Collateral Damage

The guide took us into the debating chambers and invited us to sit in the Speaker’s chair. As we wandered the corridors, I found myself gazing at the group photographs of generations of Mississippi state senators; on a less than comprehensive survey, it looked as if the first African-American senator had appeared in the mid-1980s. I also noticed an unexpected feature in the top left-hand corner of the state flag, and I asked the tour guide why Mississippi was still showcasing the Confederate flag in that way. He looked hugely embarrassed and said: ‘I really can’t discuss that.’ Surprised at this, I asked how people like him felt about the Civil War. He paused, looked at me intently, and said: ‘You have to realise, the Civil War was mostly fought here in the South. It was our homes that were burnt down, our crops that were pillaged, our economy and our way of life that was destroyed. That’s how we feel.’

Outside, in the autumn sunshine, we walked through the gardens surrounding the Capitol – and found more echoes of the Civil War. Right in front of the building stood a large monument, created as late as 1917, to ‘The Women of the Confederacy – mothers, sisters, wives and daughters’. A little further from the building was a statue of a Confederate soldier. I found myself recalibrating. I had expected our trip through the Deep South to resonate with echoes of the civil rights clashes of the Sixties; to remind me of places like Selma and Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, and of grainy black-and-white TV footage of protests and burnings and beatings. Instead, there were reminders and relics everywhere of another, wider and more savage conflict that had taken place a century earlier, the wounds of which seemed as deep and as open as if it had happened yesterday.

That evening, we again went to a downtown restaurant, this time by regular taxi rather than Uber. The vehicle was a huge SUV, but we found it more cramped than expected for the four of us; the driver had reclined his seat back to a near horizontal position, primarily to provide adequate space for his large stomach, which was more a beer barrel than a six-pack. The pile of empty fast food cartons in the passenger footwell provided a clue as to the cause of his condition. As with his predecessor, I invited his views on the election process. ‘Not interested,’ came the reply.

When we set off the next morning, heading for New Orleans via Natchez, I put Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road on the car CD player. Williams was born in Louisiana and her music is soaked in the Deep South. The album is a raw, heartfelt travelogue of the land we were travelling through: of Jackson, Vicksburg and Baton Rouge, of dusty back roads, cotton fields and dilapidated shacks. My travelling companions were insufficiently appreciative of the brilliance of the music first time round, so I made them listen to it all over again.

And so to Natchez – for lunch and a wander around a city that, prior to the Civil War, had boasted more millionaires than any other city in America. It enjoys a spectacular setting on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. We started at the visitor centre, where the main attraction was a short film on its history. Founded by French colonists in 1716, it was fought over for several years by the French and the Natchez tribe of Native Americans, traded to Spain in the Treaty of Paris of 1763, and sold again a few years later to, yes, the British. We then ceded it to the US after the American Revolutionary War. The combination of the cotton boom and Mississippi River trade made it, for a few decades, exceptionally wealthy. The film painted a picture of an era of extraordinarily gracious living; of wealth and privilege, society balls and horse racing, and the most beautiful antebellum mansions in all America. But it explained little of Natchez’s decline and depopulation, beyond the damage done to the cotton industry by the boll weevil infestation that struck the Deep South in the late 1800s.

As we left the centre, we concluded that there must have been more to the Natchez story. It was a warm still afternoon, so we bought some food and sat on the heights of the bluff, in the open air, overlooking the river. The Mississippi stretched out before us, as wide as a lake, mud-brown and sluggish. The far side was so thickly wooded that scarcely any buildings were visible; we realised that we were gazing upon a landscape that hadn’t much changed over the last two hundred years. And we trawled the internet for a more complete history of Natchez.

As we had expected, there was a darker side to the story. Natchez had also prospered thanks to slavery. The cotton plantations had thrived on slave labour, while Natchez itself had hosted the Forks of the Road Market, one of the largest slave markets in the whole of the South. The city was lucky enough to survive the Civil War largely undamaged; indeed, in 1863, Ulysses S. Grant set up temporary headquarters in one of Natchez’s finer antebellum mansions. And Natchez continued to prosper for some decades after the war. But then the boll weevil landed, and destroyed the cotton crops, and the railroads replaced the steamboat traffic, bypassing the river cities and drawing away their commerce.

