Kenya, named after its largest mountain. Farmed by 80,000 British settlers, famed for their cocktail-fuelled swinging (and occasional socialite murders), Kenya could have become a settler state like South Africa, but British land grabs fatally offended the Kikuyu, sparking an insurgency in 1952, called the Mau Mau uprising by the British, that killed thirty-two settlers and 2,000 Africans. The British crushed the rebels, killing 11,000, hanging 1,000, in their last colonial war in 1952, and they arrested Kenyatta – wrongly accused of leading the Mau Mau. He was in prison for seven years.

Kenyatta – known as the Burning Spear – was aided by a charismatic labour leader, Tom Mboya, a Luo, who was arranging scholarships for Kenyan youngsters. In 1960, Mboya helped send an exceptional Luo economics student named Barack Obama to study at Hawaii University.

His father, Hussein Onyango Obama, was a Luo farmer, elder and medicine man, living in western Kenya, near Uganda, so restlessly intelligent the villagers joked he had ‘ants up his anus’. But he had a son, Barack, by his fourth wife, Akumu. Educating himself, Hussein moved to Zanzibar, served in the British King’s African Rifles in Burma and returned at fifty with a gramophone. ‘How can the African defeat the white man,’ he asked, ‘when he can’t even make his own bicycle?’ Arrested and released by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion, he became friends with Mboya. Hussein adored Barack ‘because he was so clever’ but could not tolerate his independence, beating him when he was expelled from school. Barack married a local girl, Kezia, but hated the clerk’s job his father arranged for him in Mombasa. After his father threw him out, he attend independence rallies, was arrested and released. He became close to Mboya, who had just got back from America, where he had been welcomed by the American Committee on Africa, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, meeting Sidney Poitier and Martin Luther King and, at the family compound at Hyannis Port, a young senator and Democratic candidate called Jack Kennedy, who agreed to fund student exchanges.

Mboya chose Obama, who left for Hawaii; Kennedy won the presidential election.

NIKITA AND JACK, MIMI AND MARILYN

Joe Kennedy was still pulling the strings but he had faced unbearable blows: his eldest son Joe had been killed in the war; his daughter Kick perished in a plane crash; and Jack was (secretly) cursed with ill health, suffering back pain, Addison’s disease and hyperthyroidism, treated with steroids, amphetamines and hormones.

His father guided him into Congress straight after the war. In 1953, just after Jack’s election as senator, he married an elegantly ice-cool socialite, Jackie Bouvier, with whom he had a boy and a girl, but soon after his marriage he underwent massive back surgery. Ill health and Kennedy machismo encouraged a life of risk taking and womanizing; he often joined his friend Sinatra – supercool maestro of Swing – and his Rat Pack of actor pals, including Kennedy brother-in-law Pat Lawford and African-American Sammy Davis Jr – in Vegas, where singer and senator shared girls and jinks. Kennedy was already the best-prepared candidate for the presidency: a Harvard graduate who had studied at the LSE, travelled all over the world and met everyone, war hero and Pulitzer-prize winning author. Yet he had never run anything, his sex life was recklessly priapic, his health dubious, and his career had been funded by his rich father. He was already running for president when he first encountered Khrushchev.

In September 1959, the Russian visited the US, the first Russian leader to visit the continent. He had learned from the Suez crisis that nuclear threats won him respect and an invitation from Eisenhower. His pugnacious joviality – after the morose, saturnine Stalin – amazed the Americans. On the trip, he saw into the future when he visited the research campus of International Business Machines, IBM, but characteristically was more impressed by their canteen than their technology and understandably more excited by meeting Marilyn Monroe. But he also met Kennedy.

After the successful visit, Khrushchev’s detente with Eisenhower was destroyed by his discovery of US spy flights over the USSR. Outraged, he went on a hypomaniacal rampage that made his own comrades wonder if he was completely sane. He ordered a U2 spy plane shot down but then ranted at the Americans. When Macmillan visited Moscow to mediate, Khrushchev screamed at him, afterward boasting that he had ‘fucked the prime minister in the arse with a telephone pole’. At the UN, he banged his fists on the table and then smacked it with his shoe (to the embarrassment of his own comrades). ‘It was such fun!’ he said afterwards. Loathing Eisenhower and his vice-president Richard Nixon, he believed his strength had undermined the latter’s campaign, not only welcoming the election of the Massachusetts princeling but claiming, ‘We helped elect Kennedy.’

What looked like glamour to the Americans appeared to Khrushchev to be callowness. The Kennedy takeover of Washington was compared to a family of condottieri seizing a small town in Renaissance Italy. But they were better than that, bringing Camelot – the father’s vulgarity refined by one generation at Harvard into American class spangled with showbusiness – to Eisenhower’s dull Washington. It was very much a macho family business with brother Bobby as attorney-general and chief henchman, and an entourage of family retainers and friendly stars led by Sinatra, champion of civil rights, Mafia intermediary and Inaugural Gala organizer, who arranged lovers. ‘If I don’t have sex every day,’ he told the cerebral, asexual Macmillan, ‘I get a headache.’ His lovers varied from a courtesan, Judith Exner, introduced by Sinatra, and pop singer Phyllis McGuire, both shared with Sinatra’s friend, Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana, to Marilyn Monroe, shared with his brother Bobby, as well as his two secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle and a tall posh intern, Mimi Alford.

On her fourth day in the White House, Mimi was invited by the First Friend and presidential procurer Dave Powers to a swimming party, which led to cocktails and then to a euphemistic invitation: ‘Would you like a tour of the residence, Mimi?’ A tour of the residence usually included a tour of JFK. Mimi ‘cannot describe what happened that night as making love’ – she called him ‘Mister President’ even when naked in Jackie’s bed – but it was ‘sexual, intimate, passionate’, and later he introduced amyl nitrite poppers into their assignations.

JFK displayed his nastier side when, at the White House pool, he ordered her to give oral sex to Powers: ‘I don’t think the president thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did. The president silently watched.’ Calling himself ‘Michael Carter’ when he phoned her, she called him ‘the Great Compartmentaliser’, a quality essential for any leader. Indeed, ‘There was always a layer of reserve.’

Kennedy’s court was tightly controlled. JFK’s confidence allowed him to appoint the most gifted advisers and aim high at the essential reforms. A century after the civil war, racial apartheid still ruled the south, where African-Americans were segregated and could not vote. JFK was no liberal on race but he gingerly embraced long-overdue civil rights, pushed by a rising movement led by Martin Luther King, the son of the Atlanta pastor who had visited Berlin in 1934.

The pastor had often thrashed Martin junior, but ‘Whenever you whipped him, he’d stand there, and the tears would run down, and he’d never cry.’ His father had joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, committed to campaigning against ‘the ridiculous nature of segregation in the south’, telling a rally, ‘I ain’t gonna plow no more mules. I’ll never step off the road again to let white folks pass.’ His son recalled how when a policeman stopped him for a traffic offence and called him ‘boy’, his father pointed at Martin junior: ‘This is a boy. I’m a man and until you call me one I will not listen to you.’ So dapper he was nicknamed Tweedy, Martin junior studied in Boston, attending classes at Harvard and showed off his resonant eloquence on a musical student, Coretta Scott, with whom he was set up.

