The World

Hashemites and Kennedys, Maos, Nehruvians and Assads

LYONIA THE BALLERINA: BREZHNEV IN POWER

Brezhnev was energetic and sharp, good-natured and humorous, a cautious realist, always making jokes, giving nicknames and laughing loudly. His judgements on American politics and foreign leaders were surprisingly on point, and in the Kremlin he tried ‘to win over his interlocutors and create a free and open atmosphere for conversation’, recalled the young secretary of Stavropol, Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he always teased about his ‘sheep empire’. A hard-drinking, hard-hunting muzhik and womanizer, both vainglorious and self-deprecating, Brezhnev collected fast cars and undeserved medals: visiting Berlin, when given a new Mercedes by his East German vassal Honecker, he drove so recklessly he crashed it on a sharp right turn.

After promoting himself to the marshalate, he was derided for bellowing, ‘Make way for the marshal,’ but on Marxist scholarship he joked, ‘You don’t expect Lyonia Brezhnev to have actually read all that.’ He kept a diary, Habsburgian in its dullness: ‘Killed 34 geese’ was a typical entry. ‘With Lyonia, all I had to do was tell a few jokes,’ recalled KGB chief Semichastny, ‘and that was it.’ While the Americans were convinced that the Soviets were the puppet masters, the Vietnamese made their own decisions, and Mao was now asserting himself.

In Hanoi, as the venerable Ho retired, Le Duan escalated their war, infiltrating 40,000 regular troops into the south to join 800,000 Viet Cong guerrillas. ‘The Communist threat,’ said Johnson ‘must be crushed with strength.’^* By the end of 1965, he had deployed 200,000 troops and was bombing the north. He underplayed US escalation: ‘If you have a mother-in-law with only one eye … in the center of her forehead,’ he explained, ‘you don’t keep her in the living room.’ Sihanouk, now Cambodian head of state, was at his height, ruling absolutely, giving long speeches, boasting of sexual conquests, performing his own jazz songs with his band and presenting ballets starring his own beautiful daughter. He also assassinated opponents, and allowed Monique’s family to make fortunes as the Vietnamese cauldron overflowed into Cambodia.

The Viet Cong used the Cambodian and Laotian borderlands as supply routes into South Vietnam – the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1964, Sihanouk, close to Zhou Enlai, who visited Phnom Penh, allowed Chinese supplies to be delivered through Cambodia to the Vietnamese – the Sihanouk Trail – in return for a share of military equipment. As America deployed more troops, Sihanouk tacked left, recruiting into his government Khieu Samphan, a Marxist intellectual educated at the Sorbonne who was a member of the secret Maoist faction led by the teacher named Saloth Sar. When Sihanouk accused him of backing a peasant rebellion and arranged his public debagging, Khieu Samphan vanished. Many thought he was dead. He was joined in the jungle by Saloth Sar, who flew to Beijing where he was hosted by the deputy premier Deng Xiaoping. But it was Mao’s secret-police chief Kang Sheng who grasped his grim potential. In 1966, as China turned against Sihanouk, he realized something was happening in Beijing.

THE SCORPION’S BITE AND THE FALL OF LITTLE CANNON: MAO UNLEASHES JIANG QING

In November 1965, the seventy-one-year-old Mao, after enduring three years of rising opposition, summoned his wife Jiang Qing, the ex-actress turned cultural commissar who admired classical movies and operas yet had become the enforcer of Party kitsch, and ordered her to draft a manifesto of revolution. Culture was the tool, the aim ‘to punish this Party of ours’, the target ‘the black line opposed to Mao Zedong Thought’. Watching him cavorting with his harem of dancers, Jiang was hurt. ‘In political struggle,’ she remarked, ‘no leaders can beat him,’ but ‘in private conduct, nobody can restrain him either’. When she discovered Mao, in his mid-sixties, in bed with a nurse, she yelled at him and left. On reflection she sent him a note from the novel Journey to the West: ‘My body is in Water Curtain Cave, but my heart is following you.’ Mao had his lovers, she wanted a career. Mao had privately come to loathe Jiang – ‘poisonous as a scorpion’ – but for years she had been disdained by Party grandees. Now she had her revenge. ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog,’ she said later. ‘Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit.’

Mao ordered her to recruit Lin Biao, the vicious, hypochondriacal and cadaverous marshal recently promoted to vice-chairman, who had compiled a red book of Mao’s sayings. Now Mao promised to make him his successor. Lin and his equally neurotic wife, who was embittered by sexual gossip about her past, joined Mao’s cabal along with the black-clad security boss Kang Sheng. The wives were to be players; jealousies would play their part; vengeance was savoured.

Mao’s crisis was self-inflicted. In 1958, he had launched a Great Leap Forward, a frenzied, demented industrialization campaign designed to help China ‘overtake all capitalist countries’ at breakneck speed by forcing peasants and workers to produce surplus food to pay for more steel, more ships, overruling the advice of experts: ‘Bourgeois professors’ knowledge should be treated like dog farts.’ The food was sold to pay for new technology and weaponry. Ninety million Chinese were forced to build steel furnaces that produced worthless metal. Soon the peasants were starving: in three years, thirty-eight million perished, the worst famine of the century.^* ‘Working like this,’ said Mao in May 1958, ‘half of China may have to die.’ He added, ‘This happened before a few times in Chinese history.’ In 1959, the defence minister Peng criticized the Leap but was removed and replaced by Lin Biao. By 1962, even President Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s deputy, was attacking the Leap: ‘People don’t have enough food.’ Liu, Premier Zhou and the pragmatic vice-premier Deng Xiaoping, who would be the other key figure of the Chinese century, moderated the requisitioning of food.

Abroad, while jousting with the bewildered Russians, Mao was projecting power, the start of a new version of history in which China appears as a perpetual paramount power of east Asia – a role it had played for the climaxes of the Tang, Ming and Manchu interspersed with centuries of fragmentation. In 1959, Mao swallowed Tibet, driving out its young sacred king, the Dalai Lama, who was welcomed by Nehru in India. Mao decided to teach Nehru a lesson in Chinese power.

