When They Were Out to Get Us

When They Were Out to Get Us

http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/blog/index.cfm/Current_Books/2010/8/20/When-They-Were-Out-to-Get-Us

8/20/2010

STRANGE DAYS INDEED:
The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia.
By Francis Wheen.
PublicAffairs. 343 pp. $26.95

The 1970s­with its flared jeans and dodgy haircuts, pallid disco
music, absurdist trends (pet rocks!), and Khomeinist revolution­what
a miserable, squalid decade it was. The idealism and irrational
optimism of the 1960s, when throngs of teenagers declared the end of
bourgeois society, gave way to Cambodia, Watergate, Jonestown, and
the Symbionese Liberation Army. Civil rights marchers and peaceniks
made way for black power and Black September.
In Strange Days Indeed, British journalist Francis Wheen stylishly
chronicles what he calls the "Them decade," when the grand conspiracy
theory was ascendant in the West, having infected the thinking of an
astonishing number of clever people­prime ministers, presidents,
journalists, and movie directors­as well as the hoi polloi. When
something went wrong­a leader deposed, a president shot­it was
invariably blamed on the machinations of government, business, and
intelligence community conspirators. It was Them. Ordinary people saw
a government agent behind every rock. British prime minister Harold
Wilson was convinced that his intelligence service was fomenting a
coup. Richard Nixon distrusted all but his closest aides.

There was something of a hangover in all of this, a predictable
backlash from the mainstreaming of political radicalism of the late
1960s. Looking back on 1973, Wheen observes that in Britain "it seems
incredible that the National Theater should stage an earnest
three-hour Trotskyist seminar, led by no less a figure than Laurence
Olivier," that supposedly portended a working-class revolution.

In the United States, most every conspiracy theory that involved the
White House, Langley, the entire rotten government, was given a
hearing (and sometimes confirmed as fact) in Congress. Public
revelation of the CIA's involvement in assassination plots in the
Third World, its role in fomenting coups across the globe, and its
production of exploding cigars meant for Fidel Castro were
treasonous, said singer Bing Crosby. To others, the exposés merely
confirmed what they had long suspected: Their government could never
be trusted.

Wheen concedes that much 1970s paranoia contained a kernel of truth.
After all, it was government paranoia that created the Counter
Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), an FBI-led operation to spy on
domestic political dissidents in the 1960s. The program's exposure in
1975 predictably produced a wave of counterparanoia, and, 50 years
after its inauguration, COINTELPRO is still grist for conspiracists
and paranoiacs.

Wheen sees spasms of paranoia as cyclical: "Historians of the
paranoid style have shown that it is not a constant but an episodic
phenomenon which coincides with social conflict and apprehensions of
doom." Today, he catches "flickering glimpses ofdéjà vu" in, for
example, Michael Moore's conspiracy-laden 2004 documentary Fahrenheit
9/11. Perhaps. But the advent of Reaganism, Thatcherism, and the
"greed decade" hardly provided an interregnum to mainstream
conspiracy theorizing. From Father Coughlin's 1930s sermons about
Jewish plots against America to the amateur Poirots investigating the
"suspicious" circumstances of Clinton White House counsel Vince
Foster's suicide, the 20th century was always running a fever.

There are plenty of quibbles too. Nixon's presidency was an
unmitigated disaster, but it is a stretch to suggest that he was a
"kindred spirit" of paranoid Chinese genocidere Mao Zedong and Soviet
dictator Leonid Brezhnev.(Wheen also misquotes Helen Gahagan Douglas,
with whom Nixon squared off during a 1950 run for the U.S. Senate, as
saying that the Soviet Union was "the cruelest, most barbaric
autocracy in world history." She was referring to the governments
that preceded the Bolshevik Revolution.)

While his larger narrative doesn't quite cohere, Wheen's anecdotes
are crisply told, often terrifying, and usually amusing­as when he
describes the 1974 meeting that Britain's most powerful civil
servant, Sir William Armstrong, held with his underlings, where,
naked, he ranted that the end of the world was nigh. Wheen's dramatis
personae (Israeli paranormalist Uri Geller, Ugandan dictator Idi
Amin) often feel like comic characters invented for their
entertainment value. But everything he says is true. And he's right
to suggest that the strange, paranoid days of the 1970s are back.
Because they never really went away.
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Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor of Reason.

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