Throughout, Natchez remained a centre of Confederate defiance, troubled race relations, Ku Klux Klan activity, and opposition to civil rights progress. African-American activists were targeted and churches burned down. In the mid-Sixties, E. L. McDaniel, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klans of America, had his office on Natchez’s Main Street.

As we mused on this alternative history, a minibus drew up behind us, and a dozen men emerged and started hoeing a large municipal flowerbed. I watched them for several minutes before I realised what I was seeing. They were prisoners. Dressed in identical overalls, they were the modern equivalent of a chain gang, though without the leg irons. It was a moment straight from the movies; Sullivan’s Travels, or perhaps Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. I didn’t, however, dare to take a photograph; who knew what crimes they had committed?

On that note, we hit the highway for the final leg to New Orleans; the last stretch of Mississippi, then into Louisiana and True Detective territory. We arrived early evening, checked into another quirky hotel, this time in the French Quarter, and headed out to dinner with the honorary consul for the United Kingdom, James (Jimmy) J. Coleman Jr, CBE. Jimmy was from an old New Orleans family. A Princeton graduate and Oxford University postgraduate, he was a successful and wealthy lawyer and property developer, a friend of the British royal family, a philanthropist – and, at forty-four years, the longest serving British honorary consul anywhere on the planet. He was also exceptional company. (Sadly, Jimmy died in March 2019 after a fall in his parents’ mansion, and New Orleans thereby lost one of its great characters.)

The first evening, Jimmy took us to Antoine’s Restaurant, a New Orleans institution since 1840, where we sampled the eclectic fusion that is French-Creole cuisine while soaking up Jimmy’s lifetime experience of his city. We quizzed him in particular for his take on the US elections. He said that he looked at them as a businessman. In his view, Obama had been ‘anti-business’, always imposing new, profit-sapping regulations. So he would be voting Republican, along with most of his businessmen friends. ‘Including if Trump is the Republican nominee?’ I asked. Jimmy shrugged: ‘I don’t like him and hope he isn’t, but yes, he’s a businessman too, and he will know what needs to be done.’ This was my first experience of the other component of the growing Trump coalition; over the coming months I was to hear the same from the American business community up and down the country.

I also asked Jimmy about his experience, as a New Orleans resident, of Hurricane Katrina. He said that his own property had been virtually untouched. The same went for his immediate uptown neighbourhood. He also reminded me that there had been a 24-hour gap between the storm striking and the levees failing. So when he had walked around the city in the storm’s immediate aftermath, there hadn’t been that much damage. Then the flood waters came. And some parts, like New Orleans East, had never really recovered.

Intrigued by his account, we visited a semi-permanent Katrina exhibition in central New Orleans the next morning. After absorbing it, especially the TV film clips, I talked to one of the curators. He told me that the oldest, wealthiest families in New Orleans had built houses on the best, usually the highest, land. So although 80 per cent of the city had flooded, some of the New Orleans ‘aristocracy’ had escaped, while the poorest parts of the city, largely home to African-American communities, had been hardest hit. And afterwards, it had taken several years to get back to normal. In his view, both in the hours immediately after the storm and in the long-term clean-up, the authorities, both state and federal, had screwed up badly; and the weakest had suffered most.

Of course we did the usual things in New Orleans: the French Quarter, the French Market, Jackson Square (we couldn’t escape the humiliator of the British Army), the Mississippi towpath. That afternoon we walked around the picturesque streets of the Garden District (where I was disappointed not to run into film stars Sandra Bullock and John Goodman, or Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, all supposedly residents of that neighbourhood). And I insisted on visiting the cemetery where part of Easy Rider was filmed. Devotees of the film will remember that in these scenes, having watched the Mardi Gras procession, Wyatt and Billy pick up two girls, go to the cemetery, take acid, and make inappropriate use of the marble chambers in which the dead are entombed in New Orleans (the water table being so high in the city that if coffins were buried in the ground, they would simply float away). As with the Harley-Davidsons, this was another part of the script we lacked the nerve to recreate.