‘I’m like Napoleon at Waterloo,’ he said on the phone, ‘before your charms.’

‘You haven’t even met me yet,’ she laughed. When they were married, he tried to keep her out of the campaign, looking after their children. Serving as co-pastor of their Atlanta church with his father, he campaigned with him, in 1955 looking for a case to challenge segregation laws: when Rosa Parks, an African-American woman in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person and was arrested, the case sparked a campaign against Jim Crow. MLK organized a bus boycott; his house was bombed, but he emerged as the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, pushing JFK to cancel the Jim Crow laws. When MLK was arrested during the presidential election campaign, the Kennedys rang to support Coretta and got him released. But once in power the Kennedys allowed the FBI to bug King’s phones to discover any Communist connections – and to chronicle his adulterous affairs. Repeatedly arrested, during the spring of 1963 King moved his campaign to Birmingham, Alabama, where the police brutally crushed protests. From a Birmingham jail, King argued that only lawbreaking would bring change: ‘The Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is … the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice’; he added, ‘Everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.’

On 28 August, after Bobby Kennedy had ordered his release, he led his March to Washington for Jobs and Freedom, backed by JFK. In front of the Lincoln Memorial he addressed hundreds of thousands: ‘I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.’ Kennedy’s first attempt at a Civil Rights Bill failed, but he tried again.

As King campaigned, the young Kenyan, Barack Obama senior, a scholar partly funded by Kennedy, had enrolled as the first African student at Hawaii University. In early 1960, in a Russian class, Obama met a white American anthropology student who gloried in the name Stanley Ann Dunham. ‘He was black as pitch,’ wrote their son Barack Obama later, ‘my mother white as milk,’ yet they were welcomed by his grandparents. The Dunhams from Kansas, descended from a Union soldier, a cousin of Jefferson Davis, and a Cherokee, were freethinking liberals. After Ann brought a black girl home to play and a neighbour said, ‘You best talk to your daughter, Mr Dunham. White girls don’t play with coloreds in this town,’ they moved to Hawaii.

‘Brilliant, opinionated and charismatic’, Obama, scholar, talker and dandy, favouring blazers, ascot hats and smoking a pipe, was masterful, irrepressible but also reckless and unpredictable: when a friend nudged his pipe off a cliff, Obama senior ‘picked him clear off the ground and started dangling him over the railing’. On 4 August 1961, Ann gave birth to a son, Barack junior, but Obama was restless and the marriage failed. Ann started a relationship with an Indonesian student that took mother and son to Indonesia. ‘Your father could handle just about anything,’ the boy’s grandfather told Barack junior later. Nonetheless, Barack senior hardly saw his son again, moving to Harvard, where he married a young Jewish student. But the career of the son would change the USA – while his father, intense and troubled, returned to Kenya, where Kenyatta, finally released by the British, and Mboya were negotiating independence.

While the new states struggled to establish themselves, Africa had an emperor whose country – apart from six years of Italian occupation – had never been colonized.

THE LION OF JUDAH – AND THE AFRICAN PIMPERNEL

On 13 December 1960, when Haile Selassie, now sixty-eight and in power since 1916, was visiting Brazil, a junta of his courtiers seized most of his cabinet at the Menelik Palace and launched a coup – Africa’s first. Outside Ethiopia he was an African hero, the Lion of Judah; at home, he was an isolated autocrat who was building an empire.

Everything was centred in his person at the Menelik Palace, where in Amharic it was said you had to ‘let your face be slapped’ and ‘wait a long time outside the gate’ if you wanted to be noticed by the emperor.

The negus had formed interlocking security agencies, the Department of Public Security and the even more secret Imperial Private Cabinet which watched his own ministers, who were constantly moved from job to job, except for the devoted minister of the pen. But this tight control blinded him: he promoted a talented officer, Workneh Gebeyehu, from head of the security agency to chief of chancellery. But then the favourite suggested that the old negus should abdicate in favour of the crown prince. ‘Workneh,’ replied the negus, ‘we’re dismayed to find you’re still a child. We’ll continue to exercise power the Almighty has vested in us to the end. Besides: have you ever heard of anyone voluntarily relinquishing power?’ Workneh conspired with two of the emperor’s other favourites to overthrow the Lion. Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen agreed to broadcast a ‘revolutionary proclamation’ that he was now regent of a constitutional government: ‘Today is the start of a new era.’ But the emperor rushed back from Brazil.

At the airport, his son lay in the dust at his feet. Raising him, Haile Selassie said, ‘We would have been proud of you if We were coming to attend your funeral. Get up!’ Their relationship never recovered. The Lion’s troops attacked the rebels in the streets of Addis. Two thousand were killed. When imperial tanks attacked the palace where the ministers were held, the rebels killed fifteen ministers and generals. The ex-favourite Workneh shot himself, and his body was strung up outside St George’s Cathedral.

‘There’ll be no change in the system,’ announced the Lion, who now moved into the new Jubilee Palace. The heir to Menelik II, he was an empire builder: after the British had occupied the Italian colony of Eritrea in 1946, the UN placed it in a federation with Ethiopia, but Haile Selassie annexed it in 1962 and banned political parties that disagreed. Like all empires, Ethiopia was held together by force. Rebellions in Eritrea and the Somalian Ogaden became festering wars of conquest.

Yet Haile Selassie was the iconic African leader. In February 1962, he invited African freedom fighters to a Pan-African Freedom Movement conference in Addis Ababa, at which, wearing a gorgeously braided, bemedalled uniform, he was the first speaker. He was followed by a South African lawyer, travelling for the first time: Nelson Mandela. The forty-three-year-old Mandela was fascinated by ‘how small the emperor appeared, but his dignity and confidence made him seem like the African giant he was’. This was so even though Ethiopia was no democracy: ‘Only the emperor was supreme.’

Mandela – clan name Madiba – was a prince of the Xhosa people of Thembu, in Transkei, northern Cape, descended from King Zwide. His father, counsellor of the Thembu king, was sacked for defying the British, but Mandela was adopted by his people’s charismatic regent and raised with the princes. ‘My later notions of leadership were influenced by observing the regent,’ who groomed him to be counsellor, sending him to Methodist boarding schools. After qualifying as a lawyer and marrying a nurse Evelyn, the tall, handsome Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC), because ‘To be an African in South Africa means one’s politicized from birth.’ Mandela devoted his life to the campaign against apartheid. He was repeatedly arrested, his dedication leading to the estrangement of his wife, with whom he had a son. Then: ‘As I passed a bus stop, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a lovely young woman waiting for the bus.’ Mandela fell in love with Winnie Madikizela – ‘her passion, her youth, her courage, her wilfulness’ – and ‘My love for her gave me added strength for the struggles that lay ahead,’ and two children.

In 1960, police in Sharpeville killed sixty-nine protesters and wounded 249, igniting further protests for which Mandela was arrested. But when he was acquitted ‘I became a creature of the night,’ nicknamed the Black Pimpernel. He now founded the ANC’s military wing – Spear of the Nation – which started a bombing campaign. Haile Selassie invited Mandela and his comrades for military training. But when he got home from Addis, the Pimpernel was arrested.

