The Atlantic and Its Enemies (38 page)

In these same weeks Nixon secured a landslide electoral victory, almost as great as Johnson’s. He was handed it easily enough. This was partly because - an admiring biographer, Jonathan Aitken, does not quite see how devastating this was - he had procured short-term growth, prosperity and even tax cuts by coin-clipping the dollar itself. But in any event the Democrats, true to form for the Vietnam opposition, made fools of themselves, reconstructing their party statutes on lines that allowed any fringe grievance-struck group a say, conducting their affairs childishly in public, and finally putting forward the classic loser candidate. At the heart of matters was a vast change in American politics symbolized by the Southern Democrats and the switch of old Republicans in the north-east: there were new coalitions at work. Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ speech of November 1969 had it right: there was indeed an almost unnoticed America that was very far from sharing the concerns that made the headlines, and they voted for Nixon.

However, this did not matter, as by now in Washington there was what, later, in England, was called ‘a media feeding frenzy’. A sort of civil war developed in the USA, Nixon being in some quarters hated (with, even twenty years later, an Oliver Stone film to perpetuate the black legend). The administration’s own men could not be trusted, and in June 1971 the
New York Times
had started to serialize the ‘Pentagon Papers’, a huge collection of government documents, studies commissioned by McNamara in 1967, and ‘leaked’ by a one-time McNamara recruit from Harvard (Daniel Ellsberg: he had been at King’s, Cambridge, moved on to Harvard, and even served in Vietnam - precisely the McNamara sort until he had his moment of truth against the war). The studies were not binding, merely indicating how the administration thought, but the overall effect was to make Nixon conclude that ‘the media’ were against him and he was extraordinarily clumsy and brutal in his underhand dealings. Ben Bradlee of the
Washington Post
had been the object of gruesome flattery; now the Nixon machine went into clumsy reverse. He ordered wire-taps on thirteen telephones of his own officials. He did not trust his people, including Kissinger, and had every word recorded that was spoken in the White House. Kissinger was furious about the Ellsberg leak, and absurd prosecutions followed; newspapers were not just frontally attacked in this way, but were also surreptitiously harassed over television licence renewals and the like. Kissinger, similarly, devised foreign policy without letting the State Department know what he was doing, or even, as regards Moscow, telling the US ambassador.

For the re-election of 1972-3 Nixon’s war chest was flowing over in contributions, hundreds of thousands of dollars in safes. These could be handed out in generous bundles, and in the middle of a triumphal campaign Nixon hardly noticed at all what his lowest subordinates were doing: in this case a breakin to the Democrat headquarters in the Watergate Building on 17 June 1972. Nixon had been extraordinarily vindictive about the anti-war liberals - ‘We’ll get them on the ground where we want them and we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist’ - and he tried very hard indeed to destroy Ellsberg: even a special small team called ‘the plumbers’ (one of the White House security officers had a mother who wrote to him proudly that his grandfather, a plumber, would have been so pleased at his rise) was set up to find out what could be discovered from his psychiatric records. A list of enemies was drawn up, including Gregory Peck and the president of Harvard, and the telephone recordings whirred away. In the event, Nixon tried to weasel out of his ultimate responsibility, was caught up in a network of blackmail and blustering, and was eventually impeached by a Congress that had always had a Democrat majority. Not long after the Vietnam peace, he too was out, succeeded by a nonentity, Gerald Ford, who had not even been Vice-President, but who had to step in because the Vice-President had been caught in assorted illegalities as well.

14

Unravelling

The course of the Vietnam War worried the Europeans: did it mean that the Americans had given them up? Germany was now a fat target, but lacking her own nuclear weapon, and the Berlin crisis in 1961 had shown that the Americans were not anxious to move, whatever Kennedy said. Why, anyway, should the USA risk the obliteration of Chicago for a West Berlin of which American bombers had already made a considerable mess? In any case, the USA very obviously did not mean to let West Germany have a finger on any nuclear trigger, and the arms control proposals put to Moscow in spring 1962 amounted in effect to joint American-Soviet control, with only face-saving clauses for the NATO allies. Was this a moment for united Europe to assert itself? It had recovered from the war, and the Common Market was proving to be a great success. The old European world, with great numbers of peasant farmers, was rapidly going, and the towns boomed through hard-working rural migrants - a sure-fire formula for success in all economies except the Communist ones. Prosperity of an American sort proliferated - more cars, domestic tools, holidays in the sun. But what did it all signify?

