Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia

No wonder this was a golden age of claustrophobic conspiracy thrillers such as The Conversation, Chinatown and Three Days of the Condor. The message of Alan Pakula’s vertiginous ‘paranoia trilogy’ (Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men) was that a moral sickness had infected the heart of America – families, businesses and the government itself. The shadowy, all-powerful corporation organising political assassinations in The Parallax View might once have seemed fantastical; by the time the film was released in 1974, after the ITT corporation and the CIA had been accused of helping to topple Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, it seemed all too plausible. As if to confirm that fact had outpaced fantasy, this was soon followed by All the President’s Men, an equally incredible tale which happened to be the unembellished truth. ‘What a curiosity is our Democracy, what a mystery,’ Norman Mailer said after reading the transcripts of President Nixon’s conversations. ‘No novelist unwinds a narrative so well.’ By the summer of 1973 Watergate had supplanted Coronation Street as my favourite soap opera: the daily plot twists and the rococo cast of characters – G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh, Jeb Stuart Magruder – were far more enthralling than the chatter of Ena Sharples and Albert Tatlock over their glasses of milk stout in the Rover’s Return.

The truth was stranger than the most outlandish fiction – though there was no shortage of outlandish fiction too, including Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbowy Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy and William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, which remains an inspirational text for right-wingers who see black helicopters everywhere. These fell on fertile ground in a polity whose citizens were obliged to suspend their disbelief every time they opened a newspaper. ‘Always keep them guessing,’ Ishmael Reed said of his novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a post-modern conspiratorial epic about the struggle between black Americans and a secret society of Knights Templar which controls the white Establishment. That way, he explained, ‘they won’t know whether we’re serious or whether we are writing fiction’. Although it was sent to the publishers in April 1971, long before the Watergate scandal, the book included a group photo of three future Watergate conspirators – John Dean, John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst – standing on a balcony, watching Yippies dancing in the street. Asked to explain this prophetic coup, Reed replied: ‘It’s necromancy.’

I’d prefer to call it pre-emptive paranoia. Some novelists seemed to know things that we didn’t, and a glance at their CVs strengthened that impression. E. Howard Hunt, who organised the Watergate burglary, was not only a veteran spook but also a prolific author whose first book, East of Farewell (1942), was praised by the New York Times as ‘a crashing start for a new writer’.* During his two decades as a CIA officer, in spare moments between overthrowing the Guatemalan government and planning the invasion of Cuba, he wrote more than thirty spy thrillers, each of which had to be submitted to his superiors for vetting. ‘I made a conscientious effort to fudge details, blurring locations and identities so they couldn’t be recognised,’ he recalled, but sometimes a scene would be censored ‘and I’d learn that some episode I thought I’d made up from whole cloth had described an actual operation – one that I’d never heard about’. In his novel On Hazardous Duty (1965) he even managed to describe the Watergate break-in, a full seven years before the event:

The agent who had planted the mike in the target office had tested the key, so the first barrier would yield. But the lock on the office door was a later model – pin and tumbler – and they would have to make its key on the spot … ‘All right,’ Peter said curtly, ‘I don’t want heroes, just the contents of the safe.’

Necromancy again – or simply a self-fulfilling paranoid prophecy by a man who was described in his New York Times obituary as ‘totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him’?

In his classic lecture on ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, delivered only a few days before the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, the historian Richard Hofstadter traced the lineage of that style from early anti-Masonism and anti-Catholicism through to McCarthyite anti-Communism in the 1950s. ‘I call it the paranoid style,’ he said, ‘simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.’ He was not using the phrase in a clinical sense, merely borrowing a clinical term for other purposes:

I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to people with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. When I speak of the paranoid style, I use the term much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.

His theory rested on two assumptions: that the conspiracy theorists were dangerous and deluded; and that in America they were almost invariably ‘extreme right-wingers’ such as the John Birch Society, which had denounced President Eisenhower as ‘a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy’. In a published version of his lecture a couple of years later, Hofstadter wrote in a footnote that ‘conspiratorial explanations of Kennedy’s assassination have a far wider currency in Europe than they do in the United States’.

