For the Sake of Argument E-Book

Christopher Hitchens

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 857

Beschreibung

The test of this kind of book is for the reader to be able to open it anywhere and be drawn into the argument; it's a test that Hitchens passes time and time again... He can be devilishly funny, but he is also capable of writing with acid seriousness. -- The Independent The global turmoil of the late 1980s and early 1990s severely tested every analyst and commentator. Few wrote with such insight as Christopher Hitchens about the large events - or with such discernment and wit about the small tell-tale signs of a disordered culture. First published in 1993, the writings in For the Sake of Argument range from the political squalor of Washington to the twilight of Stalinizm in Prague, from the Jewish quarter of Damascus in the aftermath of the Gulf War to the embattled barrios of Central America. Hitchens provides re-assessments of Graham Greene, P. G. Woodhouse and C. L. R. James, and his rogues' gallery gives us portraits of Henry Kissinger, Mother Theresa and P. J. O'Rouke. The addition of pieces on political assassination in America, as well as a devastating indictment of the evisceration of politics by pollsters and spin doctors, and an entertaining celebration of booze and fags, complete this outstanding collection from a writer of unequalled talent.

Leseprobe

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (1949–2011) was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a columnist for Slate. He was the author of numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his international bestseller and National Book Award nominee, God Is Not Great. His memoir, Hitch-22, was nominated for the Orwell Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

BOOKS

Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles

Why Orwell Matters

No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton Letters to a Young Contrarian

The Trial of Henry Kissinger

Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography

god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Hitch-22: A Memoir

Mortality

PAMPHLETS

Karl Marx and the Paris Commune

The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

ESSAYS

Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays

Arguably: Essays

COLLABORATIONS

Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)

Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (with Edward Said)

When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kashi)

International Territory: The United Nations, 1945–95 (photographs by Adam Bartos)

Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)

Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing (edited with Christopher Caldwell)

Is Christianity Good for the World? (with Douglas Wilson)

Hitchens vs. Blair: The Munk Debate on Religion (edited by Rudyard Griffiths)

First published in 2000 by Verso

This edition published in Great Britain in 2021 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christopher Hitchens, 2000

The moral right of Christopher Hitchens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 232 7

E-Book ISBN: 978 1 78239 497 6

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Dedicated by permission

to my son, Alexander Hitchens, and to my godsons

Jacob Amis and Henry Cockburn

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Studies in Demoralization

Where Were You Standing?

On the Imagination of Conspiracy

Contempt for the Little Colony

The State Within the State

Voting in the Passive Voice

The Hate that Dare Not Speak Its Name

A Pundit Who Need Never Dine Alone

Hard on the Houseboy

New Orleans in a Brown Shirt

Rioting in Mount Pleasant

Billionaire Populism

The Clemency of Clinton

Clinton as Rhodesian

Bill’s Bills in Miami

2. The Power and the Glory

Realpolitik in the Gulf: A Game Gone Tilt

Churchillian Delusions

No End of a Lesson

Befriending the Kurds

Arise, Sir Norman

Jewish in Damascus

Songs Fit For Heroes

Hating Sweden

Squeezing Costa Rica

The Saviour

Tio Sam

The Autumn of Patriarch

Third Thoughts

3. The Cunning History

Cretinismo Eroico

The Twilight of Panzerkommunismus

Police Mentality

On the Road to Timşoara

Bricks in the Wall

The Free Market Cargo Cult

Now Neo-conservatives Perish

Appointment in Sarajevo

4. No Class: Toryism Today

‘Society’ and Its Enemies

Credibility Politics: Sado-Monetarist Economics

Union Jackshirt: Ingham’s Conservative Chic

Neil Kinnock: Defeat Without Honour

Bribing and Twisting

5. Coach Into Pumpkin: The Fairy Tale Reviewed

How’s the Vampire?

Charlie’s Angel

Unhappy Families

Princess of Dysfunction

6. Ideas and Interests

New York Intellectuals and the Prophet Outcast

Clubland Intellectuals

The ‘We’ Fallacy

Shouting Anarchy

Politically Correct

Friend of Promise

Booze and Fags

7. Rogues’ Gallery

Nixon: Maestro of Resentment

Kissinger: A Touch of Evil

Berlin’s Mandate for Palestine

Ghoul of Calcutta

The Life of Johnson

A Grave Disappointment All Round

Too Big For His Boot

P.J. O’Rourke: Not Funny Enough

Not Funny Enough (2)

Warhol in One Dimension

8. Critical Resources

Siding with Rushdie

Goya’s Radical Pessimism

Degenerate Art

James Baldwin: Humanity First

Updike on the Make

P.G. Wodehouse in Love, Poverty and War

Greene: Where the Shadow Falls

Kazuo Ishiguro

Victor Serge

C.L.R James

In Defence of Daniel Deronda

Index

INTRODUCTION

A feeble logic, whose finger beckons us to the dark spectacle of the Stalinist Soviet Union, affirms the bankruptcy of Bolshevism, followed by that of Marxism, followed by that of Socialism. . . . Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies? What was Christianity doing in the various catastrophes of society? What became of Liberalism? What has Conservatism produced, in either its enlightened or its reactionary form? If we are indeed honestly to weigh out the bankruptcies of ideology, we shall have a long task ahead of us. . . . And nothing is finished yet.

Victor Serge, 1947

WHEN I WAS but a callow and quarrelsome undergraduate, my moral and political tutors used to think that, by invoking the gentle admonition of there being nothing much new under the sun, they had found an indulgent but quenching reply to all distressful questions. That the words cited above should have been written two years before I was born, and forty years before Fukuyama gave tongue, strikes me therefore as – in that most overworked of the language’s most potent terms – an irony. And a pleasing irony at that, since it operates at the old foes’ expense. A turn or two of history’s wheel, a tug or so on Ariadne’s thread, and suddenly it is not the revolutionaries and idealists but the forces of reaction and tradition (to say nothing of the spokesmen for meliorism and compromise) who find themselves with much explanation due.