In prison, ‘The officer turned a blind eye [to him and Winnie] and we embraced and clung to each other.’ At his trial for high treason and terrorism Mandela, dressed not in a suit but in a Xhosa leopard-skin kaross, declared in a speech, ‘I am prepared to die.’ On 12 June 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Confined on Robben Island – from where only one prisoner had ever escaped to the mainland – the guards greeted him by chanting in Afrikaans: ‘This is the island. Here you will die!’ When he was defiant, they threatened, ‘Look, man, we’ll kill you, no fooling, your wives and children will never know what happened.’

Mandela deployed steely discipline and daily meditation to survive, writing to Winnie that prison was ‘an ideal place to learn to know yourself … At least, if for nothing else, the cell gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good,’ adding, ‘Never forget a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying.’ While he was away, his eldest son was killed in a crash, and Winnie often arrested. In his letters to her, he acclaimed ‘your devastating beauty and charm … Remember, hope is a powerful weapon when all else is lost … You’re in my thoughts every moment.’ His twenty-seven years in prison corroded their marriage yet burnished his legend.

Meanwhile, on 25 May 1963, in Addis, Haile Selassie, paragon of African rulers, invited his rivals to the first meeting of his Organization of African Unity: Nkrumah, Anglophone Marxist, hoped to lead a United States of Africa with its own army; Francophone Papa, Houphouët of Ivory Coast, mocked his ambitions. Haile Selassie held the balance between the two, leading the organization before handing over to Nkrumah the Redeemer.

‘I know decolonization is disastrous,’ said de Gaulle privately. ‘They’re again going to experience tribal wars, witchcraft, cannibalism,’ yet ‘The Americans and Russians think they’ve a vocation to free colonized populations and are outbidding each other.’ Khrushchev was the first to spot the opportunity of ‘uprisings against rotten reactionary regimes, against colonizers’, promising ‘to march in the front rank with peoples fighting national liberation struggles’. The proxy wars of the superpowers – a second scramble, this time in the name of decolonization and freedom – would kill more Africans than the first.

It started in early 1960, when the Belgians had suddenly lost control of Congo. After the Force Publique shot demonstrators in the streets, they held elections and King Baudouin (great-grandson of Leopold II) praised Belgium’s ‘civilizing mission’ as he conceded independence in June 1960. Meanwhile Belgium, hoping to keep control of military and resources (Congo possessed uranium among other mineral treasures), organized the overthrow of the elected first premier, Patrice Lumumba, thirty-five – a talented pan-Africanist but also a Soviet ally – by Colonel Joseph Mobutu, Force Publique officer, now chief of staff. Mobutu was the first of many politicised generals who demonstrated how often in the new African states, conglomerated by the colonial powers into huge new entities, the army emerged as the embodiment of the nation. Astonishingly, the Belgians ordered Lumumba’s ‘elimination definitive’, their agents seizing, torturing then shooting him before dissolving him in acid. A Belgian agent took one of his teeth home as a trophy. Khrushchev was infuriated as Mobutu, backed by the USA, established a baroque, kleptocratic dictatorship of Zaire that lasted for thirty years.^*

JFK had promised in his inaugural address that ‘In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom’ – code for fighting Communism – ‘in its hour of maximum danger. I don’t shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.’ Khrushchev too sought a way to raise the stakes, but unexpectedly he found his opportunity in the Americas when another pair of brothers took power just ninety miles from Miami.

BROTHERS: THE CASTROS AND THE KENNEDYS

On 9 January 1959, the thirty-three-year-old cigar-chomping, bearded Fidel Castro, El Comandante, assisted by his dourer brother Raul, who directed the military, rode into Havana. The Castros were illegitimate but well-educated sons of a sugar planter, a self-made Spanish immigrant who had amassed 25,000 acres; they had been taught by Jesuits, imbibing St Ignatius’ ‘All dissidence is treason.’ Fidel became a doctor of law but embraced revolution (‘if I could be Stalin’), first joining an abortive coup in Bogotá, then, disgusted by Batista’s return to power, leading the attack on the Moncada Barracks, Santiago. The brothers were captured.

Castro became famous, treating the court to a grandiloquent oration – ‘History will absolve me’ – but the brothers only escaped being shot thanks to their connections: Castro’s wife was the sister of Batista’s interior minister. When he discovered after his imprisonment that she too had joined the Interior Ministry, he divorced her; politics was all. He was verbose and loquacious, even his brother Raul complaining that in prison he never stopped talking for weeks on end.

When American pressure forced Batista to release him, Fidel fled to Mexico City, where he met Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, a handsome, asthmatic doctor, son of a rich Argentine family. ‘Extraordinary’, said Castro, ‘a person of great culture, great intelligence … a doctor who became a soldier without ceasing to be a doctor’. The two talked all night.

In November 1956, the brothers plus eighty-one half-trained fighters boarded a leaky boat, the Granma, and landed in Cuba. They were heavily bombarded, and only nineteen of the eighty-one survived, but the Castros and their barbudos – bearded ones – launched a guerrilla war in which they were three times almost annihilated but, aided by the remoteness of the Sierra Maestra, survived. Thanks to Batista’s corruption, arrogance and ineptitude, plus surprisingly some misguided CIA funding, the legend and successes of the Fidelistas grew. Castro himself met a young guerrilla, Celia Sánchez, a doctor’s daughter, who became his lover and aide. At the darkest moments, when they had just twelve fighters left, ‘Celia was with me.’

As Batista fled with millions, in January 1959 Castro set up headquarters in Havana’s Hilton Hotel, ruling with Raul as war minister, Che as education minister and Celia, in whose tiny apartment he lived, as secretary of the council of ministers. Those on a death list of enemies were shot. ‘We’re not executing innocent people,’ Fidel insisted, just ‘murderers and they deserve it’. American fruit tycoons and Mafia kingpins were driven out.

The Castro brothers ruled together, but they were opposites: Fidel, an egomaniac showman and bloviating strategist; Raul, cautious and meticulous. Fidel was nicknamed El Caballo – the Horse – favouring one-night stands with admirers from abroad, particularly dazzled French liberals; Raul was inseparable from his wife Vilma. Yet they spoke several times a day and, when the regime was settled, they lived next to each other on Punto Cero, a heavily fortified estancia outside Havana. Fidel’s office contained a portrait of José Martí, a signed photograph of Ernest Hemingway (‘I read For Whom the Bell Tolls three times’) and one of his own father.

Castro initially saw himself more as a Latino Alexander the Great (he named several of his sons Alexander) than as a Lenin, but, he explained, ‘I had a compass – Marx and Lenin.’ In February 1960, Khrushchev sent his ally Anastas Mikoyan to Havana. Mikoyan, a tough Armenian ex-seminarist who had survived the inner circles of Lenin and Stalin, advised Khrushchev to support Castro. The combination of the impulsively manic ex-miner Khrushchev and the highly strung, narcissistic Cuban intellectual was about to bring the world to the edge of catastrophe.