He spoke too soon. Even in the US, perhaps especially in the US, by the end of the Seventies the Kennedy assassination had spawned a vast shoal of conspiratorial literature and obsessive investigations. As more light was shed on the devilish schemes concocted inside the HQs of corporations and government agencies (those nameless, featureless office blocks that loom so forbiddingly in many Seventies films), the paranoid style became almost the default mode of thinking: it seemed a reasonable working assumption that there was indeed a clandestine collusion between vested interests which thought themselves above the law. If the Central Intelligence Agency had tried to bump off President Fidel Castro in the 1960s, then why not President John F. Kennedy? ‘I was very paranoid about the CIA,’ Norman Mailer recalled, ‘and so I thought it perfectly possible that the CIA had pulled it off.’ Or perhaps the Mafia, given that the Church committee listed the many phone calls made by JFK to Judith Campbell Exner, who was also the lover of the leading mobster Sam Giancana? As Mailer admitted: ‘Like most conspiratorialists, I wanted there to be a conspiracy.’

Some old radicals had begged their younger comrades not to head down this road, warning that it could only lead to the paranoia gulch inhabited by McCarthyites in the Fifties. ‘All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting in defence of the Left and of sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology,’ the veteran muckraker I. F. Stone wrote in October 1964. ‘Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report.’

The tumult of the next ten years drowned out this admonitory voice. Soon after President Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the former student leader Carl Oglesby wrote an article for Ramparts magazine titled ‘In Defence of Paranoia’, arguing that recent events had demolished the assumptions of Stone and Hofstadter: instead of leading to political madness, the paranoid style might be the necessary prerequisite for retaining one’s political sanity – an echo of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ popularised at the time by R.D. Laing, who held that schizophrenics and paranoids were the only people sane enough to see that the world is deranged. The Hofstadter paradigm was shattered, and has been irreparable ever since. ‘Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy,’ Norman Mailer wrote in 1992, ‘we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia.’ The Illuminatus! Trilogy, that key to all mythologies of the early Seventies, features an anarchist sect called the Crazies whose political position is deliberately unintelligible but seems to encompass worship of Bugs Bunny and study of the Tarot as well as ‘mass orgies of pot-smoking and fucking on every street corner’. One of the Crazies explains: ‘What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises and insanity is the only viable alternative.’

Despite the foreignness of that era to twenty-first-century eyes and ears, we are its children. (Literally so for Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, who meets his six-year-old self in 1973.) And in the first decade of the twenty-first century, just as the nation succumbed to a craze for genealogy, British novelists suddenly began scrutinising this forgotten ancestor.* ‘Just think of it!’ Jonathan Coe writes in The Rotters’ Club (2001), which pioneered the fictional fashion. ‘A world without mobiles or videos or Playstations or even faxes. A world that had never heard of Princess Diana or Tony Blair, never thought for a moment of going to war in Kosovo or Afghanistan. There were only three television channels … And the unions were so powerful that, if they wanted to, they could close one of them down for a whole night. Sometimes people even had to do without electricity. Imagine!’ Towards the end of Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby (2007), having progressed from the 1970s to the present day, the eponymous anti-hero protests at this new fascination even though the book itself exemplifies it: ‘Eventually I stopped reading the coverage. I couldn’t stand another article about 1970s fashions, ABBA or tank tops. This kind of decade-drivel used to be the territory of Chick’s Own or Bunty but has now run through whole sections of serious newspapers.’ And serious novels, one could add. Here is Engleby’s description of his student room at Oxford in 1973: ‘As well as the Quicksilver Messenger Service poster, there is one for Procol Harum live at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. I have on my cork board a picture of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, taken from a magazine; one of David Bowie with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop …’ Ah yes, I remember it well: I queued all night on the pavement outside the Rainbow that year with my friend Nick Rayne, son of the Queen’s shoemaker, for tickets to a gig by Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. Our hippy credentials took a plummeting nosedive at about 8 a.m. when the Rayne family chauffeur pulled up beside us in a Rolls-Royce and asked if he should bring some breakfast for Master Nicholas and his companion.

Like Howard Sounes, the novelists season their texts with titles of sitcoms and rock albums for period verisimilitude, but they also essay a rough impression of the social and political mood. ‘People were always on strike,’ Hanif Kureishi writes in Something to Tell You (2008). ‘The lights crashed almost every week … there were food or petrol shortages, along with some sort of national crisis with ministers resigning … Then there’d be an IRA bomb.’ In The Partisan’s Daughter (2008) Louis de Bernières gives this thumbnail sketch of Britain’s winter of discontent in the early months of 1979: ‘The streets were piled high with rubbish, you couldn’t buy bread or the Sunday Times, and in Liverpool no one would bury the dead.’