Then on to Sin City, the gambling capital of the world. We really didn’t get Las Vegas. I’ve been there since, for work reasons, and I still don’t get it. We landed there from New Orleans at dusk; from the air, awash with neon, it looked like an exotic glittering piece of jewellery carelessly discarded on the desert floor. But that was the best of it: close up, it was bleak, tawdry, grasping and plain weird. It is, for example, almost impossible to walk outside for any distance on a pavement in Vegas; you can only walk through the shopping malls. Indeed, the entire metropolis appears explicitly designed to separate visitors from their money as quickly as possible. And there are few more dispiriting experiences than wandering through the vast gambling floor of a hotel on the Vegas Strip: endless lines of slot machines, acres of blackjack and roulette tables, an air conditioning system in which air freshener fights a losing battle with the fog of nicotine, and hosts of dead-eyed punters losing their money.

I recognise that this may be a minority view; Vanessa fell into conversation in the hotel lift with a lady of mature years who told her that she visited Vegas three times a year, and always counted the days until her next trip. We had a good evening watching Cirque Du Soleil at the next-door hotel, and enjoyed one quintessential Vegas experience. According to TripAdvisor, the best Italian restaurant in the neighbourhood was in a nearby shopping mall. We duly went there for dinner, to find ourselves in a reimagined shopping street in Italy. The restaurant was located in one corner of someone’s idea of a piazza. We sat and ate some perfectly decent pasta, while above us, the artificial sky darkened and started glinting with fake stars.

We set off the next morning in another rented SUV for the 150-mile sprint eastwards to Springdale, Utah, just across the border with Nevada. Springdale is on the edge of Zion National Park and about ninety minutes from Bryce National Park; and it is Mormon country, having originally been established by a community of Mormon farmers in 1862. It is tiny: according to the last census, its population is 529. But it is also spectacular, surrounded by towering cliffs of red Navajo sandstone. The same red sandstone makes the fifteen-mile Zion Canyon, which we saw the next day, a truly exceptional experience, which we thought couldn’t be matched. But then, the day after, we saw Bryce. Its pink, red and amber phantom-like sandstone rock formations are simply otherworldly, transported from a galaxy far away.

We also had a run-in with Utah’s draconian alcohol licensing laws. It happened to be Thanksgiving. To get into the spirit of this uniquely American holiday, we tried to buy some wine for the evening. This was a problem. It turned out that state laws prohibited supermarkets from selling wine, which could only be purchased from state-run ‘liquor stores’, and the one in Springdale had closed hours earlier. So we ate at a neighbourhood diner at the deeply un-European time of 6 p.m. (their last sitting), and as we paid the bill, we asked whether we could buy some wine to take back to our hotel. The waiter looked deeply troubled and disappeared to consult his boss.

He returned and launched into a negotiation. Where were we going to drink the wine? Our hotel room, we said. This seemed okay. Were we content to carry the wine in a brown bag, and not take it out of the bag while walking down the road? We promised that we could make it the 800 yards back to our hotel without needing alcohol on the way. This also seemed okay. And then came the clincher. They couldn’t open the bottles for us; so if we didn’t have a corkscrew, we would be in trouble. We said this was fine. We didn’t have a corkscrew, but we knew that we could rely on the time-honoured technique, employed by generations of students, of pushing the cork down into the bottle. Honour and local law satisfied, we were allowed our two bottles. And as we discussed on the walk back, we really didn’t mind the interrogation or the local rules; better this than the spectacle of helpless drunks lying on the pavement (as seen in some British town centres on a Friday night). And our wives were thrilled to be asked to produce ID proving they were over twenty-one.

In the event, the wine accompanied our viewing of an American football game, the New England Patriots at the Denver Broncos, so we unwittingly participated in what I now know is an American Thanksgiving tradition. Or at least Nigel and I watched it. As I recall, it was snowing in Denver, and the Broncos won with a dramatic overtime play, a 48-yard touchdown by C. J. Anderson.

We returned to Las Vegas the following day, but went straight to the airport for our flight to Orlando. By that evening, we were on the freeway to Longboat Key, via Sarasota. This final leg was about rest and recreation as much as further exploration: sun, sea, tennis. Nigel and Lou’s apartment overlooked a long, virtually empty, white sand beach with pelicans wheeling past the windows and dolphins ‘team-fishing’ offshore. We knew and liked Sarasota from previous trips. It has some great waterside restaurants, an old-fashioned cinema showing indie films, and a pleasingly laid-back vibe.