Not that Serge and his comrades ever sought to excuse or evade the crimes and illusions of the left, or to set these in any simplistic contrast to the horrors of the counter-revolution. On the contrary, they thought of social and cultural change, individual and collective emancipation, self-determination and internationalism, as subtly but surely indissoluble; for this reason they were the earliest and bravest opponents of Zhdanov, Stalin and all versions of the uniform and the correct. In dedicating these ensuing ephemera to the memory of the old brother-and-sisterhood of the left opposition, I’m conscious of a ridiculous disproportion which critics will easily be able to enlarge. But everyone has to descend or degenerate from some species of tradition, and this is mine.

If I may say it for myself, my last collection, Prepared for the Worst, ended on a slight premonition of the 1989 European and Russian revolutions: the axis, pivot and subtext of all commentary since. Even while I was writing about other matters (a ruling-class crime-wave in Washington here; a fresh calamity in the House of Windsor there; a fraudulent memoir; a power-hungry local intellectual) I was fighting to keep in mind that aspect of ‘history’ which, bewilderingly, both takes sides and fails to take sides. I swore off all metaphors that even hinted at the presence of owls, or the existence of Minerva. Still, I could see that it was wonderfully funny, as well as distinctly embittering, that our predominant culture, faced with one of the greatest episodes of liberation in the human record, chose to take it as no more than its due. Thus ‘we’ won the Cold War by the same exercise of natural right that ‘we’ enlisted in the Gulf War. Odd, this, when you consider that even the most Establishment teaching of history contains an inscription; the warning against hubris . . .

Even if I had not spent much of that bogus triumphal period in the wastes of Kurdistan and Bosnia, I like to think that I would have seen the hook protruding from this drugged bait. In Kurdistan, an improvised socialism and communitas held tenuously against tribalism within, as well as against Saddam Hussein, Nato à la Turque and Western opportunism without. In Sarajevo, the onrush of Christian fundamentalism, military arrogance and racialist toxin was kept at bay by men and women honouring the remnant of the Partisan tradition. In both cases, the role of ‘fascist’ and aggressor was played by a ruling socialist party – the Serbian Socialist and the Arab Ba’ath Socialist, to be exact – but this did no more than lend point to the dysfunction between nomenklatura and nomenclature that had been apparent to any thinking person since approximately 1927. So I couldn’t bring myself to see, in this or a score of other instances, the licence for Western liberal self-congratulation. And there has been something more than naïveté in those who affect surprise or shock at the release of impulses long-nurtured rather than (as the consoling sapience would have it) long buried.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan– Bush–Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty – or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’.

Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ – tribe and faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modem Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read:

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [Italics mine]

The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of ideology. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

Christopher HitchensWashington DC, 4 January 1993

1

STUDIES IN DEMORALIZATION

WHERE WERE YOU STANDING?*

WHEN PEOPLE CEASE to believe in God, remarked G.K. Chesterton slyly, they come to believe not in nothing but in anything. When people cease to trust the word of the authorities, it might be added, they often become not more sceptical but more credulous. A truly hard-headed person could object that those who believe in God or in the benign ways of the government were already prepared to believe in anything. But this would be to overlook the dark and fascinating territory mapped by Richard Hofstadter in his endlessly consultable study The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

DON DELILLO could have had Hofstadter open before him when he sketched the in-tray of General Edwin Walker, real-life leader of the Kennedyhating dingbat militia that convulsed parts of the South and West in the battle against liberalism and desegregation:

Letters from the true believers were stacked in a basket to his right The Christian Crusade women, the John Birch men, the semiretired, the wrathful, the betrayed, the ones who keep coming up empty. They had intimate knowledge of the Control Apparatus. It wasn’t just politics from afar. . . . The Apparatus paralysed not only our armed forces but our individual lives, frustrating every normal American ambition. [Emphasis added.]

If one takes the normal American ambition to be the pursuit of happiness, and charts the ways in which that pursuit is so cruelly thwarted, sooner or later one strikes across the wound profiles of Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963. In those ‘six point nine seconds of heat and light’ or those ‘seven seconds that broke the back of the American century’, some little hinge gave way in the national psyche. The post-Kennedy period is often written up as a ‘loss of innocence’, a judgement which admittedly depends for its effect on how innocent you thought America had been until a quarter of a century ago. But, while Presidents had been slain before, they had generally been shot by political opponents of an identifiable if extreme sort, like Lincoln’s resentful Confederate or McKinley’s inarticulate anarchist. Moreover, the culprits were known, apprehended and questioned. With Kennedy’s murder, the Republic doomed itself to the repetitive contemplation of a tormenting mystery. Here is a country where information technology operates at a historically unsurpassed level; where anything knowable can in principle be known and publicized; where the bias is always in favour of disclosure rather than concealment; where the measure of attainment even in small-change discourse is the moon-shot. And nobody is satisfied that they know for certain what happened in the banal streets of Dealey Plaza. Coming up empty. . . .

Then, as if to heap Pelion upon Ossa, the assassin is assassinated. Some years ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a man of whom it could be said that he was as free of the paranoid trait as any American politician or analyst, published a reminiscence of that weird November. He had spent hours, he wrote, calling around a somnambulant Washington with one single, practical, urgent injunction. We have to secure Lee Harvey Oswald, he beseeched. We have to get him out of Dallas, out of the world of the Walkers and the Birchers, and in a sense back into America. We have to secure Oswald. Federal jurisdiction must be reimposed. Moynihan feared that if anything happened to Oswald, the nightmare would go on for ever. His short memoir reads today as chillingly as anything in Libra. The nation’s actual and hypothetical maximum-security prisoner was shot, while still handcuffed to his guards, by a fantasy-sodden huckster of showgirls. Once this mouth had been shut, every other one was free to open. The Warren Commission helped considerably, by its collusive, hasty emollience, to license the conspiratorial imagination and to turn every crank in America into a freelance investigator. Finally, the subsequent declension of the United States through Watergate, Vietnam and another series of murdered heroes has irrationally fixed 22 November 1963 in millions of otherwise unclouded minds as the moment when things began to go wrong. Early in this novel, the young Oswald is riding a shrieking, bucketing subway train and asks: ‘How do we know the motorman’s not insane?’ One can be endlessly surprised at how often, in American life, a variant of this question comes up.