Nehru had presided over the world’s biggest democracy for a decade, pursuing socialistic planning projects and developing power and steel production, officially ‘non-aligned’ but effectively allied with the Soviets: he criticized the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt but simultaneously refused to criticize Khrushchev’s crushing of Hungary. His challenge was ‘creating a just state by just means’ and ‘creating a secular state in a religious country’, yet he did little to challenge poverty or the caste system, which he regarded as part of Hindu culture. His approach to the people was aristocratic. ‘I rather enjoy these fresh contacts with the Indian people,’ he told Edwina Mountbatten. ‘The effort to explain in simple language … and reach the minds of these simple folk is both exhausting and exhilarating.’ Yet his inherited British Raj was bedevilled by armed rebellions, all brutally suppressed, and by the ulcer of Kashmir. In 1961, he seized Goa from Portugal and in the next year received Pondicherry from France.

Nehru had started to procure the Bomb for India. ‘We must have the capability,’ he said. ‘We should first prove ourselves and then talk of Gandhi, non-violence and a world without nuclear weapons.’ Khrushchev had visited Delhi, but Nehru got on best with Zhou Enlai; he was fascinated by China, which he saw as India’s great partner in the coming Asian century. Yet now Mao challenged the Indian–Chinese border, ill defined by the Manchus and Victorians. ‘Not a yard of India is going out of India,’ responded Nehru, who appointed an inept Kashmiri crony as chief of staff and ordered him to remove Chinese troops.

In October 1962, Mao’s troops routed the Indians and advanced. Nehru, who had revelled in his Chinese alliance, desperately rang Washington and begged for US bombers. Indira’s forty-ninth birthday party the following month was miserable. When the family asked Nehru how he was, he just replied, ‘The Chinese have broken through the Sela Pass.’ Mao could have continued all the way to Kolkata, but he halted. ‘Nothing grieved me more,’ Nehru said. Indira noticed his decline: ‘The strain is tremendous.’ On 27 May 1964, Nehru, after eighteen years as prime minister, died of a heart attack aged seventy-four. Indira had lost her closest companion and even her home, for she had lived in Nehru’s residence since independence. As she considered leaving India and running a boarding house in London, Congress grandees chose Lal Shastri as prime minister, who appointed Indira information minister. Her time would come sooner than she expected.

Successes abroad did not secure Mao at home. In April 1966, he unleashed Jiang Qing and her ‘kill culture’ manifesto, an ‘anti-Party clique’ were denounced and Lin Biao declared that anyone who criticized Mao should be ‘executed … the whole nation must call for their blood’. As Mao unlocked a seething resentment against Party barons, in private at the Politburo Lin Biao answered the poison-pen letters signed ‘Montecristo’ that accused his wife of sexual adventures by bizarrely reading out a declaration that Madame Lin ‘was a virgin when she married me’ and ‘had no sexual amorous relationship’. In May, once he had secured the backing of Premier Zhou, Mao orchestrated the Terror in detail through his Cultural Revolution Group,^* ordering students to punish any ‘bourgeois ideas’ among teachers and suspending lessons. Professors at Beijing University were beaten by gangs of so-called Red Guards.

In July, Mao signalled his power by swimming in the Yangzte. ‘I wanted to show off,’ he admitted afterwards, but if he had not been surreptitiously helped by his guard, ‘I’d have died.’ At Zhongnanhai, the reinvigorated septuagenarian moved into a new residence, the Poolside House, next to his own indoor pool. Within Zhongnanhai, when Mao summoned his courtiers, the guards would say, ‘You’re wanted at the swimming pool.’

That August, Mao himself wrote a letter to the nation’s students, attacking ‘poisonous’ Party leaders and ‘the arrogance of the bourgeoisie’ and ordering, ‘Bombard the headquarters.’ He then appeared with Lin at a parade holding his Little Red Book. He instigated a public witch-hunt: the minister of coal was beaten, bent forward with his arms pulled back – the torture known as jet-planing – and then stabbed with knives. Across China, gangs of students and brigands attacked their bosses, from teachers to Party leaders, holding ‘struggle sessions’ in which the victims were beaten up but forced to incriminate themselves – a new template for leftist intolerance.

Mao, like Stalin, a maestro of Mass Age mobilisation, directed the terror, promoting Lin Biao as his heir apparent as both his wife and Lin’s joined the Politburo. He preserved those he might need later. The president, Liu, was dismissed as ‘No. 1 Capitalist Roader’, then he and his wife were jet-planed and beaten to the ground. Later Liu was left to die of cancer, refused all treatment. Yet Mao respected Deng Xiaoping, the tough, capable ex-favourite who was running China, nicknaming him Little Cannon. But now Deng was denounced as ‘No. 2 Capitalist Roader’, dismissed and dispatched to a tractor factory in Jiangxi; his son Pufang was tortured and thrown from the top of a building, surviving as a paraplegic.^* His ally, Xi Zhongxun, a vice-premier, was denounced by Kang Sheng, demoted to a tractor factory, then publicly tormented and imprisoned, while his ten-year-old son, Xi Jinping, raised in privilege, witnessed his father’s downfall, and Red Guards smashing his home. His wife Qi Xin was forced to denounce her husband in a terrifying struggle session. Their daughter committed suicide. Qi chose to accompany Xi into exile, where he read Adam Smith and Churchill, but he was embittered and damaged by the trauma and by more than ten years of disfavour. The boy was forced to join Mao’s Down to the Countryside Movement but escaped to Beijing, was arrested and sent back. He did not see his parents again until he was almost twenty. When he became China’s autocrat, he remembered the Terror. ‘I see the bullpens [Red Guard detention camps],’ he said fifty years later. ‘I understand politics on a deeper level.’ China was chaotic: three million killed, a hundred million sacked, seventeen million deported or rusticated for ‘re-education’, a billion Little Red Books brandished.