In the immediate post-war decades, civilization was still defined by Europe. British and French writers and restaurants, Italian film-makers, the Vienna Staatsoper dominated the stage. The great universities of Europe were still vastly attractive to foreigners, who learned French or German as a matter of course; American graduate students came to Cambridge to take an undergraduate degree and American academics, visiting European institutions with their families, found that their children, at school, were a year or two behind. True, this cultural Europe did not extend into mass culture, which had been Americanized, and was to become ever more strongly so. As to this there was resentment. At this stage the Germans were in no mood to contest the American empire politically, but, especially in the Catholic south, they resisted the cultural side-effects and despite the best efforts of a would-be democratizing occupation education expert, one Zink, they had been able to retain the old divisions in education, as between academic and technical. If you opened a German newspaper, you were going to be instructed. The various German states competed with each other in cultural matters, and supported outstanding museums or opera houses; Wagner’s Bayreuth returned to the world’s stage, with command performances on traditional lines from Birgit Nielsen or Hans Hotter, and the Austrians, even more conservative, maintained the standards of the Vienna Opera or the Salzburg Festival, where Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan drew audiences from around the world; the Wiener Philharmoniker still excluded women. That world resisted Americanization, but Americanization was very difficult to resist.

It affected language. The bestselling weekly journal in Germany was
Der Spiegel
, which had been set up in British-occupied Hamburg after the war, with advice from the British (along with the left-liberal
Die Zeit
, modelled on the
Observer
in London, owned and run by David Astor). It did not express itself in the standard German literary style, lengthy verbs-at-the-end-sentences and all: it aimed for English brevity, and in time
Spiegeldeutsch
was such that the magazine could only be understood if you knew American English quite well. There was a bestselling book in France at this time, Étiemble’s
Parlez-vous franglais?
It is a long book, giving many examples of the corruption of French, not just by Anglo-American words, but even by Anglo-American usages - for instance, the translation of the World Bank’s formal title to include
développement
, whereas
mise en valeur
gives a better understanding of the English original. There was some justice in the French campaign. After all, up until very recent times French had indeed been a dominant language, and when de Gaulle appeared at a state visit in London in 1962, and was accompanied by the Comédie-Française and the great Racine actress and director Marie Bell, the London theatre was enthusiastically full up for her productions of
Bérénice
and
Britannicus
, austere alexandrines in a language that, today, even most of the French would find testing. As it happened, Étiemble (who was of peasant origin) had spent seven years in Chicago and had hated much about it. A French West Indian academic colleague had come to see him at home, and the landlord had nearly thrown him out; he remarks, of ‘the American way of not living’, ‘how can you not deplore the great sexual misery of a people with frigid, obsessive, puritanical and bossy women for whom the men stupifiedly kill themselves with work and alcohol?’ and asks what might be done with ‘the infantile cuisine to which the Yankees are reduced and which they take such joy in’. He adds that he would never be attracted by a woman wearing jeans. Étiemble (who lived to an immense age) had no illusions as to what might be done: he recognized that French writers were simply not as interesting as they had been even in the recent past, when French theatre had had worldwide resonance, and he would soon have had to admit as well that the great French cinema was producing mainly clichés. Such campaigns were all too easy to ridicule. At least Luther in the sixteenth century had been robust and not long-winded, but in the 1880s there had been an absurdly pompous effort to prevent words such as ‘telephone’ entering the German language directly: ‘far-speaker’ (
Fernsprecher
) was substituted, and ‘round-spark’ (
Rundfunk
) for ‘radio’ (an even more absurd Croat effort to avoid that word came up with
krugoval
, ‘round-spark’ in South Slavonic). This was a hopeless business, and Étiemble had the humiliation of seeing ambitious Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of a sort he detested make the standard trot to Harvard or Stanford business school, there to be deracinated into unmemorable miniature Jean Monnets.