And then there is the other obsession: Cuba. The United States government has made its peace with ‘Red China’; a demon which it went all the way to Vietnam to exorcize. It is in the process of thinking about making its peace with the Soviet Union. But somehow, the idea of a Cuban Embassy in Washington is unimaginable. This is oddness and denial raised to the power of objective political fact. Castro’s depredations are trivial when compared to Stalinism or Maoism. Yet the hate he arouses is as near-pure as anything so long nurtured can be. And even those who wish to transcend this hatred are queasily aware of something coiled and smouldering in Miami; something that has several times taken revenge on the politicians who have first encouraged and then betrayed it. The Cuban underworld of Dade County was an energizing force in the Watergate burglary and the Iran–Contra network as well as in countless other minor attentats. It was on behalf of these exiles that Kennedy sent a lost patrol to the Bay of Pigs, and indirectly on their behalf that he got as near as any President has got to emptying the missile silos. In other words, Cuba represents high stakes gambled at high pressure. DeLillo has one of his assassins make this latent connection explicit. Discussing the morality and the likelihood of a successful ‘hit’, he says:

The barrier is down, Frank. When Jack sent out word to get Castro, he put himself in a world of blood and pain. Nobody told him he had to live there. He made the choice with his brother Bobby. So it’s Jack’s own idea we’re guided by. And once an idea hits. . . .

At the time of the Warren Commission, Americans did not know that Kennedy had approached the Mafia in order to discuss ‘hitting’ Castro, and had no notion that he was sharing a girlfriend with the mob leader Sam Giancana. Only the warped J. Edgar Hoover knew, and warned him privately that he was exposing himself to blackmail and worse.

In order to distinguish himself from the vulgar conspiracy theorists, perhaps, DeLillo arranges his narrative along two parallel tracks. Track one shows the intersection of Cuba and the paranoids, with a group of drifters, loners and fanatics having their grotesque imaginations manured, so to speak, by ambitious manipulators from the world of covert action. In this world we meet men like David Ferrie, deranged autodidact, his body denuded by alopecia universalis ‘like something pulled from the earth, a tuberous stem or fungus esteemed by gourmets’. He is a bomb-shelter cultist fixated on the torsos of young men, and in his darkened brain he broods happily on cancer and war. ‘It was heart-lifting in a way to think about the Bomb. How satisfying, he thought, to live alone in a hole.’ In slightly too obvious contrast we have Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA analyst, who sits in a spacious air-conditioned archive trying to write the secret official history of the assassination. Like the rest of the country when confronted with the enigma, he finds knowledge dissolving in information. With all the resources of the Borgesian infinite library at his call, he learns that the tapes, documents and calibrations generate only theories and dreams. The forensic, DeLillo seems to say, is only guesswork. And you can never be sure that the Curator isn’t withholding something. You might as well be a novelist.

It is in his evolution of the character of Oswald that DeLillo has excelled. Neglected child of a widowed, maundering, self-pitying mother, he leads an intense, dyslexic inner life. ‘Most boys think their daddy hung the moon’, says his mother, who watches the test-pattern on television. Pages later, young Lee is helping her to ‘hang half-moon wall-shelves’ – a scant substitute. Handed a leaflet on the Rosenberg case (another endlessly pickable scab on the national hide) at a subway station, he keeps it and forms an obsession around it. Brutalized in the navy brig, where every reminiscence from the grub-hoe to John Dillinger seems designed to evoke From Here to Eternity, he tries living in Russia, only to return to the grimy, scrabbling, subliterate American underclass. Except that, as Nicholas Branch concludes in his hygienic sanctum: ‘After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation’:

You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

Or, as DeLillo puts it earlier, in a reflection that might have been crafted for Oswald or Manson or Hinckley or some serial murderer or freeway sniper: ‘How strangely easy to have a say over men and events.’ It is exactly this ease, combined with the democracy and openness of America and its love of celebrity, that constitutes the national post-Dallas nightmare.

A novelist must commit himself to a hypothesis, and DeLillo tells the story of an assassination plot that was meant to fail but succeeded. He postulates a group of diehard rightist officials, disgusted by Kennedy’s failure of nerve at the Bay of Pigs, who recruit from the zombie exile world of Miami. The idea is to fake an attempted murder of the President, which will not injure him but will ‘lay down fire in the street’. A false trail will implicate the Castro Cubans, and will replenish the national will to destroy Fidel. The difficulty is that the recruits must be genuinely motivated enough to ‘hit’ the President, but must aim to miss him. They exceed their brief. On first reading, this seemed absurdly convoluted and strenuous. But then I reflected that the Contras, who had been recruited by Oliver North from a very similar milieu, were instructed, and instructed to say, that their mission was not to overthrow the government of Nicaragua but to ‘squeeze’ it. In the resulting folds of disinformation and self-deception, a whole strategy became chronically, crazily unravelled. In a bizarre column in the Washington Post, conservatism’s archmoralist George Will recently attacked DeLillo for writing a historical novel based on speculation and thereby creating alarm and despondency. He was answered by Anthony Hecht and others, who ridiculed this new ‘responsible’ standard for fiction. But the moment had its significance, in showing that there are subjects still considered too toxic and worrisome for any treatment save baffled, patriotic reticence.

The gruesome David Ferrie is given by DeLillo the opportunity to try an intelligent definition of paranoia. In a desperate bar in New Orleans he whines:

There’s something they aren’t telling us. Something we don’t know about. There’s more to it. There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.