Brezhnev was fascinated but bewildered by Mao. ‘What kind of person is he?’ he said wonderingly to Castro. ‘Is he a Communist or a Fascist? Or perhaps the new Chinese emperor?’ Eschewing Maoist lunacy, Brezhnev defended Stalin’s empire – ‘When forces hostile to socialism try to turn some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes … the common problem of all socialist countries’ – but, after Cuba, he was keen to limit nuclear weapons with the USA while fighting the hot struggle through African proxies.

NASSER AND THE KING: SIX DAYS IN JUNE

Africa was fertile territory for the Soviets, but western rivalry and political instability were a challenge. Nkrumah the Redeemer travelled frequently to Moscow, Havana and North Vietnam, but Papa Houphouët, coordinating with de Gaulle’s African mastermind Foccart, backed a conspiracy against the Redeemer, who was redeemed by his own army and deposed, sending Ghana into a spiral of dictatorship and corruption. Houphouët was one of many inclined towards the west. On 12 December 1964, the sixty-six-year-old Kenyatta, only recently freed from house arrest, was elected president. Genial, pleasure-loving and theatrical, Burning Spear was polygamous, marrying four times, lastly to Ngina, thirty-four years younger, who was as extrovert as he was but shamelessly amassed a fortune. Ultimately forging a one-party state, hailed as the mzee – elder master – brandishing his flywhisk and often sporting head-to-foot leopard-skin robes, he dominated Kenya^* through a court of Kikuyu henchmen, carving up the spoils of government, making his own family the country’s largest landowners and clashing with his ally, Tom Mboya, the Luo minister of finance.

At the same time, Mboya’s protégé, Barack Obama, returned from Harvard to join the elite. As his ex-wife Ann, now a qualified anthropologist, lived with her new Indonesian husband in Jakarta, accompanied by his son Barack junior, senior was joined in Nairobi by his new wife, Ruth Baker, white and Jewish. Dr Obama became a senior economist at Mboya’s Finance Ministry. He was set to thrive. Yet he did not – and he would meet Barack junior only one more time.

Kenyatta kept the Soviets out of Kenya; Egypt was more receptive. Brezhnev backed Nasser with Soviet arms, advisers and intelligence in order to confront the western ally, Israel. Nasser prepared for war, promoting his long-serving crony Abdel Hakim Amer to war minister and marshal. Amer, lean and raffish but contumacious, resisted Nasser’s attempts to control the army. He partied heavily with girls and drugs, while Nasser, diabetic with heart problems, suffered from stress and insomnia. At home, his favourite daughter fell in love with a flashy young engineer, a general’s son called Ashraf Marwan, whom the dictator distrusted. But Mona got her way and his new son-in-law joined the presidential office, living for a time in London luxury until Nasser, furious about their extravagance, humiliated Marwan: he would take his revenge.

Darling of the crowds, Nasser escalated the threats of annihilation against Israel, encouraged by Amer’s promises of military power. The dictator who believes his own myth will be consumed by it. In early 1967, as Israel struck back against raids by militias of Palestinian exiles, and duelled with the Syrian army, Nasser dismissed UN peacekeepers from Sinai and heralded the liquidation of Israel. Brezhnev forwarded to Nasser intelligence that claimed Israel planned to attack Syria. The intelligence was flawed, but Nasser used it to stoke the Syrians for war.

On the central front in Jordan, the diminutive Hashemite king Hussein, still only thirty-two, had already been denounced by Nasser as an ‘imperialist lackey’ and was stalked by Nasserite assassins. Named after his great-grandfather, the amir of Mecca, educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, Hussein was cunning, jaunty and sporty, with an eye for beautiful women. He prided himself on his guardianship of the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, but his survival was doubtful. He still mourned his gibleted cousin Faisal of Iraq. While Hussein ruled the West Bank, Nasser endorsed the newly founded Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), dominated by a young radical named Yasser Arafat, born in Cairo but partly brought up in the Maghrebi Quarter of Jerusalem, as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians.

Now Nasser summoned the little king. Nasser might arrest or kill him in Cairo, but Hussein acquiesced. Nasser, towering over him, joked ominously that he was not arresting him but demanded command of Jordanian forces. Hussein submitted. ‘Our basic objective,’ said Nasser, ‘will be to destroy Israel.’

Across the border, the Israelis were in a fever of panic. Their premier Levi Eshkol was indecisive, elderly and unnerved. The chain-smoking, laconic, fair-haired chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, special forces commander in 1948, was close to breakdown. Surrounded by popular existential anxiety, Eshkol bowed to public demand and appointed the piratically eye-patched Moshe Dayan as defence minister. ‘Original, handsome’, in Peres’s words, ‘and a brilliant mind’, Dayan was a kibbutznik born in Israel, a compulsive lover of women, amateur archaeologist and fluent Arab-speaker with many Arab friends. He had been trained by British commandos during the Arab revolt. Dayan and Rabin devised a pre-emptive strike to hit Egypt, then Syria, warning Hussein to keep out of the conflict.

At dawn on 5 June 1967, Israeli planes – Mirages supplied by France – obliterated the Egyptian air force, then Israeli troops smashed through Egyptian defences to take Sinai and reach the Suez Canal; Marshal Amer ordered counter-attacks, claimed victory, then panicked and retreated. Dayan switched northwards to smash Syria and take the Golan. Hussein watched tensely; Amer boasted of historical victories and ordered Jordan to attack Israel. Hussein sent in his Arab Legion. Dayan swiped them aside, occupying the West Bank, then, in a moment of almost mystic excitement, reunited Jerusalem under Jewish rule after two millennia. The Six-Day victory changed much: as Jews across the world celebrated and thousands prayed at the Kotel – the Wall, a surviving section of the Jewish Temple – Israel enjoyed a burst of overconfidence. Cool strategy suggested that some of Judaea and Samaria along with Golan and Sinai should be retained to give the narrow state some strategic depth. But the triumph brought many Palestinians under Israeli rule and awakened a religious nationalism beneath Israel’s secular, socialist tradition which demanded that Israelis should settle the lands of the ancient kingdoms. For many Israelis, Jerusalem – sacred Zion – became the ‘indivisible’ and ‘perpetual’ Israeli capital.

