The World

At home, the US thrived, its economy – now a third of global output – stimulated by mass consumerism, military production and technical ingenuity, boundlessly innovative and confident in its righteous mission to promote capitalist democracy. In the richest country that had ever existed,^* the appetite of its well-off consumers for flashily advertised fashions, cars and fridges stimulated efficient production; its films and music reverberated across the world as compulsive as the pelvic thrusts of Elvis Presley. A handsome boy with an invincible sex appeal and a creamy baritone who, channelling the African-American gospel and blues he heard in his dirt-poor upbringing in Mississippi and later in Memphis, promoted a new sound – rock ’n’ roll – selling 500 million records to make him ‘The King’. Radio and television had diminished community – promenades and theatres were no longer essential – but the home theatre of television tied families together and helped build nations through the sharing of beloved drama series and trusted anchormen, and yet televised scenes of political strife and warfare could also divide them. Some leaders were better on television than they were at ruling.^*

TV became a powerful political tool for all states, democratic or autocratic. It was television that helped expose the bullying bombast of US Senator McCarthy, who had orchestrated witch hunts against supposed Communists in arts and governments.

It was not just goods that travelled: cheaper flights allowed millions to go on holiday to foreign lands, and many Americans now flew down to their own American Babylon: Cuba.

MEYER LANSKY’S HOTEL NACIONAL; FIDEL CASTRO’S FAILED REVOLUTION

In 1952, Meyer Lansky, the Russian-born gangster who had started in the backstreets of Little Italy, met a former Cuban dictator, Colonel Fulgencio Batista, at his suite in the Waldorf-Astoria, Manhattan, to plan a new seizure of power and division of casinos in Havana. An illegitimate ex-labourer, Batista, part-Taíno, African, Chinese and Spanish, the only mixed-race president Cuba has ever had, had early befriended Lansky, who, starting in 1933, helped turn Havana into the pleasure dome of the western world.

Lansky and Bugsy Siegel had survived the arrest and trial of their boss Lucky Luciano, sentenced to fifty years for pandering,^*

but the Mafiosi had negotiated his release through a deal, Operation Underworld, in which he and his longshoremen would prevent Nazi infiltration of New York Harbor. On his release, Luciano set up headquarters in Havana, where, in 1946, he and Lansky held a Mafia conference of kingpins at the Hotel Nacional, where they were entertained by a young singer, blue-eyed son of a New Jersey bar-owner, fixer (and occasional abortionist) and a boxer, called Frank Sinatra, whose feral sex appeal, transcendent baritone and extended phrasing would make the idol of the first teenager ‘fanatics’ of the consumer age, the bobby-soxers. The first problem on their agenda was their oldest friend: Bugsy Seigel.

As Havana boomed, Lansky and Siegel pursued their vision of an American pleasure city, investing in a hotel–casino, the Flamingo, at the village of Las Vegas in the Utah desert, attracted by legal gambling and off-track betting. Siegel was basing himself in Los Angeles, where the rich gangster became friends with the movie stars and producers of the Hollywood industry that was purveying the glamour of American capitalism to the world. After several murder cases, Bugsy was keen to go legitimate, reassuring his builder at the Flamingo, ‘Don’t worry, we only kill each other.’ But Siegel spent too much money buying jewellery for his girlfriend. After blowing $6 million on the Flamingo, he attracted his friends Clark Gable and Judy Garland to the launch, but Lansky and Luciano now suspected him of ‘skimming’ profits – a capital offence in their milieu. Lansky signed off: on 20 June 1947, as Siegel held court in his Beverly Hills mansion, a sniper shot him through the eye.

Batista, allowing Lansky to open hotels and casinos and American industry to control Cuba’s sugar, asked the diminutive gangster to bribe the island’s president to resign and then seized power again as dictator. As the Mafia ruled Havana and the American fruit companies dominated Cuban agriculture, the CIA backed Batista. Wiser Americans worried that his corruption would encourage revolution.^*

Batista and his secret police the Bureau for Repression of Communist Activities soon demonstrated how easily he would crush any Communists.

On 26 July 1953, Batista foiled a pathetic Communist attempt to seize the barracks in Santiago. Many of the 165 rebels were shot, their amateurish leader, a young lawyer named Fidel Castro, imprisoned and unlikely to be heard of again. Cuba was safe, but now the CIA worried about two friendly kings in danger.

FAT FUCKER AND THE BOY SCOUT: NASSER AND THE SHAH SEIZE POWER