Nicholas Branch, of course, can afford no truck with plebeian rancour of this kind. For one thing, he is one of ‘them’ – the professionals who are paid to be in the know. For another, he has considered all the second-order stuff: the mysterious deaths and apparent suicides of witnesses; the missing files and the discrepant police reports; and has become ‘wary of these cases of cheap coincidence’. For him, the task of posing endless heuristic questions has to be sufficient even if the whole enterprise is futile and even if the accumulation of data thus far is just the raw material for ‘the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred . . . the novel in which nothing is left out’. The tendency of witnesses to die violently may indeed be a coincidence – no more than ‘the neon epic of Saturday night’. But even this reflection, intended as it is to be partially reassuring, is in its way an unsettling one. Business as usual is often alarming, too. The proof of DeLillo’s seriousness is the way in which he makes that uncomfortable thought occur without emphasis.

Particularly in the last two-and-a-half decades, Americans have become almost as repelled by conspiracy theories as they have by revelations of conspiracies or skulduggeries. Perhaps they are spoiled for choice: at all events a temperate belief in ‘coincidence theory’ has become almost mandatory in respectable circles. And the commonest thing said: by vulgar coincidence theorists in reply to vulgar conspiracy theorists is: ‘There is no smoking gun.’ This wised-up, handy term, in vogue since Watergate and lately much in demand, refers crudely to red-handed evidence or absolute proof. Yet, as metaphor, it has a crucial weakness. In Dallas, there was a smoking gun. Or was it two? – We’ll never know. The main events took place on television and yet are still opaque. The official story was empiricism pushed to the point of obfuscation. No one will ever get beyond hypothesis – a term of abuse these days anyway – which means, as Moynihan feared, that the argument will go on for ever, coming up empty. Only a novelist can attempt to decode it now, and DeLillo has made the attempt with scruple as well as considerable dramatic panache. Cutting along the ragged seam that runs between politics and violence, between the grandes peurs of the century and the localized, banal madness of ‘ordinary’ life, he has shown what monstrosities result when reason even so much as nods off.

Times Literary Supplement, November 1988

ON THE IMAGINATION OF CONSPIRACY*

Fine phrases about the freedom of the individual and the inviolability of the home were exchanged between the Minister of State and the Prefect, to whom M de Sérisy pointed out that the major interests of the country sometimes required secret illegalities, crime beginning only when State means were applied to private interests.

If ever a man feels the sweetness, the utility of friendship, must it not be that moral leper called by the crowd a spy, by the common people a nark, by the administration an agent?

Honoré de Balzac (A Harlot High and Low)

THOSE WHO COMPLAIN of the banality of American political life seem at first review to have every sort of justification. Political parties are vestigial; the ideological temperature is kept as nearly as is bearable to ‘room’; there is no parliamentary dialectic in congressional ‘debates’; elections are a drawn-out catchpenny charade invariably won, as Gore Vidal points out, by the abstainers; the political idiom is a consensual form (‘healing process’, ‘bipartisan’, ‘dialogue’) of langue de bois, and the pundits are of a greyness and mediocrity better passed over than described. Periodic inquests are convened, usually by means of the stupid aggregate of the opinion poll, to express concern about apathy and depoliticization, but it’s more consoling to assume that people’s immense indifference is itself a wholesome symptom of disdain. Yet now and then, there are thumps and crashes behind this great, grey safety-curtain, and unsightly bulges appear in it, and sometimes great rips and tears. Politics here a bit trite, you say? Perhaps. But the following things really happened. President Kennedy was shot down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life – if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidant to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-inlaw Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to the Contras and then lost the money in a Swiss computer error. Ronald Reagan sent three envoys with a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-forhostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert McNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The Central Intelligence Agency was caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s White House was run to astrological time, and its chief spent his evenings discussing Armageddon theology with strangers. Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in prayer on the Oval Office carpet, and complied. Klaus Barbie was plucked from the SS ‘Most Wanted’ list and, with many of his confrères, given a second career in American Intelligence. J. Edgar Hoover amassed tapes of sexual indiscretion in Washington, partly for his own prurient needs and partly for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.

Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these sorts of disclosure. They have never known whether to treat such episodes as normal or exceptional. It is, for example, perfectly true to say that the whole Vietnam intervention began with a consciously contrived military provocation in the Gulf of Tonkin, followed by a carefully told lie to the Senate. But can we tell the schoolchildren that? Then again, it now looks very much like being established that the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 went behind President Carters back and made a private understanding with the Iranians about the American diplomatic hostages. But those hostages were the original cause of the yellow ribbon movement! Can a piece of fraud and treason really have been the foundation of the storied ‘Reagan revolution’? Contemporary historians like Theodore Draper, Arthur Schlesinger and Garry Wills, or political journalists like Seymour Hersh, Lou Cannon and Robert Woodward, deal with this difficulty in various ways, but seldom succeed for long in firing the general consciousness. This is because they are either apologists for power (Schlesinger, Woodward) or its intimates (Schlesinger, Woodward) or politically conditioned to disbelieve the worst (Schlesinger, Woodward). Men like Wills and Draper, on the other hand, are almost too bloody rational. They are careful to speak truth to power and to weigh evidence with scruple, but they are wedded to the respectable and predictable rhythms of academe, of research, of high and serious mentation. They find and pronounce on corruption and malfeasance, and gravely too, but it’s always as if the horror is somehow an invasion or interruption. This is why the permanent underworld of American public life has only ever been captured and distilled by novelists.