Nasser rushed to army headquarters where he and Amer almost came to blows, after which El Rais broadcast his resignation. Millions gathered outside his palace, crying, ‘We’re your soldiers, Gamal!’ Nasser, restored to power, sacked Amer, who supported by his officers tried to seize power. Nasser, at his own house, confronted Amer, ordering his arrest and exit: Amer either committed suicide or was liquidated. El Rais mourned his ‘closest man’ and visited Brezhnev to procure arms. ‘If I were the Israeli leader,’ Nasser told Brezhnev, ‘I’d never give up the occupied territories.’ Brezhnev, facing the rout of his allies, used the hotline to confirm that LBJ would not intervene.

THE ASSASSINATIONS: RFK, MLK, MBOYA

LBJ was in no position to do so, destroyed by his Vietnamese war and challenged by his enemy, Bobby Kennedy, now New York senator, who had transformed into an inspirational liberal and channelled the rising disgust felt for the president. ‘Some men see things as they are, and ask why,’ he said. ‘I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.’

A total of 525,000 US troops were fighting in Vietnam; thousands of young Americans, rallied by Kennedy and MLK, protested against an unjust and misconceived war. Long hair, bell-bottoms and miniskirts were the costumes, marijuana the tonic and Marxist critical theory the vision, Mao and Che Guevara the heroes, for a radical new world that promised a utopian dream of love, tolerance and equality for the small numbers of young people in the Americas and Europe who actually experienced the short period known as ‘the Sixties’.

Its real chroniclers were poets first and foremost: Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, both Jewish children of middle-class families – one from Minnesota, the other from Montreal – who put their poems to music. Rock music provided the Sixties’ soundtrack, particularly a wave of British bands, led first by The Beatles but personified by the Rolling Stones, fronted by the lithe strut and full-lipped sexual insolence of Mick Jagger and the riffing guitarist Keith Richards, who wrote their own songs, channelling American blues, and now ‘conquered’ America; few songs encapsulated the rebellion, promise and cynicism of the Sixties as well as ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. The British establishment feared these hedonistic radicals, arresting Jagger and Richards, who were sentenced to jail for drug possession. But they were rescued by a Times editorial entitled ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?’ After their release came apotheosis: they and other rock stars – gifted musicians from obscure origins now rich from selling millions of records and playing to stadiums, flying the globe in customized airplanes accompanied by their own retinues of paramours, courtiers and drug dealers – attained, for the next fifty years, the apex of a new global social prestige, shared with film and sports stars, in the West’s mass-consumer age, comparable to that of princes, paladins and popes of earlier centuries.

The era had its own distinctive visual backdrop too: news footage of sweaty, stoned American troops and Chinook helicopters in the first televised war, Vietnam. The great artistic manifestation of this alienated world was the distorted brilliance of the paintings of Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund, which were more considerably exciting than the concept-laden ‘abstract expressionists’ of the Fifties.^*

The rebellion of youth was happening just as the reality of family had been proven: in 1962, two scientists, one British, one American, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. Nine years earlier, a balding boffin walked into his local Cambridge pub, the Eagle, and announced to the bemused boozers, ‘We’ve found the secret of life.’ The thirty-six-year-old Francis Crick, working with a young American, James Watson, just twenty-four, had discovered the double-helix of DNA – but not on their own. In fact they had been racing another researcher, Rosalind Franklin, a thirty-two-year-old Anglo-Jewish chemist, whose essential discovery of the key properties of DNA they had obtained without her knowledge, passed to them by a colleague at King’s College London. ‘When we saw the answer,’ Watson recalled, ‘we had to pinch ourselves. Could it really be this pretty? It was so pretty.’ Franklin died of cancer at just thirty-seven and therefore did not share the Nobel Prize won by Crick and Watson.

The discovery confirmed that DNA itself was the carrier of hereditary information, and further study showed that humans were virtually all the same; differences were tiny and everyone was a walking collection of family histories and a member of a deeper, broader family. It confirmed that race as a social category was neither based on scientific differences nor reflective of genetic ancestry. It was a social construct, but that did not it make any less powerful. Unravelling human DNA helped reveal the twists, migrations, settlings and clashes of the human story, as well as launching a biological revolution that changed the world, from the treatment of diseases and the investigation of crime to a new passion for family history.

In 1960, a birth-control pill, using hormones to inhibit ovulation, freed women from male control of sex for the first time: it could be enjoyed for its own sake. New household gadgets, washing machines, fridges, vacuum cleaners, made female servants obsolete, but also liberated women – encouraged by a movement of female empowerment, feminism – to pursue independent careers. They had fewer children, but now most of those survived to adulthood, leading to a new cult of childhood, particularly in the middle class, where the desire for women to work clashed with the virtues of attentive parenting. The feminist movement was the great success of the Sixties and early Seventies, the Great Liberal Reformation that delivered the right to abortion, curtailed capital punishment, legalized homosexuality and later gay rights.

Female sexual freedom shocked a gerontocracy of starchy male leaders. In 1965 Franco and Tito both reached seventy-three, de Gaulle seventy-five.^* ‘One must not reduce women to machines for making love,’ declared de Gaulle, denouncing the Pill that year. ‘A woman is made to have children … Sex will invade everything!’ So it did. Two years later, he legalized the Pill, but on 3 May 1968 radical students seized Sorbonne University in Paris and started to build barricades, calling for Marxist revolution and ‘adieu de Gaulle!’ Workers went on strike; students occupied their campuses. The president called this ‘chienlit’ – or havoc, literally shit in the bed – and sent in his riot police: ‘When a child gets angry and oversteps the mark, the best way of calming him is to give him a smack.’ The violence only intensified les événements. Madame de Gaulle wept at dinner, the president ranted, ‘The French have never recovered from defeat at Waterloo and Sedan,’ and warned, ‘I’m not Louis Philippe.’

Instead he contemplated a solution unique in the modern democracies: on 29 May, the president set off for home in Colombey but instead, taking an aide and his son, he commandeered the helicopter and flew to French NATO headquarters in Baden-Baden. ‘It’s all over,’ he told General Massu, testing the loyalty of the army for a military coup.