Kennedy inherited CIA plans to invade Cuba. On 17 April 1961 his invasion, using 1,400 Cuban émigrés and a few American planes, landed at the Bay of Pigs but was easily repelled by Castro: although hundreds of Castro’s militia were killed, he captured a thousand of the émigrés, and executed hundreds. ‘Thanks for Playa Girón,’ he wrote to JFK, referring to the beach where the raiders had landed. ‘Before the invasion, the revolution was weak. Now it’s stronger.’ JFK soon sacked Allen Dulles from the CIA.^* Although he had despised the Mafia corruption in Havana, even sympathizing with Castro, he ordered the Cuban’s liquidation – with Mafia assistance. The CIA recruited Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante and Giancana. At least eight attempts, including poisoned diving gear, cigars, toothpaste, failed. ‘There were dozens of plans,’ said Castro, ‘some close to succeeding,’ but ‘chance sometimes intervened against them’. Khrushchev was unimpressed by Kennedy.

Inconsistency was the only consistent thing about Khrushchev. On 4 June 1961, the two men met in Vienna, where the pugnacious Khrushchev almost crushed JFK, twenty-three years younger but medicated for his back pain. ‘If the US starts a war over Germany,’ Khrushchev shouted, ‘let it be so’ – a chilling moment in a depressing encounter. ‘It’s going to be a cold winter,’ concluded JFK. He was crestfallen. ‘He just beat the hell out of me,’ he said. But he hardened himself.

Khrushchev mocked JFK as ‘very inexperienced, even immature’. He first hoped to force Kennedy out of west Berlin. ‘Berlin is the testicles of the west,’ said Khrushchev, ‘every time I want the west to scream, I squeeze.’ But the testicles survived the squeezing. It was his front-line satellite, East Germany, a grim totalitarian dystopia policed by the omniscient Stasi, that was fragile. So many citizens were escaping to western plenty that Khrushchev ordered the building of the Berlin Wall to confine its people. Now he mulled over Kennedy’s threat to Cuba. ‘The most important consideration in the power struggle of our time’, he decided was that ‘those with weak nerves go to the wall’. He would test those nerves. ‘It’s like playing chess in the dark.’

INSTALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN CUBA: THE MILLIONAIRE’S WHORE AND THE IMMORAL GANGSTER

After the Bay of Pigs, ‘one thought’, recalled Khrushchev, ‘kept hammering away at my brain, “What if we lose Cuba?”’ In May 1962, he had an idea for his comrades: ‘Fidel would be crushed if another invasion were launched,’ but if he placed ballistic missiles on Cuba ‘such a disaster’ could be prevented, plus they would ‘equalize the balance of power’: the Americans had just installed missiles in Türkiye, right on his borders. The grandees acquiesced before the bombastic Khrushchev, but Mikoyan had a question. The Americans would strike the missiles: ‘What are we supposed to do then – respond with a strike on US soil?’ Mikoyan was overruled. ‘Install nuclear rocket weapons. Transport secretly. Disclose later,’ recorded the minutes. ‘This will be an offensive policy.’

Within days, the Castros were informed. ‘The best way to safeguard Cuba,’ replied Fidel. ‘We’re willing to accept all the missiles.’ Khrushchev told his comrades he was stuffing ‘a hedgehog’ down Uncle Sam’s pants. In July as plans were made, Raul Castro and Che Guevara visited Moscow, asking, ‘What precautions have you taken in case the operation is discovered?’

‘Don’t worry,’ beamed Khrushchev, ‘there’ll be no big reaction and if there is, I’ll send the Baltic Fleet.’ Later he suggested, ‘I’ll grab Kennedy by the balls and make him negotiate,’ adding that, like a peasant who brings his goat into his hut for winter and gets used to the stink, Kennedy would ‘learn to accept the smell of the missiles’.^*

On 26 July 1962, a Soviet armada departed from Odessa bearing 44,000 troops and six atomic bombs, along with eighteen nuclear cruise missiles, three divisions of tactical nuclear weapons and six bombers. In August they started installing the missiles: it is likely Khrushchev permitted his commander to use the tactical weapons – if necessary. American intelligence noticed activity in Cuba but had missed massive activity in Odessa and never realized the full extent of the Soviet deployment.^*

On 14 October, a US spy plane revealed some of the missiles in Cuba, throwing JFK into an existential world crisis. He had found the hedgehog in his pants. ‘He can’t do this to me,’ he said, calling Khrushchev ‘a fucking liar’, an ‘immoral gangster’. It was the biggest crisis any president would face, and ultimately he proved his acumen, telling his Executive Committee, ‘Gentlemen, we’re going to earn our pay today.’

Kennedy listened as his hawkish aides proposed surgical attacks on the missiles, a plan supported by nine members of his Executive Committee against seven who supported a blockade. But he quickly switched to blockading Cuba and announced a press conference. In the Kremlin, Khrushchev panicked: ‘That’s it! Lenin’s work has been destroyed.’ Mikoyan and the Presidium, all Second World War veterans fearful of war, were alarmed by his recklessness. Khrushchev was afraid that an invasion was imminent, and admitted, ‘The tragedy is they can attack and we’ll respond. This could escalate into large-scale war.’ Khrushchev urged his commanders to ‘Make all efforts initially not to use atomic weaponry,’ and now stressed that Moscow’s authorization would be required for their deployment.

In Washington, JFK announced instead a quarantine of Cuba and demanded removal of weapons. At the ExComm, ‘we’d taken the first step,’ recalled Bobby, ‘– and we were still alive.’ JFK permitted his trigger-happy generals to plan air strikes – all of them unaware that a full nuclear arsenal was on the island – but ‘it looks like hell’, he told Bobby, ‘doesn’t it!’ JFK was obsessed with a history book, The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, about the start of the First World War, which he and his aides had read. ‘They somehow seemed to tumble into war,’ he said, through ‘stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur’. Never has a historian been so important.

In Moscow, a jumpy Khrushchev ordered some of the Soviet ships to turn back; in Washington, keen to test the quarantine, JFK was delighted to see the six ships turn, but ordered the stopping of all of them. ‘His face seemed drawn, his eye pained,’ noted Bobby. The order to stop the other ships, which would have led to confrontation, was withdrawn just in time. ‘For a moment the world had stood still and now it was going round again.’ In Moscow, a sleepless Khrushchev ‘swore at Washington, threatened to nuke the White House’, but then calmed down and led his comrades off to watch Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi. ‘It’ll have a calming effect,’ said Khrushchev. ‘If Khrushchev and other leaders are sitting in the theatre, then everyone can sleep soundly.’ But the next morning, when he learned of a tightening of the blockade, he cursed ‘like a bargeman’, stamping his foot. ‘I’m gonna crush that viper!’ he bellowed. JFK was ‘a millionaire’s whore’.

While Khrushchev was calming down, Kennedy sent Jackie and the children out of Washington and raised DEFCON (Defence Readiness Condition) to Level 2,^* just short of war, a move that so alarmed Khrushchev that he told Mikoyan he was withdrawing the missiles in return for ‘promises the Americans won’t attack Cuba’. He dictated a long, meandering letter offering a mix of peace and defiance. But the crisis was still escalating: Castro ordered the shooting down of any US aeroplanes and prepared for an imminent American invasion, staying up all night at the Soviet embassy, drinking beer and eating sausages. It was now he decided that the best course was nuclear war.