Mass culture in America, contrary to report, has no great resistance to believing in official evil. The citizenry stoically watches movies in which the cop is the criminal, the President is the crook, the CIA is a doublecross and the dope is dealt by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The great cult film of all time in this respect is George Axelrod’s and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, withdrawn from circulation after the Kennedy assassination but now available again in cassette form. And the great artistic and emblematic coincidence of the movie is the playing of the good guy by Frank Sinatra – the only man to have had a real-life role in both the Kennedy and Reagan regimes, as well as a real-world position in the milieu of organized crime and disordered ‘Intelligence’. The Manchurian Candidate began as a novel by Richard Condon who, with Don DeLillo, has done more to anatomize and dramatize the world of covert action than any ‘authorized’ chronicler. Before discussing Norman Mailer’s magisterial bid for dominance in this field, I want to use Richard Condon to anticipate a common liberal objection – the objection that all this is ‘conspiracy theory’.

One has become used to this stolid, complacent return serve: so apparently grounded in reason and scepticism but so often naive and one-dimensional. In one way, the so-called ‘conspiracy theory’ need be no more than the mind’s needful search for an explanation, or for an alternative to credulity. If one exempts things like anti-Semitism or fear of Freemasons, which belong more properly to the world of post-Salem paranoia and have been ably dealt with by Professor Richard Hofstadter in his study The Paranoid Style in American Politics, then modern American conspiracy theory begins with the Warren Commission. There had been toxic political speculation at high level before, as when certain people thought that there was something too convenient about the Lusitania for President Woodrow Wilson, and too easy about Pearl Harbor for President Franklin Roosevelt – both of these, incidentally, hypotheses which later Churchill historians are finding harder to dismiss – but such arguments had been subsumed in the long withdrawing roar of American isolationism. The events in Dealey Plaza and the Dallas Police Department in November 1963 were at once impressed on every American. And the Warren Commission of Inquiry came up with an explanation which, it is pretty safe to say, nobody really believes. Conspiracy theory thus becomes an ailment of democracy. It is the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version. To blame the theorists is therefore to look at only half the story, and sometimes even less. To take an obvious example: nobody refers to Keith Kyle as a ‘collusion theorist’ because he explodes the claim that Britain, France and Israel were not acting in concert in 1956. The term ‘organized crime’, which suggests permanent conspiracy, is necessary both to understand and to prosecute a certain culture of wrongdoing. And you may have noticed that those who are too quick to shout ‘conspiracy theorist’ are equally swift, when consequences for authority and consensus impend, to look serious and say: ‘It’s more complicated than that.’ These have become standard damage-control reflexes.

In his Kennedy assassination novel Winter Kills, Condon’s protagonist is Nick, the brother of the slain President. He has a grown-up adviser and protector named Keifetz:

Nick used to think that there was the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. It had taken Keifetz a long time to explain why this wasn’t so, but after that, after Nick had been able to comprehend that there was only one political party, formed by the two pretend parties wearing their labels like party hats and joining their hands in a circle around their prey, all the rest of it came much easier.

That’s put slightly cheaply: all the same, it makes more sense than the drear convention that two opposing parties contend in the ‘marketplace of ideas’. Nick has two reflections on the way in which official truth is manufactured and promulgated in America, and on the ‘Commissions’ (one need only think of our Royal ones like Denning and Bingham and Pearce) which act as vectors in the process. First, he inquires:

Was the history of all time piled up in a refuse heap at the back of humanity’s barn, too ugly to be shown, while the faked artifacts that were passed around for national entertainments took charge in the front parlour? Could the seven hack lawyers of the Pickering Commission, with a new President for a client, decide that two hundred million people could not withstand the shock of history?

It was the argument of Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1964, and the Tower Commission members in 1987 when they ‘reported’ on Iran–Contra, that ‘the American people’ could not bear too much reality. And even the chief attorney for the farcical Senate/House inquiry into the latter affair, Mr Arthur Liman, conceded to Seymour Hersh that he and his colleagues had meant to find the President blameless, and thereby spare the masses the supposed agony of impeachment, Nick goes on to reflect that:

The Pickering Commission had operated like arms, elbows and fingers upon a silent keyboard. They had played all the notes – the score was surely there to be read, but they would not allow it to be heard. The Commission had announced Stephen Foster when they were actually playing Wagner. Surely, critics who had followed the true score should have pointed that out?

A good question, but perhaps one that only literature can answer. ‘Critics’ – the press, the academics, the think-tankers – do not care to admit that they missed the big story or the big case. Nor do they get their living by making trouble for the Establishment.

A novelist, however, can listen for the silent rhythms, the unheard dissonances and the latent connections. ‘Conspiring’, after all, means ‘breathing together’. Why not check the respirations? He can also do what quotidian academics and scholars are afraid to do – which is to ruminate on the emotions and the characters and the motives. Most instant reporters are so wised-up that they become innocent: taking politicians at their own valuation. Thus Kennedy the youthful and impatient, Carter the introspective, Nixon the driven, Reagan the folksy and so forth, ad – if not indeed well in advance of – nauseam. Then the scholars move in to give needed ‘balance’ and ‘perspective’ to these popular fables. A novelist need not do either. He can dispense with banality. He can raise intrigue to the level of passion.

She would not have been a liberal; a courtesan is always a monarchist. (Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low)

I once got into trouble with Norman Mailer by asking him, on an everyman-for-himself chat-show with Germaine Greer, about his fascination with the Hubert Selby side of life. Boxing gyms, jails, barracks, the occasions of sodomy. The practice of sodomy. He appeared riveted, in book after book, by its warped relation to the tough-guy ethos. Had this ever been a problem for him personally? I miscued the question, and Mailer thought I was trying to call him some kind of a bum-banger. He later gave an avenging interview to the Face, asserting that he was the victim of a London faggot literary coterie, consisting of Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and myself. (Amis and I contemplated a letter to the Face, saying that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton, but then dumped the idea.) Now here is Mailer attempting the near-impossible: that is to say, a novel about the interstices of bureaucracy which, without any Borgesian infinite libraries or Orwellian memory holes, can summon the sinister and the infinite. Doing it, moreover, at a level of realism which vanquishes Condon and DeLillo while leaving spare capacity for the imagination. And here is Harry Hubbard, his outwardly insipid narrator. Hubbard is a white-collar type of CIA man, ‘a ghost’ writer of planted texts, who is vicariously thrilled by the knowledge that he is working with ruthless men. He meets this ‘other half’ of the agency, Dix Butler, a cruel exploiter of local Berlin agents, and has a gruelling soirée with him on the Kurfürstendamm which culminates when:

‘Let me be the first,’ he said, and he bent over nimbly, put his fingertips to the floor and then his knees, and raised his powerful buttocks to me. ‘Come on, fuck-head,’ he said, ‘this is your chance. Hit it big. Come in me, before I come back in you.’ When I still made no move, he added, ‘Goddamnit, I need it tonight. I need it bad, Harry, and I love you.’