‘This is impossible,’ replied the general. ‘This is madness.’ De Gaulle was not the only potentate under siege. In Czechoslovakia, a reformer launched a Prague Spring against the Soviet imperium. In America, LBJ, broken, announced he would not run for a second term. Bobby Kennedy was expected to win. Yet in France, as elsewhere, the majority – hailed by the US presidential candidate Richard Nixon as ‘the silent majority’ – was willing to tolerate young radical excess only for a while. When de Gaulle flew back to the Élysée Palace to call new elections, opinion had turned against the students. But he was fatally damaged, and resigned soon afterwards.

On 21 August, Brezhnev sent 200,000 troops to crush the Prague Spring, gaining Stalin’s empire another twenty years. In America too, the loving feast of the Sixties was spoiling. Martin Luther King was bombarded with threats: in Memphis, on 3 April 1968, he talked about his death. ‘I just want to do God’s will,’ he preached. ‘And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you.’ Next day, on the balcony of his motel, MLK was assassinated by an attention-seeking criminal. RFK denounced ‘this mindless menace of violence’, saying, ‘No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet.’ Three months later, in June, Kennedy, forty-two years old, close to clinching the Democratic nomination, spoke at the LA Ambassador Hotel where, walking through the kitchens, he was shot by an unbalanced Palestinian. ‘Everything,’ he said as he lay dying, ‘is going to be OK.’ But it was not.

On 5 July 1969, in Nairobi, Tom Mboya, exuberant finance minister serving the ageing President Kenyatta, was walking down Government Road when he bumped into his protégé Barack Obama. He had tried to help Obama, but that irrepressible maverick had criticized his policies, then lost other jobs, becoming an abusive alcoholic. While driving drunk, he killed his passenger and best friend, the first of several car crashes, while his marriage broke up. Now he chatted with Mboya and moved on. Moments later he heard shots: Mboya, the Luo, had been assassinated by a Kikuyu. Before he was hanged the killer asked, ‘Why don’t you go after the Big Man [Kenyatta]?’ Kenyatta liked to say, ‘T. J. [Mboya]’s my favourite son,’ but his Kikuyu courtiers may have ordered the hit, which, like the shootings of RFK and MLK in America, marked the start of a harsher, more tribal politics in Kenya. It also accelerated the decline of Dr Obama: he was convinced his next booze-fuelled car crash was a hit ordered by Kenyatta. As his family later told his son, Kenyatta dominated Kenya – ‘That’s where it all starts. The Big Man’ – and Obama ‘forgot what holds everything together here’.^* But he had not forgotten his American son: ‘I left a baby bull in America. Someday I’ll go get him.’

One day, Obama, now thirty-seven, turned up in Hawaii to see his long-lost son, who was back there after his time in Indonesia. Ann was still married to her Indonesian husband and had a job in Jakarta. Aged ten, Barry went to stay with his grandparents in Hawaii to attend the best prep school in the state. Later Ann joined him. Now the boy encountered his famous father once again: ‘a tall dark figure … thinner than I expected’, sporting ‘a blue blazer and white shirt, scarlet ascot, horn-rimmed glasses’, limping with an ivory-headed cane. He taught Barry to dance – and addressed his class at school. But he had come to take Ann and Barry back to Nairobi. Ann refused.

Barry and his father never met again; his mother, only eighteen years older than him, was everything to him – ‘the kindest, most generous spirit I’ve ever known,’ he wrote; ‘what is best in me I owe to her.’

In Nairobi, Dr Obama was given a job at the Finance Ministry, finally finding the respect he deserved, while Barry studied in LA before getting into Columbia Law School. On 23 November 1982, Dr Obama, just forty-eight, was killed in a car crash. ‘After my twenty-first birthday, a stranger,’ wrote Barack Obama junior, ‘called to give me the news.’ He craved to know the real story of his father and to construct his family history: he had a dream of his father, and looked to Africa to define himself.

As Obama started his studies and his search for himself, America was at its lowest ebb, divided at home, stalemated by Soviet Russia, haemorrhaging men and prestige in Vietnam. ‘You think you’re the most powerful leader since God,’ an exhausted LBJ told his successor, Richard Nixon, reluctantly welcoming him into the Oval Office, ‘but when you get in that tall chair, as you’re gonna find out, Mr President, you can’t count on people.’

THE APHRODISIAC OF POWER: KISSINGER AND NIXON’S TRIANGULAR GAME

Nixon was just as hard-scrambled as LBJ but slightly more polished. The prickly, awkward, misanthropic, emotionally strangulated son of a mean-spirited bankrupt grocer, his mother ‘a Quaker saint’, Nixon had overcome defeat by JFK, then run disastrously for California governor. ‘You won’t have Richard M. Nixon to kick around any more,’ he told the press after the latter failure. But then, watching LBJ’s Vietnam fiasco and the national divisions it sparked, he reinvented himself as the representative of ‘the silent majority’. His first challenge on taking office in January 1969 was how to get out of Vietnam.

‘My rule in international affairs,’ he said to the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, ‘is “Do unto others as they would do to you.”’

‘Plus ten per cent,’ added his national security advisor, Dr Henry Kissinger. The two were an unlikely but effective double act. The forty-five-year-old Kissinger was instantly more important than the secretary of state. A Jewish refugee from Fürth, Bavaria, who escaped in 1938, he had come closer to the tragedies of European extremism than any other American statesman: ‘Having lived through totalitarianism, I know what’s it like.’ It made him a connoisseur of power. After serving in the US army he became a Harvard historian, writing his thesis on Metternich. Inevitably he compared himself to Metternich and America in 1969 to Austria in 1809: ‘a government that had lost its élan and its self-confidence, which knew its limits but hardly its goals’, goals that could only be achieved by ‘the subtlety of its diplomacy’.