The world we now inhabit, and often take for granted, was gestated in that unpromising decade. The first call on a handheld mobile phone was made on 3 April 1973 in New York City by its inventor, Martin Cooper of Motorola, who had been inspired by Captain Kirk’s portable ‘communicator’ in Star Trek. The first personal computer, the MITS Altair, appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975, prompting a nineteen-year-old Harvard student, Bill Gates, and his friend Paul Allen to design a Basic operating system for it. Their partnership, initially called Micro-soft (sic), had total earnings that year of $16,005. (By the end of the century, its annual revenue was more than $20 billion.) On April Fool’s Day 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak unveiled their Apple I computer.

The gestation occurred partly because we inhabited a world that could no longer be taken for granted, or indeed taken at all. Throughout the Seventies there was a rising hubbub of discontent, a swelling chorus of voices saying it couldn’t go on like this – whether ‘it’ was a sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy, a jackbooted Latin American dictatorship, an enfeebled British corporatist democracy, or merely the quotidian headache of trying to make a phone call without a mechanical chorus of clicks, wheezes and crossed lines, as of a thousand boiled sweets being unwrapped simultaneously during a tuberculosis epidemic. Even the steady drip of small daily frustrations felt like torture, as in this litany from Douglas Hurd’s diary during the autumn of 1971, when he was the British prime minister’s political secretary: ‘All the mechanics of life crumbling around us – heating, cars, telephone etc … Telephone mended, light fuses blow. No progress on cars or heating … Demented by no progress at all on selling car or repairing heating … The bloody paper fails to insert my ad … Still getting nowhere on central heating … Finally we have two cars which work, and boilers, taps and radiators ditto. This has taken three months.’

The frustration seemed almost universal.* You can hear it in the howl of Peter Finch’s messianic TV anchorman in Network (1976) as he exhorts viewers to lean out of their windows and yell: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!’ Or in the New Statesman’s front-page headline on the day after the fall of the Labour government in 1979: ‘NO CONFIDENCE. This time, something’s got to give.’ Something did: the British elected Margaret Thatcher, the Americans installed Ronald Reagan, and within little more than a decade much of the creaky but apparently immovable furniture of the old world had been consigned to the bonfire – South American military dictators, the Soviet bloc, even prices and incomes policies.

Which brings me to the starting point of my earlier book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: that although 1979 may not have the same historical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too marks a moment when a complacent and exhausted status quo reached the end of the road. That book began in 1979; this one recounts how we got there, and what a bizarre journey it was. Fasten your seatbelts: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

* Whitlam’s premiership was itself snuffed out by Her Majesty the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor General Sir John Kerr, who sacked him in November 1975. In true Seventies fashion, some furious Whitlam supporters claimed that Kerr had acted on orders from the CIA.

* ‘This particular house on the sea had itself been very much a part of the Sixties, and for some months after we took possession I would come across souvenirs of that period in its history – a piece of Scientology literature beneath a drawer lining, a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land stuck deep on a closet shelf – but after a while we did some construction, and between the power saws and the sea wind we got the place exorcised.’

* Baader-Meinhof members waged war against West Germany’s ‘performance society’, claiming that it induced mental illness in its citizens. Perversely, they seemed to think that the remedy was to terrorise the nation into a state of paranoia instead, through a campaign of bombings and assassinations that revived memories of Nazi methods in the 1930s. Jillian Becker’s study of the group, published in 1977, was titled Hitler’s Children.

* In 1946 Hunt was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to finance the writing of his novel Stranger in Town, beating two other up-and-coming authors who applied for the same fellowship. ‘The only thing Truman Capote and I have in common,’ Gore Vidal said, ‘was Howard Hunt beat us out for a Guggenheim.’

* See, for example, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby, Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You, Helen Walsh’s Once Upon a Time in England, Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions, Louis de Bernières’s A Partisan’s Daughter, Richard T. Kelly’s Crusaders, Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency. Hensher discusses these novels in ‘Writing the Nation’, Prospect magazine, April 2008, pp.32–6.

* A diary entry by James Lees-Milne, English aesthete and castle-creeper, for Friday, 21 June 1974: ‘This morning I endeavoured to get a Bath number for three-quarters of an hour. Three times I rang the exchange, three times the supervisor. Finally, I was driven so mad with rage that I shouted abuse down the mouthpiece and smashed the telephone to smithereens on the hearthstone. Pieces of it flew across the room to the windows. Instead of feeling ashamed I felt greatly relieved. And if it costs me £50 to repair it was worth it. I only wish the telephonist who was so obstructive and impertinent to me had been the hearthstone.’

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