This blunt offer, which stirs Hubbard more than he wants to admit (‘two clumps of powered meat belonging to my hero who wanted me up his ass, yes I had an erection’), enables him to summon the heft to take his first woman that very night. Ingrid turns out to have some qualities in common with her fellow Teuton, the German maid Ruta in An American Dream:

She made the high nasal sound of a cat disturbed in its play . . . but then, as abruptly as an arrest, a high thin constipated smell (a smell which spoke of rocks and grease and the sewer-damp of wet stones in poor European alleys) came needling its way out of her. (An American Dream)

A thin, avaricious smell certainly came up from her, single-minded as a cat, weary as some putrescence of the sea . . . pictures of her vagina flickered in my brain next to images of his ass, and I started to come. (Harlot’s Ghost)

Berlin and Bildungsroman, you say. OK, so he’s a camera: get on with it. But, self-plagiarism apart, I think that Mailer is distilling an important knowledge from his many earlier reflections on violence and perversity and low life. As Balzac knew, and as Dix Butler boasts, the criminal and sexual outlaw world may be anarchic, but it is also servile and deferential. It is, to put it crudely, generally right-wing. It is also for sale. (Berlin has seen this point made before.) Berlin was the place where the CIA, busily engaged in recruiting hard-core ex-Nazis for the Kulturkampf against Moscow, first knew sin. First engaged in prostitution. First thought about frame-ups and tunnels and ‘doubles’ and (good phrase, you have to admit) ‘wet jobs’. More specifically – because this hadn’t been true of its infant OSS predecessor in the Second World War – it first began to conceive of American democracy as a weakling affair, as a potential liability; even as an enemy.

Mailer strives so hard to get this right that he’s been accused of not composing a novel at all. But as the pages mount one sees that this is one writer’s mind seeking to engage the mind of the state. The Imagination of the State is the name of a CIA-sponsored book on the KGB, and fairly early in Harlot’s Ghost its eponymous figure ‘Harlot’, a James Angleton composite, says of the agency: our real duty is to become the mind of America’. How else to link the Mafia, Marilyn Monroe, the media, the Congress, Hollywood and all the other regions of CIA penetration? ‘The mind of America.’ A capacious subject. As Harry minutes while he’s still a green neophyte:

In Intelligence, we look to discover the compartmentalisation of the heart. We made an in-depth study once in the CIA and learned to our dismay (it was really horror!) that one-third of the men and women who could pass our security clearance were divided enough – handled properly – to be turned into agents of a foreign power.

Which, in one sense, they already were. As Kipling made his boy spy say, you need ‘two separate sides to your head’. The boy, of course, was called Kim.

A continuous emphasis, then, is placed on the concept of ‘doubling’ and division. It’s expressed as a duet between ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega’, which may not be as obvious as at first appears since ‘Omega’ was the name of the most envenomed Cuban exile organization. Homosexuality ‘fits’ here – even, on one occasion, androgyny – as being supposedly conducive to concealment and ambivalence. Other-gender infidelity, too, can be conscripted. So can the double life led by the ‘businessmen’ and ‘entertainers’ linked to organized crime. But Mailer calls his novel ‘a comedy of manners’ because it treats of people who have been brought up ‘straight’, as it were, and who need a high justification for dirtying their hands. One of the diverting and absorbing features of the book is its fascination with the WASP aesthetic. Not for nothing was OSS, the precursor of the CIA, known during its wartime Anglophile incubation as ‘Oh So Social’. A proper WASP – former CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush swims into mind – can have two rationales for entering the ungentlemanly world of dirty tricks. One is patriotism. The other is religion. Hubbard finds a release from responsibility in both.

I eschewed political arguments about Republicans and Democrats. They hardly mattered. Allen Dulles was my President, and I would be a combat trooper in the war against the Devil. I read Spengler and brooded through my winters in New Haven about the oncoming downfall of the West and how it could be prevented.

Apart from its affinity with the Condon extract above about the irrelevance of everyday ‘politics’, this can be read as an avowal of Manicheism and thus as the ideal statement of the bipolar mentality. I’ve heard and read many CIA men talk this way, though usually under the influence of James Burnham (and Johnnie Walker) rather than Oswald Spengler, and found it easy to see that their main concern was sogginess on the domestic front – the enemy within. Hence the battle, not just against the Satanic ‘other’, but for the purity of the American mind. And, since the Devil can quote Scripture, it’s an easy step to mobilizing the profane in defence of the sacred. Facilis descensus Averno. ‘The agency’ becomes partly a priesthood and partly an order of chivalry. Recall that James Jesus Angleton, though he detested his middle name for its Hispanic, mother-reminiscent connotations, was an ardent admirer of T.S. Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic style and once startled a public hearing by quoting from ‘Gerontion’. The norm at Langley, Virginia is Episcopalian, though Mormons and Christian Scientists and better-yourself Catholics are common in the middle echelons, and Mailer has a go at creating a Jewish intellectual agent who is also – perhaps avoidably – the only self-proclaimed shirt-lifter.