Sarasota also has a feature of some fame, or perhaps notoriety. There is a famous photograph, taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt in Times Square on VJ Day, 15 August 1945, of a sailor kissing a nurse. In 2005, the sixtieth anniversary, a man called Seward Johnson created a 25-foot-high statue of the couple, which he called ‘Unconditional Surrender’, and was given permission to place it prominently, but temporarily, on the Sarasota waterfront. In 2007, it was loaned to the Port of San Diego, travelling there on a flatbed truck, which must have been quite a sight on the freeway. It was returned to Sarasota in 2012, in the teeth of some opposition: the then chairwoman of the Public Arts Committee said of it, ‘it doesn’t even qualify as kitsch’. Nevertheless, it has remained, even surviving a car driving into it in 2012; it is now permanently owned by the city, having been bought and donated by a Second World War veteran. It has, however, suffered a more recent mishap. The sailor in the iconic photograph, George Mendonsa, died on 18 February 2019. The next evening, someone sprayed a #MeToo logo on the statue; 1945’s romantic moment had become 2019’s sexual assault.

Our time in Sarasota wasn’t all play. Florida, with its twenty-nine electoral college votes, is the most important swing state in America, so there was value in sniffing the state’s political air. And Sarasota is a leading refuge for Midwesterner ‘snowbirds’, fleeing the bleak northern winters by driving straight down I-75 to Florida’s west coast. The Midwest is where US elections tend to be decided.

So what was in the air? Judging by what I heard, hopes were building around the local boy, Florida senator Marco Rubio (reminding me that he’d also been tipped by some of the Washington pundits at that breakfast at the residence several weeks earlier). But Donald Trump seemed to be everyone’s second choice from the field. These were mostly rich retirees, but Trump’s rhetoric seemed to be connecting with them as much as with the blue-collar classes. The overwhelmingly dominant theme, however, was deep dissatisfaction with President Obama. The apartment block was equipped with gym, swimming pool and tennis courts. I visited the gym most mornings, to hear the other residents complaining about taxes and regulations and government waste. One morning, two of them had an entirely serious conversation about whether Obama was actually a communist. Another morning, the discussion focused on the President’s attendance, a few months previously, at the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator killed in a mass shooting at an African-American community church in Charleston. This was the service where Obama memorably broke into ‘Amazing Grace’ during his eulogy. My fellow gym enthusiasts didn’t think Obama would have attended the funeral had the victims been white. Given the hopelessly small size of my survey, I hesitated to draw judgements. But with the benefit of hindsight, the signals were already there that Florida wasn’t going to vote for Obama’s Secretary of State.

I usually can’t sleep on aeroplanes. So as we flew back to London, I had plenty of time to think about the messages I had heard during the trip. I had been to the borderline South (Tennessee); the Deep South (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana); the West (Nevada and Utah); and Florida. I had scarcely heard a positive word anywhere about Obama, or Hillary Clinton. By contrast, I had heard a lot of approving comments about Donald Trump, and almost nothing about the other Republican candidates. In short, it had been the polar opposite of Washington, where Obama was spoken of with respect and Trump with contempt or derision. America seemed to be two different countries.

But it was the Deep South which left the deepest imprint on me, as it does on so many travellers. An American might say ‘Well, of course; everyone knows what’s been left behind.’ But I simply hadn’t understood the legacy of the Civil War: the memories, the hurt, the bitterness, the defiance and the rewritten history, all contributing to an abiding sense of resentment and separateness, and a distrust of the Northern elites in their Washington and New York fortresses. With a little research, I uncovered what was known as the Lost Cause of The Confederacy: a revisionist ideology which held that the Confederates had been fighting, not to retain slavery, but for their homes, the rights of their states, and the Southern way of life. It reached its peak in the years of the First World War, at the same time that the statue of ‘The Women of the Confederacy’ was being erected in front of the Mississippi State Capitol. And I realised that there were echoes of the Lost Cause in many of the moments of the trip: the tour guide’s heartfelt exposition of Southern victimhood in the Capitol; or the nostalgic, sepia-tinged, account of the history of Natchez presented in its visitor centre. Oscar Wilde, one of my favourite writers, visited America in 1882 for a ‘talking tour’, in which he appeared in 150 cities. He wrote five years later, in ‘The Canterville Ghost’, of ‘the beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance … living on the memory of crushing defeat’.