Khrushchev had been reading translations of articles by the powerful Washington Post columnist Walter Lippman, who had suggested a solution: removal of American missiles from Türkiye in return for removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. No journalist in history has ever been so influential. With this idea, Khrushchev sent a second less conciliatory letter to JFK, who dispatched his brother to discuss the plan with the Soviet ambassador. As the president relaxed somewhat, Special Assistant Dave Powers summoned his teenage lover, the intern Mimi. Yet though he chatted to her, JFK’s ‘expression was grave … even his quips had a half-hearted, funereal tone’: ‘I’d rather my children were red than dead,’ he said before sending her alone off to bed while he watched a movie, Roman Holiday.

The leaders were moving towards the deal, yet soldiers and weapons were still moving towards war. Khrushchev now received Castro’s letter: ‘the imperialists might initiate a nuclear strike against the USSR’, suggested Fidel, so the ‘moment would be right’ to launch nuclear strikes on America. ‘However difficult and horrifying this decision may be, there is I believe no other recourse.’ It remains the most terrifying letter ever written by a leader. Khrushchev was horrified: ‘When this was read to us, we, sitting in silence, looked at one another for a long time.’

‘You proposed we carry out a nuclear first strike,’ he wrote to Castro. ‘This wouldn’t be a simple attack but the start of a thermonuclear world war.’

‘We knew we’d be exterminated … should a thermonuclear war break out,’ responded Castro, ‘and if such an event occurred, what would one do with the madmen who unleashed the war?’

Soviet troops were permitted to resist with anything non-nuclear – and they shot down an American plane and killed a pilot. Bobby told the Soviet ambassador that his brother could withdraw the Turkish missiles in ‘4–5 months’ but ‘can’t say anything public’, adding, ‘Time is of the essence.’ This was no exaggeration: off Bermuda, US ships dropped non-lethal depth charges to signal to a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine, the B-59, that it should surface. Yet the officers of B-59 had had no contact with Moscow and only knew of negotiations from American radio. Around midday on 27 October, Captain Savitsky, believing the two superpowers were at war, ordered the launch of a T5 nuclear missile: ‘Prepare [nuclear] torpedo tube 1 and 2 for firing!’ But his commander, Akhipov, using the sub as a command centre, overruled him and convinced him to surface, where an American ship flashed its searchlights in a friendly gesture. Savitsky understood and ordered: ‘Stop preparations for firing.’ It was the closest the world came to nuclear war.

At his dacha at Novo-Ogarevo outside Moscow (later Vladimir Putin’s residence), Khrushchev persuaded his comrades, Mikoyan and his protégé, the titular head of state Leonid Brezhnev, to take JFK’s offer of Cuba for Türkiye: ‘To save humanity, we should retreat.’

In Washington, JFK was so relieved ‘I feel like a new man,’ he told Powers. ‘Do you realize we had an air strike all arranged for Tuesday. Thank God it’s all over.’ But when Khrushchev informed Havana, Castro was incandescently defiant. Khrushchev suggested ‘we offer friendly advice: show patience, restraint and more restraint’, and sent Mikoyan, even though his wife Ashken was dying in Moscow, to Havana, where he told Castro the missiles were going home. In private, Castro called Khrushchev a ‘bastard … asshole’, and ranted, ‘No cojones! No balls! Maricon! Homosexual!’ At a later meeting on 22 November, Castro refused to allow UN inspections and raged at Mikoyan: ‘We didn’t agree with the removal of the missiles … What do you think we are? A zero on the left, a dirty rag.’ Then he bid for nuclear weapons.

Castro: We took the risk … We were even prepared for a nuclear war …

Mikoyan: We were also prepared to make sacrifices for Cuba.

Castro: Doesn’t the Soviet Union transfer nuclear weapons to other countries?

Mikoyan: We’ve a law prohibiting the transfer of any nuclear weapon.

Castro: Would it be possible to leave the tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba …

Mikoyan: No, Comrade Fidel, it would not be possible.

Mikoyan learned his wife had died, and sent his son Sergo^* home to attend the funeral, which Khrushchev oafishly refused to attend himself: ‘I don’t like funerals, it’s not like attending a wedding is it?’ The ballistic weapons were removed, even the atom bombs and tactical nuclear weapons – the ones the Americans hadn’t known about.

The crisis was over.

Khrushchev denounced the Cuban: ‘Because he’s young, he couldn’t behave himself.’ But the crisis had shown, he said, ‘we are members of the World Club’ and defended himself: ‘It’s not necessary to act like the tsarist officer who farted at the ball and then shot himself.’ It had been a bit more than a fart at a ball. ‘I cut his balls off,’ exulted JFK, who resumed the affair with Mimi. Kennedy and Khrushchev, who had terrified each other, hinted through aides that it was time to reduce nuclear weapons and agreed to establish a hotline – actually a teleprinter – to avoid future crises. Each side tested the hotline – the US quoting Shakespeare, the Soviets Chekhov: it would be used sooner than anyone guessed.

‘We have a problem making our power credible,’ said JFK, ‘and Vietnam looks like the place.’ Khrushchev regarded Ho Chi Minh as a Red ‘saint’ but gave limited backing to the Vietnamese, monitoring more US personnel arriving in Thailand and South Vietnam. Kennedy, riding high after Cuba, hated – and was hated by – the two Asian leaders who most resembled him.

SIHANOUK AND THE SHAH

Prince Sihanouk, charismatic playboy, now in love with a teenaged Eurasian beauty queen named Monique who became his chief but not only lover, often compared to Jackie Kennedy, was trying to keep Cambodia neutral. Sihanouk joined the non-aligned movement, led by Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno, which leaned strongly towards the Soviets. But in Indo-China, where even the US and USSR agreed to a neutral Laos, there was little space for real neutrality. After a breathing space following the French withdrawal, Ho Chi Minh and his younger more aggressive comrade Le Duan ordered General Giap to infiltrate South Vietnam, now ruled by another set of siblings, President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brothers.^*

Kennedy raised the number of American military advisers from 1,000 to 16,000, and pressured Sihanouk to resist Communist encroachment. The CIA approved Sihanouk’s assassination, organized by the Ngos, but the prince survived the bomb. Kennedy himself was exasperated by the Ngos, who were brutally crushing mounting Buddhist protests. In November 1963, just twenty days before JFK went to Dallas, the Ngos were deposed by their generals and bayoneted, though Madame Nhu survived because she was abroad. Sihanouk, growing close to China, resented JFK’s menaces.

Similarly, JFK had much in common with the shah – the same age, both athletic playboy sons of domineering self-made moguls, both married to cool-blooded fashion icons. But tragically Queen Soraya could not have children; after the shah, now forty, had begged her to allow him to take a second wife, they divorced and in 1959 he married a young, high-spirited architecture student, Farah Diba, wearing a wedding dress by Yves Saint Laurent. Farah was more liberal, more open to change than he was. They had two sons and two daughters, and her elegance too was compared to that of Jackie Kennedy. Both JFK and Mohammad Pahlavi were risk-taking womanizers and clients of the Parisian Madame Claude.^*

Yet president and shah hated each other. In the ten years since the fall of Mosaddegh, the shah had emerged as the rising power of the region. While coping with a welter of conspiracies, he renegotiated the oil deals with the west and in 1960 he was one of the founders of OPEC, the oil producers’ organization, managing to be close to both Saudis and Israelis, whom he respected and liked. Playing the Americans against the Soviets, he chose the former as allies but resented their interference. He created a secret police, SAVAK, to hunt Communists, many of whom he executed, and to confront the constant plots against him.