It is an intriguing fact, a fact of intrigue, possibly the most ironic fact in the modern history of conspiracy, and arguably the great test of all who believe in coincidence, that on 22 November 1963, at the moment when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was being struck by at least one bullet, Desmond FitzGerald was meeting AMLASH in Paris. FitzGerald, the father of the more famous Frances, was a senior executive at the CIA. AMLASH was the CIA codename of a disgruntled and ambitious Castroite. FitzGerald handed AMLASH a specially designed assassination weapon in the shape of a fountain pen, and discussed the modalities of termination. Emerging on to the wintry boulevards, he found that his own President had been murdered. A bit of a facer.

Conspiracy is, more than any other human activity, subject to the law of unintended consequences (which is why it should always be conjoined to cock-up rather than counterposed to it). Jonathan Marshall of the San Francisco Chronicle, who is in my view the most sober and smart of those who study conspiracy theory, has an elegant and minimal guess about CIA reaction to this disaster: ‘Richard Helms asked himself: “Is my Agency responsible for this?” and answered: “I certainly hope not.”’ The CIA, in other words, knew that both Ruby and Oswald were involved in the febrile politics of Cuban exile resentment, and the scuzzy world of the fruit-machine kings. The CIA therefore prayed that this footprint would not be discovered. It did more than pray that this was not a ‘blowback’ from one of its own criminal subplots. By the neat device of Allen Dulles’s appointment to the Warren Commission, it was able to postpone the revelation of its involvement by more than a decade. If the Warren Commission had known what the Church Committee later found out, American history and consciousness would now be radically different. But the meantime saw several more domestic assassinations, a war in Asia and the implosion of a felonious President who had also relied on Cuban burglars, and in that meantime the American mind had become in more than one sense distracted. This is ideal psychic territory for Mailer, who surveys with an experienced eye the Balzacian cassoulet of hookerdom, pay-offs, cover-ups, thuggery, buggery and power-worship from which the above morsels have been hoisted. ‘Give me a vigorous hypothesis every time,’ exclaims Harlot/Angleton at one point. ‘Without it, there’s nothing to do but drown in facts.’ His protégé Hubbard wonders whether it’s ideologically correct to be too paranoid, or whether there exists the danger of not being paranoid enough. Mailer registers these oscillating ambiguities brilliantly in the minor keys of the narrative and in the small encounters and asides. He does less well when he tries to supply his own chorus and commentary, as he attempts to do by means of a lengthy epistolary subtext. Hubbard, ‘on station’ with the real-life E. Howard Hunt in Uruguay, writes long confessional letters to Kittredge, Harlot’s much younger and brighter wife and a classic Georgetown blue-stocking. One sees the point of going behind Harlot’s back, but this exchange is improbably arch and overly literal, bashing home the more subtle filiations and imbrications that are the real stuff of the novel.

‘Large lies do have their own excitement,’ as Hubbard shrewdly notices. There must have been CIA men who whistled with admiration at the scale of Adlai Stevenson’s deception of the UN over Cuba, and disgustedly or resignedly went through the motions of reassuring Congress that things were above board. There must also have been CIA men who enjoyed sticking it to the more earthbound, plebeian gumshoes of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI (more Baptists and Adventists than Episcopalians in that racket) and relished the freedom to travel, to make overseas conquests, to hobnob with Godfathers, to toy with death warrants and the rest of it. Mailer summons their sense of illicit delight very persuasively. Crucial to the skill and thrill was, of course, knowing how far they could go and then going just that crucial bit further. There were laws and customs and codes to be negotiated and circumvented, and these were men with law firms in their families. As Cal, Hubbard’s leathery old warrior WASP of a father, puts it, while seeking to lure President Kennedy into further complicity over Cuba:

‘Always look to the language. We’ve built a foundation for ourselves almost as good as a directive. “Subvert military leaders to the point where they will be ready to overthrow Castro.” Well, son, tell me. How do you do that by half? . . . Always look to the language.’

Two weeks later, Jack Kennedy sent a memo about Cuba over to Special Group. ‘Nourish a spirit of resistance which could lead to significant defection and other by-products of unrest.’ ‘By-products of unrest,’ said Cal, ‘enhances the authorisation.’

I can just hear him saying it. By looking to the language you find that the secret state, in addition to a mind, possesses a sense of humour and a sexual sense also. The Agency knew, as Angleton’s hero knew in Murder in the Cathedral, that potentates are very flirtatious and need to have their desires firmed up – hence the mentality, very commonly met with among intelligence agents, of aggressive self-pity. The public hypocrisy of the politicians convinces them that they do the thankless, dirty, dangerous tasks: getting the blame when things go wrong and no credit when they go right. (The CIA memorial at Langley has no dates against the names of agents missing in action.) Thus great fealty can be recruited by a superior who sticks by his thuggish underlings. As Kittredge writes to Hubbard, when the excellently drawn Bill Harvey, a psychopathic station chief, has run afoul:

Helms did go on about the inner tensions of hard-working Senior Officers accumulated through a career of ongoing crises and personal financial sacrifice. . . . Helms may be the coldest man I know, but he is loyal to his troops, and that, in practice, does serve as a working substitute for compassion.

Or again, annexing real dialogue for his own purpose, Mailer uses an occasion during the Commission hearings when Warren himself asked Allen Dulles:

‘The FBI and the CIA do employ undercover men of terrible character?’ And Allen Dulles, in all the bonhomie of a good fellow who can summon up the services of a multitude of street ruffians, replied, ‘Yes, terribly bad characters.’

‘That has to be one of Allen’s better moments,’ remarked Hugh Montague.

It’s some help to be English, and brought up on Buchan and Sapper, in appreciating the dread kinship between toffs and crime.