Coming from different worlds, Nixon and Kissinger were both secretive and pragmatic, both impressed and repelled by the other, both adroit players of the World Game. But while the president was morose and solitary, the gravel-voiced, German-accented Kissinger was a showman who, during a long career, delighted in analysing the personalities he had known: at regular dinners for the antique Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Teddy, Nixon encouraged his Harvard professor to perform and Kissinger became the most glamorous wonk since Palmerston, revelling in being the cynosure of attention, joking that ‘Power is the greatest aphrodisiac’ as he dated film stars. ‘The focused energy of the first months in office,’ Kissinger told this author, ‘are always vital and we had a grand design.’ Perhaps the conjunction was right: on 16 July 1969, 650 million people watched two American astronauts walk on the Moon.^* ‘The Heavens,’ Nixon told them from the White House, ‘have now become part of man’s world.’ Astronaut Buzz Aldrin described the Moon as ‘magnificent desolation’. First Nixon had to deal with the desolation of Vietnam.

‘A sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem,’ said Kissinger, who sought to change the relationship with Russia and China. ‘The challenge for the US was to make sure it always has more options than either of the other two parties within the triangle.’ He planned to negotiate with Brezhnev, reach out to Mao and leave Vietnam in a blaze of gunpowder. He managed all three. But in the process Nixon’s flaws tainted American democracy as much as the bruises of Vietnam had done.

In March, Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Communist trails in Cambodia. Prince Sihanouk had failed to keep Cambodia out of the war. As thousands of anti-war students protested across America, Nixon and Kissinger launched counter-offensives as a basis for starting secret negotiations, yet the policy expanded the war before it ended it. Sihanouk, trying to keep the Americans and Communists out, did not wish to lose the eastern part of his country to the Vietnamese nor to encourage his local Communists, whom he called Khmer Rouge. Instead he was ground between the two.

In early 1970, the ex-teacher and French student Saloth Sar, general secretary of the Cambodian Communists, adopted a new name, Pol Pot, and arrived in China, where Mao promised military aid for a revolution that was no longer an obscure dream.

KILLING B -52: MAO AND POL POT

While Pol was in Beijing and Sihanouk – the Prince Who Was King – was visiting Moscow, his pro-American commander Lon Nol seized power in Phnom Penh. Yet such was the prestige of the monarchy that peasants rebelled and killed Lon Nol’s brother in revenge for the coup, reportedly eating his liver. Lon Nol knelt at the feet of the queen mother to ask forgiveness for overthrowing her son, but his attacks on the North Vietnamese brought not just more Viet Cong but American troops into Cambodia – an operation ironically codenamed Freedom Deal. Determined to get power back, Sihanouk flew straight to Beijing, where Mao and Zhou welcomed their friend, whom they persuaded to join in an alliance with their other Cambodian guest, Pol Pot. Sihanouk’s vanity helped bring about a tragedy. Mao kept Sihanouk in Beijing and sent Pol Pot to Cambodia – just as he faced his own crisis.

In September 1971, Mao arrived back in Beijing unaware that his heir, Marshal Lin Biao, and son ‘Tiger’ Lin Liguo were planning to assassinate him in a drama that would mystify the outside world for decades.

After Mao had declared the end of his Cultural Revolution, he noticed that Lin was pursuing his own ambitions, exerting influence even over his personal bodyguards and criticizing Madame Mao. Lin was also alarmed by Mao’s warmongering: in March 1969, Chinese and Soviet troops clashed on the Ussuri River, encouraged by Mao, who toyed with launching a full-scale war. The Helmsman tested Lin by demanding a self-criticism. Marshal Lin refused. Lin’s secret views of Mao were reflected in the plans of his beloved son Tiger, playboy deputy chief of the air force command who came to loathe the ‘paranoid sadist … the biggest feudal tyrant in Chinese history’ whom he codenamed B-52 after the American bombers.

Tiger planned the assassination of B-52, just as the Chairman briefed allies that Lin ‘can’t wait to seize power’. The Lins decided to divebomb Mao’s train, but B-52 kept changing his plans. Now Tiger’s latest plan clashed with the news that Mao had turned on the marshal. They planned their escape, but Tiger hoped to kill Mao first. Foolishly he confided in his sister Dodo, a fanatical Maoist, who snitched to Mao’s bodyguards. When Mao was informed, he was so alarmed he had to be sedated. As Lin Biao, his wife and the pistol-brandishing Tiger raced for the airport, they were chased by Mao’s guards but just managed to board their half-fuelled plane and take off.

Two hours later, Mao learned that a plane had crashed in Mongolia, and that his paladin was dead. Frantic and feverish, quaffing mao-tai and sleeping pills, he was suddenly old and his doctors discovered a heart condition. He had long believed in ‘one united front’ against Moscow, but now the old manipulator planned a final world-changing reversal. ‘We must win over one of the two hegemons,’ he said; ‘never fight with two fists.’ That dovetailed with Kissinger’s plan.

It started with ping-pong. Mao directed the moves through his nephew Mao Yuanxin, son of his brother Zemin executed in 1943. He had long found his wife Jiang Qing unbearable. Once when she talked her way into his compound he threatened to arrest her unless she got out. So it was his young nurses-cum-lovers who interpreted his orders. The Helmsman ‘came to trust women far more than men’, his doctor, Li, recalled. Bingeing on sleeping pills, he said: ‘Words after sleeping pills don’t count.’ Now the order was so surprising that his favourite nurse, whom he called Little Wu, had to double-check.

‘You’ve taken sleeping pills,’ said Little Wu. ‘Do the words count?’

‘Yes! Do it quickly!’ ordered Mao. ‘Or there won’t be time.’ Zhou was to coordinate the plan, suddenly inviting the American ping-pong team to play in Beijing. ‘You’ve opened a new chapter,’ Zhou told the bemused paddlers, ‘in Chinese–American relations.’ Via Pakistan, Mao invited Kissinger to Beijing. ‘This,’ said Kissinger to Nixon, ‘is the most important communication to an American president since the Second World War.’ In July 1971, as India and Pakistan clashed, Kissinger flew in.

