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

and the Munich agreement, about his love of American football, even about which Californian beaches were best for surfing. What struck the bemused audience wasn’t what he said but how he said it. ‘His hands were in his pockets,’ one recalled. ‘He didn’t look anyone in the eyes; he was mumbling; when people asked him to speak up he would boom one word out and no more.’ Another student found it ‘freaky’: ‘Nothing he was saying was coherent … At first I felt awe, and then that changed right away to respect. Then as he kept talking, it went to disappointment and disillusionment. Then I felt pity because he was so pathetic, and then just plain fear to think that he’s running the country.’

      When Krogh finally managed to hustle the President and the valet into a limousine, a bearded youth rushed up to the car window and gave Nixon the finger. Nixon, snapping out of his trance, returned the gesture. ‘That son-of-a-bitch will go through the rest of his life telling everybody that the President of the United States gave him the finger,’ he chuckled. ‘And nobody will believe him.’ Despite Krogh’s pleas the President still refused to go home, asking the driver to head for the Capitol instead. Apart from a few guards and janitors, the only people in the deserted congressional buildings at that hour were three black cleaning women – one of whom, Carrie Moore, asked Nixon to autograph the Bible she always carried with her. Her piety was apparently contagious. ‘You know,’ he confided, taking her by the hand, ‘my mother was a saint. She died two years ago. She was a saint. You be a saint, too.’ He then strolled into the chamber of the House, installed himself in the seat he used to occupy in the 1940s and invited his valet to step up to the podium and make a speech. Krogh watched the extraordinary tableau: ‘Richard Nixon, exhausted, his face drawn … sitting there by himself telling the valet, “Manolo, say something!” Manolo was embarrassed – he was a dear, sweet man – but he did try to talk a little. And Nixon started to clap. Clap, clap, clap, echoing in the chamber. I tell you, at that moment I wasn’t quite sure what was going on … I did question his mental stability.’

      More aides and Secret Service agents were arriving by now, and Nixon decided they should all accompany him to breakfast in the Rib Room at the Mayflower Hotel. Bob Haldeman, who had also joined the posse, found the President ‘completely beat and just rambling on, but obviously too tired to go to sleep’. After breakfast he strode off in the direction of the White House, through the gaggles of demonstrators who were gathering on the street. ‘The President kept walking,’ Krogh recalled, ‘and the car was sort of moving along trying to keep close to him. Haldeman hissed, “Stop him!” and I kind of grabbed Nixon by the arm. He pulled his arm away and glowered, and then he got in the back of the car.’

      ‘I am concerned about his condition,’ Haldeman wrote in his diary. ‘The decision, the speech, the aftermath killings, riots, press, etc; the press conference, the student confrontation have all taken their toll, and he has had very little sleep for a long time and his judgment, temper and mood suffer badly as a result.’ He described it as ‘the weirdest day so far’, but there would be many almost as weird: Kissinger thought the incident revealed ‘only the tip of the psychological iceberg’. Fortunately for Nixon, the media still had enough respect for the office, if not the incumbent, to refrain from alleging in public what they suspected privately: that the President of the United States was cracking up. John Osborne of the New Republic came closest to breaking the taboo when he mentioned the President’s ‘alternating moods of anger and euphoria’ in a book published a few months later. After Nixon’s resignation, Osborne told the whole truth: many White House correspondents felt that ‘he might go bats in front of them at any time’.

      Although Nixon said that the point of meeting the students was ‘to try to lift them a bit out of the miserable intellectual wasteland in which they now wander aimlessly around’, the effect of his own aimless wandering was to drag him deeper into the pit of paranoia that he had dug for himself. Over the next few days he bombarded aides with demands for retribution against his innumerable foes: universities which ‘caved into demonstrators’ by closing down should have all their defence funds stopped; State Department officials who opposed the Cambodian invasion must be sacked. He instructed Haldeman to ‘put the hook into the Jewish boys’, as none of the Jews in Congress had supported his invasion of Cambodia.

      The uproar on campuses and the lack of any visible gains from the Cambodian adventure prompted a slump on the stock market: after their own fashion, institutional investors were on strike just as emphatically as the students. At the behest of Bernard J. Lasker, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, Nixon hastily arranged a White House dinner on 27 May for anxious bankers and company chairmen. ‘It probably is safe to say that rarely in modern history have so many of the nation’s financial leaders assembled together in the same room,’ the New York Times reported. ‘The fact that they were all there indicates the urgency of the situation.’ The columnist William Janeway described it as the most expensive dinner in American history, as investors had to lose nearly $30 billion before the invitations went in the post. One guest bragged that he and his fellow diners ‘had the fate of the stock market in their hands’.

      After lobster cocktails and beef Wellington, served with Château Lafite-Rothschild 1962, Nixon rose to address these financial demigods. If peace meant a revival of confidence, he said, they ought to be very bullish indeed: the Cambodian adventure was going well, and when the Communist bases there had been wiped out a full withdrawal from Vietnam would at last be possible. He then launched into a self-pitying riff about the loneliness of leadership and the burdens of command, looking down the rectangular table in the State Dining Room at his audience of burdened commanders and lonely leaders. The perfect analogy came to him instantly. ‘Anybody here see the movie Patton?’ he asked.

      No American President has a character or career so inextricably entwined with the cinema as Richard Nixon. Jack Kennedy looked and behaved like a Hollywood star, hanging out with Frank Sinatra and sleeping with Marilyn Monroe; Ronald Reagan actually was a Hollywood star. Yet Nixon surpassed them both. One could tell the story of his life purely through the films he watched and the films he inspired – and indeed the American critic Mark Feeney has done so, in his brilliant study Nixon at the Movies. As Feeney writes:

      The moviegoer’s fundamental yearning and loneliness – why else sit for two hours in the dark if not in pursuit of yearning’s fulfilment and loneliness’s abolition? – find an unmistakeable embodiment in Nixon. Growing up hard by Hollywood as Hollywood itself grew up, he added a particularly vivid strand to the pattern of outsiderdom that would define him all his life: indeed, it was a pattern that helped elevate him to the White House and then remove him from it. The standard road to political success is to ape the lineaments of stardom: glamour, grace, assurance. However unwittingly, Nixon followed another route: representing the rest of us – drab, clumsy, anxious – the great silent majority of moviegoers who don’t decorate the screen but stare at it.

      He was born in 1913, the year before Cecil B. DeMille made the first feature film in Hollywood – then a small town of unpaved streets and parched fields, twenty-five miles from Nixon’s birthplace in the citrus groves of Yorba Linda – and from boyhood onwards he was an avid moviegoer. During the sixty-seven months of his presidency he arranged private screenings of more than five hundred films at the White House, Camp David and his ‘western White House’ in San Clemente. Most were old favourites from the 1940s and 1950s, produced by the studio moguls who had financed his early election campaigns in California, men such as Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox and Jack Warner of Warner Brothers.

      ‘People need to laugh, to cry, to dream, to be taken away from the dull lives they lead,’ Nixon told a gathering of Hollywood bigwigs in 1972, pleading for a return to good old-fashioned escapism and entertainment. ‘The difficulty we have at present,’ he wrote to the actress Jane Wyman a few months later, ‘is that so many of the movies coming out of Hollywood, not to mention those that come out of Europe, are so inferior that we just don’t enjoy them.’ He didn’t like most contemporary films – too earnest, too angry, too political – but he seems not to have twigged that what he recoiled from might be his own reflection. Nixon was fascinated by cinema, and cinema has reciprocated the fascination. He turns up in the most surprising and unpolitical settings: Shampoo takes place on election day in 1968, when he first won the presidency;