Yet this gruff, stupid masculine world is set on its ears by one courtesan. ‘Modene Murphy’, who is Mailer’s greatest failure of characterization here, is perhaps such a failure because she has to do so much duty. In the novel as in life, she has to supply the carnal link between JFK, Frank Sinatra and the mob leader Sam Giancana. (Ben Bradlee, JFK’s hagiographer and confidant, says that one of the worst moments of his life came when he saw the diaries of Judith Campbell Exner and found that she did indeed, as she had claimed, have the private telephone codes of the JFK White House, which changed every weekend.) Because it’s not believable that this broad would write any letters, Mailer’s epistolary account of Modene takes the form of recorded telephone intercepts between her and a girlfriend. These are read by Harry, whose general success with women is never accounted for by anything in his character as set down. He both gains and loses the affection of Modene: the gain seemingly absurdly simple and the loss barely registered. Perhaps Mailer was faced with a fantasy/reality on which he couldn’t improve, but one could hope for better from a friend of ‘Jack’ and a biographer of ‘Marilyn’. Incidentally, what was Modene like in the sack? ‘Its laws came into my senses with one sniff of her dark-haired pussy, no more at other times than a demure whiff of urine, mortal fish, a hint of earth – now I explored caverns.’ This is perhaps not as gamey as An American Dream (‘I had a desire suddenly to skip the sea and mine the earth’), but evidently Mailer’s olfactory nerve has not failed him. Still, one occasionally feels (‘Modene came from her fingers and toes, her thighs and her arms, her heart and all that belonged to the heart of her future – I was ready to swear that the earth and the ocean combined’) that he is pounding off to a different drummer. At one point, losing his grip entirely, he makes Hubbard exclaim: ‘I could have welcomed Jack Kennedy into bed with us at that moment.’

These elements – volatile, you have to agree – all combine to make Kennedy’s appointment in Dallas seem like Kismet. It’s a fair place for Mailer to stop, or to place his ‘To Be Continued’. Ahead lies Vietnam, of which premonitory tremors can be felt, and Watergate, and Chile. . . . But the place of covert action in the American imagination, and in the most vivid nightmare of that imagination, has been so well established that it will be impossible – almost inartistic – for future readers and authors to consider the subjects separately.

Louis XVIII died, in possession of secrets which will remain secret from the best-informed historians. The struggle between the General Police of the Kingdom and the Counter-Police of the King gave rise to dreadful affairs whose secret was hushed on more than one scaffold.

(Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low)

It may seem astounding, after what happened to compromise the Kennedy brothers and Richard Nixon, and after what disgruntled CIA rebels almost certainly did to Jimmy Carter over Iran, that in 1980 a new President should decide simply to give the CIA its head. But in Ronald Reagan’s warped and clouded mind, the fantasy world of covert action demanded such evil clichés as that hands not be tied, kid gloves not be used, and the ‘stab in the back’ over Vietnam be revenged. Thus it was only a matter of time before the crepuscular world of William Casey was exposed to view. ‘Affair is too bland a word for the Iran–Contra connection. Remember that it involved the use of skimmed profits from one outrageous policy – hostage-trading with Iran – to finance another: the illegal and aggressive destabilization of Nicaragua. This necessitated the official cultivation of contempt for American law and of impatience, to put it no higher, with the Constitution. It also entailed, since the funding of the racket had to be concealed from the Treasury and State Departments, a black economy. The arms-dealers, drug-smugglers and middlemen of this dirty budget were to furnish most of the ‘colourful characters’, as Americans found to their dismay that shady Persian marchands de tapis knew more about the bowels and intestines of the White House than, say, the Congress did. This more than licenses the plural in the title of Theodore Draper’s book: one of the very few indulgences he permits himself. (The book itself has been abandoned by its English publishers at the last moment, in a flurry of unconvincing excuses.)

Draper’s task may be likened to that of an anatomist or dissector, going coolly about his work while the bleeding and reeking corpse is still thrashing about on the slab. In his mild introduction, he confesses the ‘horror’ he felt when he saw the growing mountain of evidence and testimony that was heaping up in front of him. Nor was it just a matter of meticulous forensic investigation. Two elements of mania pervaded the case, and pervade it still. First, the principals in the conspiracy all claimed – and claim – to have amnesia. Second, they all behave as if they had been working for King Henry II. It became a bizarre question of interpreting a President’s desires: protecting that same President from the consequences of his desires, and then redefining knowledge and participation so as to elude or outwit the law. Always look to the language. In this case, the giveaway key word was the ‘finding’ – a semi-fictional document which conferred retrospective presidential approval for policies that had often been already executed. Ordinary idiom became unusable in this context. Robert Gates, who is now George Bush’s nominee to head the CIA, was at the material time William Casey’s deputy. He told Congress in 1987 that when advised of the ‘diversion’ of funds from the Iran to the Contra side of the dash, his ‘first reaction’ was to tell his informant: ‘I didn’t want to know any more about it.’ A strange response, at first sight, from a professional Intelligence-gatherer. And how did he know enough to know that he didn’t want to know any more? This absurdity was easily lost in the wider, wilder cognitive obfuscation – did Reagan know? – by which the whole inquiry was derailed. One needs a separate brand of epistemology to attack the question of official ‘knowledge’, which has the same combination of Lear and Kafka that you sometimes find with British ‘official secrecy’. Actually, what is required is the mind of a Mafia prosecutor. Once postulate a capo who tells his soldiers, ‘I want the hostages out, and I want the Nicaraguans to say “uncle”, and I don’t want to know how you get it done and if you get caught I never met you,’ and the cloud of unknowing is dispelled. Fail to conceive of such a hypothesis – and the Congress could not bear that much reality – and there is a ‘mystery’. This is not the ‘thin line’ of Draper’s inquiry. Relying almost exclusively on the written record and his skill as a historian, he tries to compose a history of the present. But with knowledge, memory and desire left opaque, and without the promiscuity that is permitted to the freelance speculator, all he can do is show – employing their own words and memos – that the American Constitution was deliberately put at risk by a group of unelected, paranoid Manicheans. This in itself is one of the scholarly achievements of the decade.