JFK regarded the shah as an inefficient tyrant, advising that he appoint a Kennedy ally as premier. Bristling with pride and planning revolution and rearmament, the shah was incensed but agreed, convinced JFK was trying to overthrow him. When the shah and Farah visited Kennedy at the White House, the meetings were chilly. On the shah’s return, his firm treatment of the ayatollahs finally convinced JFK that he could be a useful ally.

On 9 January 1963, the shah launched his Shah and People Revolution, to industrialize, distribute land and grant female rights, but it outraged the ulema – Islamic jurists – led by Ruhollah Khomeini. The glowering ayatollah, sixty-three years old, seemed the very model of a medieval mullah, but he was also an innovator. Backed by Fadayan-e Islam, the secret network of terrorist extremists who had assassinated several ministers, Khomeini was developing an extraordinary idea that involved rejection of secular rule altogether: as Shiites awaited the messianic emergence of the occulted Mahdi, they should adopt rule by an Islamic judicial guardian – velayat-e faqih – and probably Khomeini was already thinking of himself. Most of the ulema regarded the idea as eccentric if not bizarre.

On Ashura, 3 June 1963, Khomeini denounced the ‘wretched miserable’ shah, comparing him to the Umayya caliph Yazid who had killed the first imam Husain on that day. The shah turned to his trusted premier, Asadollah Alam, a debonair landowner who had given away his estates and prosecuted corrupt officials. ‘Guns and cannon are in my hand … I’ll tear their mothers apart.’ On 5 June, Alam arrested Khomeini, sparking days of riots that were suppressed by the army, which shot 400 dead. Temporarily moving his trusted Alam aside, the shah appointed a new premier, Hassan Ali Mansur, who berated Khomeini and slapped his face. Dispatched into exile in Iraq, Khomeini ordered Mansur’s assassination. Yet the shah had triumphed. Khomeini was irrelevant and obsolete.

The shah, appointing his friend Alam as court minister, a job more important than premier in an absolute monarchy, had won time to put his revolution into practice. His aims were admirable, his execution flawed, yet the shah successfully promoted Iran as ‘the key to a vast region’, receiving massive US armaments, while supporting western allies Morocco, Jordan and Israel.^* Iran countered a radical Iraq by backing a rebellion by its Kurds.

The shah was admired by Alam as ‘a determined, demanding reformer’, a meritocrat who liked to say, ‘Where did the Pahlavis begin? My father was a simple soldier from the provinces.’ Negotiating everything himself, the shah trusted no one, and complained of the stress. His recreation was hardly different from that of any other potentate, but Alam’s diaries reveal the details. The marriage with Farah was happy, yet he and Alam enjoyed flying in ‘visitors’ – Madame Claude’s call girls, who were paid in jewels. Sounding exactly like JFK, he said sex was his ‘only relaxation … If it weren’t for this little indulgence of mine, I’d be an utter wreck.’ Queen Farah, intelligent, sensitive, ‘a moderating influence’, disliked Alam, knowing that ‘her husband and I go philandering together’.

At home, the shah’s policies had created a literate middle class, and millions of peasants moved to the cities to work. Yet the shah offered no participation in government, the oil money was frittered away on luxury, corruption and armaments instead of alleviating poverty, while SAVAK resorted to torture to crush dissent. But as his friend the duke of Edinburgh, who stayed with him, told this author, ‘The shah shows it is dangerous and difficult if you try to do everything yourself.’ The shah, spoiled by success and ever more grandiose, felt his rise was providential – a view confirmed when his enemy in the White House went on campaign to Dallas.

EXIT KENNEDY: LBJ AND MLK

In Dallas, on 22 November 1963, JFK, riding in an open limousine with Jackie, chic personified in a pink Chanel suit, was shot in the skull and throat by an assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, probably operating alone. As sections of his brain spattered her suit, Jackie crawled out of the back of the limousine and was rescued by a bodyguard as the convoy sped to the hospital, where the president was declared dead. His successor Lyndon Johnson, a Brobdingnagian tough, self-made Texan machine-politician and congressional maestro who had hated the vice-presidency (‘not worth a bucket of warm spit’, said LBJ, quoting one of FDR’s veeps) and the smug Kennedys, took the oath of office on Air Force One beside Jackie in her bloodied Chanel.

LBJ ordered the hotline used for the first time to inform Moscow of the assassination. Khrushchev, who feared the Soviets would be blamed, believed that JFK had been killed by conservatives to stop any detente with Moscow. Khrushchev sent Mikoyan, who had been a bearer of Lenin’s coffin in 1924, to Kennedy’s funeral.

LBJ, whose style of leadership was ‘If you can’t fuck a man in the ass, then just peckerslap him – better to let him know who’s in charge than to let him get the keys to the car,’ proved a surprise, determined to force through civil rights. He resented the respect he owed the Kennedys. Now Bobby mourned Jack in a romance of grief with his widow Jackie. LBJ hated Bobby and his ‘Harvards’; Bobby hated him back. ‘Bobby, you don’t like me,’ Johnson had once said to him. ‘Your brother likes me … Why don’t you like me?’ Bobby admitted that LBJ was ‘the most formidable human being I’ve ever met. He just eats up strong men,’ but he regarded him as ‘almost an animal’. LBJ kept Bobby as attorney-general, in charge of civil rights.

‘Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race,’ promised LBJ, ‘until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.’ Yet his decency was always infected with oafish pragmatism: ‘I’ll have those n*****s voting Democrat for the next 200 years.’ On 2 July 1964, the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination and segregation. In March 1965, Martin Luther King launched a campaign for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, where police brutality on Bloody Sunday exposed how much Jim Crow, like slavery, was based on violence. Two days after King had led a prayer session on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, LBJ, the most successful legislator in presidential history, backed the Voting Rights Bill, signed into law on 6 August 1965. King wept: after 300 years of slavery and apartheid, the liberation of African-Americans had started. But it would take more than two statutes to overturn the prejudices of centuries.

The shah did not mourn JFK, even drafting a critical letter to LBJ that Alam refused to send, but he too lived under the gun. He had already been shot once by an assassin. Soon after JFK’s murder, an Islamicized bodyguard tried to shoot the shah in his office: after dodging machine-gun fire, he carried on coolly with his day, commenting, ‘Thieves never hit the same house twice.’

In the Kremlin, Johnson faced a new team. Castro, safe but humiliated, had no choice but to forgive Khrushchev, whose own comrades could not. At 4 p.m. on 13 October 1964, the seventy-year-old Khrushchev walked into the Presidium in the Kremlin. He had been on holiday in Abkhazia on the Black Sea when Brezhnev had suddenly called him back: ‘We can’t decide without you!’ Khrushchev flew back. At the meeting Brezhnev suddenly denounced him for dictatorship, blundering, boozing, ‘contradicting Lenin’, ‘making decisions over lunch’ and calling the Presidium a pack of ‘male dogs peeing on kerbstones’. Now the pee was aimed at him.