CALL ME SIR – DUMB DOLL DOMINATES INDIA

Nixon called Indira Gandhi ‘the Bitch’ and sometimes ‘the Witch’. ‘The Indians are no goddamn good,’ he told Kissinger; he preferred the Pakistanis, who were ‘straightforward’ if ‘sometimes extremely stupid’. Nixon was not the first to underestimate Indira, although he did realize how ruthless she could be. When Shastri died of a heart attack in January 1966, the Congress powerbrokers chose Nehru’s attractive daughter, now forty-eight, as their puppet prime minister: a socialist politician nicknamed her Dumb Doll. But the Doll outplayed them all and then won an election.

Neglected during her lonely childhood when her father was often in prison or on campaign, she was born to rule, combining a longing for love with the entitlement of power. She had sat with her grandfather Motilal, with Gandhi and then with Nehru hosting world leaders; she had studied at Oxford and had followed her father’s advice: ‘Be brave and the rest follows.’ When asked what the US president should call her, she replied, ‘He can call me Prime Minister or Mr Prime Minister. You can tell him my ministers call me Sir.’ But Indira’s grandeur, recalled Kissinger, ‘brought out Nixon’s insecurities’. Graceful in her saris with her greying hair, she was masterful but paranoid and suspicious. When the press tried to find out if Indira had a lover, she reflected privately, ‘I don’t behave like a woman; the lack of sex in me partly explains this.’

In March 1971, promising to ‘Garibi Hatao!’ (Abolish poverty!), she had won an election victory so sweeping that westerners nicknamed her Empress of India. Now she saw an opportunity in the disintegration of Pakistan. The resulting war, like the Arab–Israeli conflicts, was a sequel to the unfinished business of partition, which had created a new nation, Pakistan, that had inherited little of the stabilizing British-trained bureaucracy, its identity shaped by its army and Islam, united by visceral hatred for India. It was divided into two, Punjab in the west, Bengal in the east, 1,600 miles apart. Now the easterners rebelled, seeking independence from the arrogant grandees of Islamabad, driving millions of Hindu refugees into India.

The Pakistani military dictator Yahya Khan set his troops loose in the east’s capital Dhaka, machine-gunning students, mass-raping women, murdering children, killing 10,000 in days, 500,000 within months. Indira prepared for war, skirmishing with Pakistani forces in the east. But on 3 December 1971 the Pakistanis, inspired by their enemy Israel, launched air strikes on eleven Indian air bases. Indira liberated Dhaka and attacked western Pakistan too, routing its forces in a thirteen-day war. The east declared independence as Bangladesh; Indira was triumphant.^* Indians, exultant that their country had won their first victory in centuries, hailed her as Durga, invincible ten-armed goddess. ‘India is Indira,’ declared the Congress president. Having inherited the throne herself, she now started to groom her favourite son for the crown.

Nixon and Kissinger watched morosely. Earlier in the year, Kissinger had flown in to encourage conciliation, but that was his cover. Pakistan was backed by China and America, a link that brought them together. Secretly, Kissinger flew on to Beijing to meet Mao, preparing the way for the president himself …

I LIKE RIGHTISTS: AMERICAN METTERNICH AND THE PHILOSOPHER -KING OF CHINA

On 21 February 1972, Nixon and Kissinger were received by Mao in his book-heaped study at the Swimming-Pool House that resembled ‘more the retreat of a scholar than the audience room of the all-powerful leader’.

‘I voted for you,’ joked Mao to Nixon. ‘I like rightists.’

Kissinger told Mao he recommended his books to his Harvard students.

‘These writings of mine,’ said Mao, ‘aren’t anything.’

‘The Chairman’s writings,’ answered Nixon, ‘moved a nation and changed the world.’

‘I’ve only been able to change a few places,’ smiled Mao, ‘in the vicinity of Beijing.’ He damned Nixon with faint praise: ‘Your book Six Crises isn’t bad.’ When the Americans tried to negotiate – offering to drop recognition of Taiwan as official China, Mao grandly dismissed them: ‘Troublesome problems I don’t want to get into.’ Kissinger could not help but admire ‘the philosopher-king’.

Brezhnev watched this encounter with horror and invited Nixon to Moscow, believing that in war ‘everyone loses’. Perhaps perversely he trusted Nixon more than any other US president and admired, almost envied, Kissinger. ‘There was never a good president,’ Brezhnev told Castro, ‘and probably never will be. The difference between Republicans and Democrats is unsubstantial.’ As for America, Brezhnev thought it was ‘a sick society’ where ‘gangsterism, racism and drug addiction have reached enormous proportions. The monopolies are robbing the people, having grabbed political power.’ Yet he admired Nixon and thought Kissinger ‘a cunning, smart guy’, though Kissinger was unimpressed by Lyonia. In one of their encounters, Brezhnev, a metalworker turned tsar, dressed Kissinger, German-Jewish schoolteacher’s son, in boots and khaki and took him wild-boar hunting. Kissinger refused to shoot; Brezhnev killed one boar and wounded another. Brezhnev also drove Nixon at high speed in his ZiL limousines and his speedboats. ‘Enjoy good things with impunity,’ he bellowed. When he visited Washington, Nixon gave him a Lincoln Continental. Brezhnev insisted on driving it, which the Secret Service vetoed.

‘I’ll take the flag off the car, put on dark glasses,’ said Brezhnev, ‘so they can’t see my eyebrows and drive like any American would.’

‘I’ve driven with you,’ replied Kissinger. ‘I don’t think you drive like an American!’

In May 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev signed a first agreement – Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) – the start of thirty years of negotiations. Surfing on these successes, the duo now negotiated American withdrawal from Vietnam. Yet Nixon could not restrain his own Manichaean paranoia. A month after SALT, he ordered a henchman to send five myrmidons – ‘the Plumbers’ – to burgle and set up wiretaps in Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Building, only for them to be arrested. Nixon lied to conceal his role, but it is not true that he was solely destroyed by the cover-up. The original crime was bad enough. Two journalists at the Washington Post unveiled a web of paranoid conspiracies and secret payments that corroded Nixon’s presidency.

Moreover, the Soviet detente was fragile. On 24 October 1973, just months after a jovial US–Soviet meeting, Brezhnev threatened military intervention.

