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Slice the Seventies where you will, the flavor is
unmistakable—a pungent mélange of apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial
fever. You can find it in the words of Chairman Mao's wife in 1971: "I have
been feeling as if I am going to die any minute, as if some catastrophe is about
to happen tomorrow. I feel full of terror all the time." Or in the advice given
by Harold Wilson to two BBC reporters in 1976, weeks after his resignation as
British prime minister, as he urged them to investigate plots against him by
the security services: "I see myself as a big fat spider in the corner of the room.
Sometimes I speak when I'm asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally
when we meet I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a
blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something,
lead you somewhere." It is omnipresent in the private conversations of
President Richard Nixon, preserved for posterity by the White House's voice-activated
recording system which he installed in 1971—and which provided
the evidence that compelled his resignation three years later. "Homosexuality,
dope, immorality in general—these are the enemies of strong societies," he
tells his aide Bob Haldeman, in a typical exchange. "That's why the
Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they're trying to
destroy us! . . . You know it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are
out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the
Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them?" You can see it, at its bleakest, in
the closing scene of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974): the surveillance
expert Harry Caul sits alone in the ruins of his own apartment,
which he has comprehensively dissected in a vain search for the hidden bugs
which he knows must be there. "The Watergate affair makes it quite plain,"
Marshal McLuhan wrote in 1974, "that the entire planet has become a whispering
gallery, with a large portion of mankind engaged in making its living
by keeping the rest of mankind under surveillance. |
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HARDCOVERISBN 978-1586488451 Pub date: 03/02/10 Price: $26.95/33.95 Canada 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 352 pages Carton Quantity: 20 History, Politics Selling Territory: USC Rights: First serial: PublicAffairs Translation, Performance, Audio, Electronic Rights: HarperCollins UK
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