There was another famous French book at this time, another of those silly-clever sixties bestsellers, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s
Le Défi américain.
He, in a later work, suffered from strange notions, that, to stop Indian textiles from competing with their own, the British in India had cut off the little fingers of Hindu girls’ hands. However, the earlier title made at length the point that the Americans were buying up Europe: multinationals such as IBM were moving in; they were taking advantage of cheap labour, and yet by setting up in France they could duck under the French protectionist walls and thereby keep French industry from developing. However, they could do this because they could quite literally just print off dollars on paper which everyone else had to accept as if it were real gold. As had been feared from the start of the new system devised at Bretton Woods, in 1944, American paper money was international legal tender because two thirds of trade was conducted with the dollar (the pound sterling accounting for most of the remainder). In theory it could be converted into gold, at the famous formula of $35 per ounce, but even in 1960 the American gold reserve at Fort Knox was less in value than the number of dollars kept abroad and especially in Europe. What was to stop the Americans from just printing pieces of paper and buying up Europe? This was a fraudulent point, because the same system, triumphantly and perhaps perversely in the case of the British, enabled Europeans to invest in the USA. ‘S-S’, as he was called (he produced a would-be French version of
Time
magazine, became an internet-is-the-answer bore, and had his children brought up in Pittsburgh, generally at the business school), also failed to notice that French industry, far from languishing, was doing better than it had done since the 1890s, when the arrival of electrical energy had enabled it to bypass the coal in which France was poor. Quite soon France was going to overtake England, for the first time since the French Revolution itself.

All of this allowed de Gaulle to appear as a world statesman, to put France back on the map. Now, he, many Frenchmen and many Europeans in general resented the American domination. There was not just the unreliability, the way in which the USA, every four years, became paralysed by a prospective presidential election. France’s defence was largely dependent upon the USA, and, here, there were fears in Paris and Bonn. They did not find Washington easy. The more the Americans became bogged down in Vietnam, the more there was head-shaking in Europe. They alone had the nuclear capacity to stop a Russian advance, but the Berlin crisis had already shown that the Americans’ willingness to come to Germany’s defence was quite limited, and they had not even stood up for their own treaty rights. Now, in 1964, they were involved in a guerrilla war in south-east Asia and were demonstrably making a mess of it: would Europe have any priority? Perhaps, if West Germany had been allowed to have nuclear weaponry, the Europeans could have built up a real deterrent of their own, but that was hardly in anyone’s mind. The bomb was to be Anglo-American.

At the turn of 1962-3 the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had met Kennedy (at Nassau) and agreed to depend upon a little American technology on condition that the French got even less. There would be no Franco-British nuclear link and as far as de Gaulle was concerned, France would have to make her own way forward. He got his own back. The Americans were trying to manoeuvre Great Britain into the EEC, and, conscious now of their comparative decline, the British reluctantly agreed to be manoeuvred. At a press conference in January 1963, de Gaulle showed them the door. Europe was to be a Franco-German affair, and de Gaulle was its leader. France could not go alone. If she had seriously to offer a way forward between the world powers, she had to have allies, and Germany was the obvious candidate. Adenauer, too, needed the votes of what, in a more robust age, had been called ‘the brutal rurals’, and the Common Agricultural Policy bribed them. In return for protection and price support, they would vote for Adenauer, even if they only had some small plot that they worked at weekends.

France, with a seat on the Security Council and the capacity to make trouble for the USA with the dollar and much else, mattered; the Communists were a useful tool, and they were told not to destabilize de Gaulle. He was being helpful to Moscow. In the first instance, starting in 1964, the French had made problems as regards support for the dollar. They built up gold reserves, and then sold dollars for more gold, on the grounds that the dollar was just paper, and inflationary paper at that. There was of course more to it, in that there was no financial centre in France to rival that of London, and the French lost because they had to use London for financial transactions; by 1966 they were formally refusing to support the dollar any more, and this (an equivalent of French behaviour in the early stages of the great Slump of 1929-32) was a pillar knocked from under the entire Atlantic financial system.