The fifty-seven-year-old Leonid ‘Lyonia’ Brezhnev, ursine and bushy-browed, unpretentious and jovial, had been Khrushchev’s protégé since the 1930s, a Russian lathe worker’s son from east Ukraine who had served on the Ukrainian front with his patron, then been selected by Stalin for promotion. He was one of the team that arrested Beria, backing Khrushchev against the Stalinist grandees (and fainting in the middle of the drama), and was promoted to deputy Party leader. But he disapproved of the denunciations of Stalin, was embarrassed by Khrushchev’s tantrums and was most appalled by the disaster of Cuba. ‘Before the war,’ Khrushchev said mockingly of Brezhnev, ‘the boys nicknamed him the Ballerina’ because ‘anyone who wants can turn him around’. In June 1964, Brezhnev started to plot but was so nervous that he almost wept – ‘Khrushchev knows everything. All is lost. He’ll shoot us’ – and even wrote fake diary entries: ‘Met Nikita Sergeievich. Joyous pleasant meeting.’ Brezhnev recruited the KGB and suggested they murder Khrushchev or arrange an accident for his plane. But in October 1964, when Khrushchev was enjoying his holiday at Pitsunda, Brezhnev set the trap, calling to order his return to Moscow.

‘You’re suffering from megalomania,’ a grandee shouted at Khrushchev, ‘and the illness is incurable.’ But Cuba was his ultimate sin. ‘Juggling the fate of the world,’ said another. ‘Neither the Russian nor the Soviet army,’ said a third, ‘had ever suffered such a humiliation.’

‘I can’t make bargains with my conscience,’ concluded Brezhnev. ‘Dismiss Comrade Khrushchev from the posts he holds and divide them up.’

‘You gathered together and splattered shit on me,’ said Khrushchev, ‘and I can’t object … I’m old and tired.’ But his real achievement? ‘The fear is gone and we can talk as equals. That’s my contribution.’ Khrushchev was not shot. While Mikoyan became head of state, the veteran Alexei Kosygin became premier and Brezhnev became Party leader, soon taking Stalin’s old title of general secretary. But he was no Stalin – and no Khrushchev either.

* Roosevelt spent the rest of his life advertising his dashing role. But the generals and ayatollahs were probably much more important than the Americans. There were several conspiracies: it was Zahedi’s troops who seized power and Ayatollah Kashani’s crowds that ruled the streets. Roosevelt did recruit some criminals, but it is unlikely that their crowd of gangsters and prostitutes were decisive and even by his own account he scarcely spent his own budget. Indeed he gave Zahedi the remaining $900,000 of Ajax funds. Eisenhower remarked that the CIA man’s report ‘seemed more like a dime novel than historical fact’. The preposterous self-promoter was the novelist. Yet the coup became an iconic crime of American imperialism, its myth encouraged by both the CIA, to boost the mystique of its power, and the shah’s enemies, Iranian nationalists and the Islamic republic, to demonize and taint the Pahlavis. When the shah heard Roosevelt’s vainglorious claims, he just laughed, a scene recounted in the diaries of his court minister Asadollah Alam.

* Ho’s paternal charm belied his Stalinist ferocity. Rivals were quietly executed: ‘All those who don’t follow the line I’ve laid down will be broken.’ In North Vietnam, 200,000 innocent well-off peasants were executed by quota, laid down in May 1953 – ‘fixed in principle at the ratio of one per one thousand people of the total population’.

* In 1957, Paris handed over Morocco to Sultan Muhammad Alawi descendant of the terrifying seventeenth-century monarch Ismail ibn Sharif. Muhammad had resisted Vichy demands to send Moroccan Jews to the death camps, then after the war had demanded the reuniting of Morocco and independence. Paris exiled him to Madagascar. Now he and his son Hassan negotiated the French and Spanish exit from Morocco. As king in 1961, Hassan promoted the dynasty as sherifians, assuming the title Amir al-Muminin, and assuming absolute power while allowing a multi-party parliament. Able, haughty and ruthless, he crushed opposition, often with French help, seized Western Sahara and succeeded in making Morocco a stable hybrid monarchy.

* De Gaulle’s ‘politics of grandeur’ reflected his personality and life. ‘Of course I wouldn’t redo the Second Empire,’ he reflected, ‘because I’m not Napoleon’s nephew and one doesn’t become emperor at my age.’ His view of life was one of struggle: ‘Life is a combat and each of its phases includes both successes and failures … Success contains within it the germs of failure and vice versa.’ His view of humanity was low: ‘There are only two motors to human action, fear and vanity. Either there’s a state of catastrophe and fear dominates. Or calm and then it is vanity.’ De Gaulle won a plebiscite that approved his Fifth Republic, creating a powerful presidency like a republican monarch, successor to the Bourbons and Bonapartes. When he met the young British queen Elizabeth II, she asked his advice and he perfectly defined constitutional monarchy for her: ‘In the place where God has placed you, be who you are, Madam. I mean be that person around whom, thanks to your legitimacy, everything in your kingdom is organized, around whom your people see their patrie and whose presence and dignity contribute to national unity.’

* In 1966, in tiny, oil-rich Gabon – part of France’s central colonial federation, Afrique-Équatoriale française – de Gaulle interviewed a dapper, diminutive ex-officer who spoke beautiful French, Albert-Bernard Bongo. At just thirty, de Gaulle blessed him as vice-president and then backed him as president, in return for favoured access to Gabonese oil and uranium. Bongo, who later converted to Islam, ruled like a monarch for forty-two years, enriched by oil and French subsidies, intimate with every French president up to Sarkozy. His many children were promoted to government. In 1980, his daughter Pascaline had an affair with Bob Marley, the Jamaican Rastafarian singer whom she invited to play in Gabon; later she was promoted to foreign minister. When Bongo died in 2009, his son Ali Bongo succeeded him. The Bongos ruled for over fifty years.

* Salazar, the dictator of Portugal, did not espouse the French embrace of independent Africa. In February 1961, Angolan rebels, spearheaded by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), backed by Moscow and Havana, started to fight for independence, soon followed by the Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frelimo) in Mozambique. Salazar regarded the empire as essential to Portugal, embracing the singular theory of ‘Lusotropicalismo’ which held that the Portuguese empire was especially multicultural and multiracial and claiming that an African could in theory become president of Portugal. He encouraged Portuguese settlement in the colonies – between 1960 and 1975, 200,000 Portuguese left for Africa, and soon there were 400,000 colonists in Angola, 350,000 in Mozambique. Now he was the only European leader willing to fight a full-scale war to keep his colonies. Fifty thousand Portuguese troops crushed the African revolts, increasingly aided by units of elite African commandos who by 1970 made up 50 per cent of the Portuguese army (the most decorated officer in the army was Colonel Marcelino da Mata, a Guinean soldier who rose to command the crack Comandos Africanos). Salazar’s dictatorship was showing strain: in 1958, a charismatic opposition leader, Humberto Delgado, almost won the presidency, which would have allowed him to dismiss Salazar. He went into exile, and in 1965 the secret police PIDE murdered him in Spain. Salazar’s African wars were fought brutally – with massacres and beheadings – but within ten years the insurgencies had been almost crushed. US president Kennedy later advised Salazar to give his colonies independence. Salazar refused.