4

Snowzilla

*

‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters’

– Donald Trump, 23 January 2016

*

WE ARRIVED in Washington DC at the start of my posting on the afternoon of Wednesday 20 January; a clear, sunny but cold day, with the temperature hovering around minus 8°C. We spent the evening having supper with some of the senior members of the embassy. The next day was unpacking, meeting the residence team, hearing about the building’s state of disrepair, and walking around the compound. And on Friday morning, I went into the embassy building for the first time as ambassador, to be met by the worried faces of the deputy head of mission and the head of corporate affairs. A monster blizzard was heading towards the north-eastern seaboard, with Washington right in its path. One meteorologist described it somewhat inarticulately as ‘kind of a top-ten snowstorm’. The Washington Post dubbed it ‘Snowzilla’.

The advice from the team was clear and insistent: I should close the embassy at lunchtime to allow staff time to get home before the roads became dangerous. I looked out of the window at the clear blue sky and wondered about the optics of my first decision as ambassador being to close down the embassy. But the same advice was coming in from every direction, with the 24-hour news channels already approaching maximum hysteria: ‘Everyone should get home!’ And I heard that Amanda Downes, the residence social secretary of twenty-eight years’ standing, had taken Vanessa shopping at the local Whole Foods to ‘provision up’ and head off the risk of starvation over the ensuing few days.

So I signed off an email to all staff telling them all to abandon ship and head for the lifeboats. They complied. Meanwhile, the sun continued shining.

But not for long: the sky gradually turned from blue to grey and snow started to fall that Friday afternoon. It was, at first, a few flakes floating prettily to earth, like Hollywood’s concept of Christmas. But through the evening, it increased steadily in ferocity. As we went to bed, we were conscious of a raging blizzard outside. We woke to the extraordinary sight of four feet of snow, lying in drifts against every door in the residence. And the snow was still coming down. Every feature in the residence garden had been obliterated by a thick white blanket. Massachusetts Avenue, in normal times a four-lane artery into the heart of Washington, was silent and unrecognisable; a snowmobile, or a skier, might have made some progress down it, but nothing with wheels.

This was genuinely once-in-a-generation, one of those episodes of Big Weather that characterise the United States. There were tragic consequences; among the more than 100 million people affected by it, there were 55 deaths, including three in Washington. The cost of this officially designated ‘Category 5 Extreme Event’ was estimated at $3 billion.

Inevitably, the snowstorm also generated some knockabout politics. At the time, the Republican presidential primaries were in full swing. Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey (who later became a good friend), was campaigning in New Hampshire, flew back briefly to his state to assess the damage, which by then was more about the risk of flooding from melting snow, but returned almost immediately to the campaign trail. A storm of criticism erupted around his swift exit. A frustrated Christie said to a reporter: ‘I don’t know what you expect me to do, go down there with a mop?’ A New Jersey resident instantly crowd-funded the purchase of 1,000 mops for the governor.

Two of our best friends from my time in Brussels as British ambassador to the European Union were already in Washington when we arrived. David O’Sullivan, the EU ambassador to the US, and his wife Agnes lived about a mile down Massachusetts Avenue from us. We invited them round for supper on Saturday evening, though we wondered whether they would be able to make it through the snowdrifts. They could: they pitched up in full winter gear, wearing ski suits and snowshoes. And they reciprocated, inviting us back on Sunday evening. We lacked the ski gear, but dressed in what was available and set off down a silent and still impassable Massachusetts Avenue. Though the road was still covered in feet of snow, the emergency services had created a narrow pathway, allowing us to walk to the side street where the O’Sullivans lived. We turned off the main road to be greeted by a hill of snow twelve feet high. It took us twenty minutes to climb it and then slide down the other side; ice axes and crampons would have helped. We heard subsequently from David and Agnes that the first house on the street was an outpost of the Russian Embassy. The Russians had hired some private excavators and cleared the snow from the road in front of their building – by pushing it all back down the street. They had thereby opened their way to the main road while creating an impassable obstacle for the rest of the street. I surmised that it wasn’t one of those neighbourhoods where new arrivals were greeted by neighbours bearing meat loaves or pumpkin pies.