* LBJ saw Communist advances everywhere: like JFK, he was terrified of a ‘new Cuba’ in south America, encouraging a military coup – ‘Golpe de 1964’ – against the leftist president of Brazil, João Goulart, who in April 1964 was overthrown by a junta that ruled for twenty years, arresting over 40,000 and killing at least 333, all supposedly Communists, and probably several hundred more. In Indonesia, a similar process sparked the bloodiest Cold War coup of all. The maverick showman Sukarno defied American influence but also mocked the Soviets for being white and arrogant, meanwhile consolidating his own dictatorship backed by a popular Communist Party. LBJ ordered the CIA to overthrow him, but Sukarno revelled in his own drama, calling 1965 ‘the year of living dangerously’. But when a Communist coup killed six generals, Sukarno lost control to his own general Suharto, who launched a purge of Communists and their ethnic Chinese supporters, killing 500,000 people, many by beheading. Suharto remained dictator for the next thirty-one years. In 2001 Sukarno’s daughter Megawati was elected president.

* The advances in food production and intensive agriculture mean that even though the world population has surged, famines are much rarer. Five million died between 1980 and 2020, while fifty million had died between 1940 and 1980, some famines caused by droughts, some by wartime failures of food distribution, but most by deliberate political policies adopted by Marxist-Leninists in the USSR, China and Ethiopia, and by the Nazis in Europe.

* Mao’s daughter Li Na, by Jiang, worked as his secretary during the Cultural Revolution, witnessing struggle sessions for him. She became ever more haughty, threatening staff. Mao promoted her to director of the Small Group that ran the campaign. But in 1972 she had a nervous breakdown and Mao lost interest in her.

* During the 1990s, this author met Deng Pufang in Beijing. ‘Yes, let us say we have come through struggles to get here,’ is how he described his trajectory, sitting in his wheelchair.

* While Kenyatta was consolidating his power in Kenya, the British withdrew from Tanganyika and Zanzibar. In January 1964 the sultan of Zanzibar – the Arab monarch whose cousin ruled Oman – faced an invasion by a demented messianic Ugandan Christian, John Okello, who seized the island with 600 revolutionaries and tried to capture Sultan Sir Jamshid bin Abdullah, who fled on his yacht. Okello ordered the killing of all Arabs between eighteen and twenty-five, gang-raping all women, though banning the rape of virgins. Two thousand Omanis were killed – vengeance for centuries of slave trading. But Field Marshal Okello was outmanoeuvred by saner leaders who, after trying to impose a Marxist republic, expelled him and negotiated a union with Tanganyika to form Tanzania. The sultan ultimately retired to Oman: his cousins still rule Oman today.

* Lucian Freud, who had only known the famed psychoanalyst, his grandfather, in old age, lived like an eighteenth-century street-fighting rake, horseplayer and libertine, holding court with a harem of lovers and fathering at least twelve children. In 1966, painted his first reclining nude portrait, Naked Girl. His own raw, alienated, sensual and harshly impastoed style over the next fifty years mastered and gloried in the flesh, the soul and the human condition: ‘I want paint to work as flesh,’ he said. ‘My portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not have the look of the sitter, being them.’

* In September 1968, Salazar, aged seventy-nine, fell over in his bath and suffered a stroke. Yet Portugal’s Estado Novo did not fall. A loyalist was appointed prime minister, who continued the dictatorship at home and the brutal colonial wars abroad.

* Kenyatta died in 1978 aged eighty-four, leaving his family one of the richest in Kenya, but his sons were too young to succeed him. He selected a henchman, Daniel Arap Moi, who ruled for twenty years. Kenyatta’s son Uhuru served as president from 2013 to 2022 – another African dynast in a flawed but functioning democracy.

* That week, a British art and drama student and singer-songwriter from Brixton named David Bowie (né Jones) released a song, ‘Space Oddity’, that told the story of a stranded astronaut, Major Tom, who orbited earth forever. Fascinated by space travel, Bowie – a figure of cadaverous beauty and vampirical glamour – now chronicled the messianic strangeness of fame in the age of mass consumerism in his album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His only equal as a songwriter and showman was his contemporary, also a working-class Londoner, Elton John (né Reggie Dwight), who also chronicled the space world in his ‘Rocketman’ and whose masterwork ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ expanded what was meant by pop music. Their fusion of theatre, fashion and music showed that rock was becoming the dynamic wing of art, while their exploration of sexual androgyny (both caused much shock by admitting to being bisexual), exotic hedonism and their near destruction through cocaine addiction marked the end of the utopian Sixties and the dawn of the darkening Seventies. But it was the Rolling Stones, whose ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ – the best history song of all time – confronted the Age of Aquarius with the satanic forces of history. The Sixties unofficially died on 6 December at the Stones concert at Altmont, California, when a fan was stabbed to death by marauding Hells Angel security. But the Stones survived it all and played to vast stadiums for the next fifty years.

* Pakistan smarted from the disaster, its president ceding power to its dynamic foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a socialist heir to 250,000 feudal acres in the family power base Sindh, educated at Oxford and Berkeley. Two weeks after taking office he summoned Pakistani scientists: ‘We’re going to have the Bomb. How long will it take?’ But Indira Gandhi was pursuing the Bomb too. Aided by the Soviets, in 1974 she tested an Indian device that, feared Bhutto, would establish Indian ‘hegemony in the subcontinent’. He accelerated the Pakistani project, promoting a young scientist, A. Q. Khan, who started to buy plans and equipment for an Islamic Bomb. ‘Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilizations have this capability,’ said Bhutto. ‘Islamic civilization is without it.’ He tried to combine Pakistan’s different sides. ‘Islam is our faith, democracy our policy,’ he declared, ‘socialism our economy.’ But he was overshadowed by a military which regarded itself as the guardian of the precarious state. In the east, the founding leader of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, nicknamed Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal), ruled the new state until his assassination in 1975; he founded a dynasty – his daughter Sheikh Hasini ruled autocratically into the 2020s.