* Afterwards, Macmillan proudly called on the US president Kennedy to back the Upper Volta dam: ‘I’ve risked my queen,’ he said. ‘You must risk your money.’

* As president, Nkrumah invited the ninety-three-year-old Du Bois, who had lost his US passport thanks to McCarthyist investigations into his socialist connections, to compile the Africana encyclopaedia in Ghana. Du Bois arrived in 1961, becoming a Ghanaian and dying in Accra, shortly before the US Civil Rights Act, the culmination of his life’s work.

* Few of the African monarchs became rulers, partly because their prestige had been diminished by decades as figureheads. There were exceptions. In Swaziland and Lesotho, the descendants of the successful warlords of the Mfecane ruled as king, having shrewdly avoided being swallowed by South Africa. In Bechuanaland, Sir Seretse Khama, grandson of King Khama III, heir to another of the kingdoms that had emerged out of the Mfecane, caused a scandal in both his homeland and Britain by marrying in 1948 a white English woman, Ruth Williams – the first prominent mixed-race couple of modern times – but on his return he campaigned for independence, emerging as Botswana’s first president. Khama and later his son dominated a tolerant and orderly Botswanan democracy into the twenty-first century.

* Unbeknown to anyone, undetected in the confusion of Belgian withdrawal, a new disease that attacked the immune system had leaped from monkeys to humans in Congo. The first identified case of the new disease was found there in 1959, probably spread through west and central Africa after the Second World War by unclean vaccinations and sexual contact, often via blood exchanged in anal sex and through the prevalence of genital ulcers during vaginal sex. It probably reached the USA soon afterwards: Richard R, a young man who died of pneumonia in 1969, was the earliest confirmed case. Only identified in 1981, it became a pandemic that killed millions. It was later called human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

* ‘How could I have been so stupid?’ he exclaimed, reflecting the danger of self-delusion among isolated potentates. ‘You get walled off from reality when you want something to succeed too much.’

* It was a moment when modern humans started to glimpse the implications of their total domination of the planet. In 1960, an American scientist, Charles David Keeling, taking temperature measurements in Hawaii, revealed how rising CO₂ and ‘greenhouse gases’ in the atmosphere, emitted by the burning of coal and oil, as well as deforestation and intense agriculture, the result of industrialization over the last two centuries of human development, were causing the earth to heat up, a process, predicted in his Keeling Curve, that could produce irreversible and catastrophic damage. Simultaneously, Herman Kahn, a systems theorist, was warning of nuclear war, publishing on 1 January 1962 a book entitled Thinking about the Unthinkable, which posited sixteen (later raised to forty-four) stages culminating in ‘Spasm/Insensate War’.

* On 19 May, JFK had celebrated his forty-fifth birthday at a fundraiser where Marilyn Monroe, in a beaded dress, breathily sang ‘Happy Birthday’, the apogee of Kennedy Camelot. Monroe had been introduced by her ex-lover Sinatra, who occupied a unique place in US culture at the nexus of entertainment, presidential power and organized crime. She had affairs with both JFK and Bobby (father of eleven children with a long-suffering wife) between failed marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller. Marilyn suffered bitterly from the wounds of a desolate childhood in foster homes, and she was cold-shouldered when she fell for Bobby. In August, she was found dead of an overdose of sleeping pills, the Kennedys suppressing any evidence of their liaisons. Her life personified American glamour at the height of the American Century, her death the fragility of beauty and the darkness of fame.

* Since 1959, the Pentagon had been working on a ‘survivable’ communications system that would function if a nuclear strike destroyed telephone cables and radio networks. Paul Baran, a Polish-born Jewish scientist whose family had arrived in America in 1928 and who now worked for the Rand Corporation, had just created a cheap, quick new way of sending data separated into what he called ‘message blocks’, findings he published in his On Distributed Communications. Demonstrating how ‘discoveries’ are the result of cumulative knowledge, a British engineer, Donald Davies, simultaneously developed the same idea though he called the data ‘packets’. In 1967, the two shared their ‘packet switching’ ideas, Baran telling Davies, ‘You and I share a common view of what packet switching is all about, since you and I independently came up with the same ingredients.’ In 1969, the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency used their work to create a network to communicate between computers. Over the next twenty years, a galaxy of scientists developed the technology out of which came the internet and email.

* Sergo Mikoyan, who had accompanied his father as his aide, recounted the drama of the journey to this author. ‘My father said, “The future of the world requires that my mission succeed. That’s it.” You can appreciate it was a very tense flight but my father was always calm. He was used to high tension: after all, he had lived with Stalin for thirty years!’

* In the tiny elite of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh and the younger General Giap had both attended the French lycée, Quoc Hoc, in Hue founded by the Catholic Vietnamese official who was father of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Giap and President Ngo were pupils at the same time. After rising to provincial governor, Ngo collaborated with the Japanese against the French. Appointed as premier by the last emperor of Annam, he removed the monarchy and as president the celibate, puritanical Catholic, who surrounded himself with handsome young men, led a murderous kleptocratic dynasty. One of his brothers, Nhu, Hitler admirer and drug addict, ran Ngo’s party and secret police, which he modelled on the SS; his wife Madame Nhu was beautiful, fiery, always gorgeously attired and packing a pistol. Of the others, Thuc was archbishop of Hue, Can ran Hue, and Luyen was ambassador to London. But all of them lived in the presidential palace. The irrepressible Madame Nhu terrorized the president and her husband, declaring, ‘Power is wonderful, total power totally wonderful,’ and adopted a moralistic programme, burning pornography and trying to ban prostitution – while complaining that her husband neglected to have sex with her. When monks burned themselves alive in protest at Ngo predations, Madame Nhu called them ‘barbecues’: ‘Let them burn!’ she said, and menaced her enemies: ‘We’ll track down and exterminate all these scabby sheep.’ Vietnamese were horrified by her; Americans half appalled, half fascinated.

* ‘There are two things that people will always pay for: food and sex,’ Madame Claude said. ‘I wasn’t any good at cooking.’ Claude (Fernande Grudet), proprietor of Paris’s leading maison close, specialized in sophisticated middle-class girls, often second-rank actresses and models, who were not full-time professionals. Almost the carnal division of the French intelligence services throughout the 1960s, her clients included film stars (such as Marlon Brando), plutocrats (Rothschilds, the Italian Fiat magnate Agnelli, the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, who later married Jackie Kennedy) and potentates from the shah and Saudi fixer Muhammad Khashoggi to President Kennedy, who on his visit memorably requested a girl ‘like Jackie. But hot.’

* Israel was still dependent on French weaponry, though de Gaulle had ended any nuclear assistance. America was just starting to supply Israel with weaponry but JFK was infuriated by its nuclear programme. When Shimon Peres, its mastermind, visited the White House, JFK asked him about the nuclear weapons; he replied with deliberate vagueness, ‘I can tell you clearly that we shall not introduce atomic weapons to the region. We shan’t be the first to do so.’