The World

In May 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev signed a first agreement – Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) – the start of thirty years of negotiations. Surfing on these successes, the duo now negotiated American withdrawal from Vietnam. Yet Nixon could not restrain his own Manichaean paranoia. A month after SALT, he ordered a henchman to send five myrmidons – ‘the Plumbers’ – to burgle and set up wiretaps in Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Building, only for them to be arrested. Nixon lied to conceal his role, but it is not true that he was solely destroyed by the cover-up. The original crime was bad enough. Two journalists at the Washington Post unveiled a web of paranoid conspiracies and secret payments that corroded Nixon’s presidency.

Moreover, the Soviet detente was fragile. On 24 October 1973, just months after a jovial US–Soviet meeting, Brezhnev threatened military intervention.

 

 

* LBJ saw Communist advances everywhere: like JFK, he was terrified of a ‘new Cuba’ in south America, encouraging a military coup – ‘Golpe de 1964’ – against the leftist president of Brazil, João Goulart, who in April 1964 was overthrown by a junta that ruled for twenty years, arresting over 40,000 and killing at least 333, all supposedly Communists, and probably several hundred more. In Indonesia, a similar process sparked the bloodiest Cold War coup of all. The maverick showman Sukarno defied American influence but also mocked the Soviets for being white and arrogant, meanwhile consolidating his own dictatorship backed by a popular Communist Party. LBJ ordered the CIA to overthrow him, but Sukarno revelled in his own drama, calling 1965 ‘the year of living dangerously’. But when a Communist coup killed six generals, Sukarno lost control to his own general Suharto, who launched a purge of Communists and their ethnic Chinese supporters, killing 500,000 people, many by beheading. Suharto remained dictator for the next thirty-one years. In 2001 Sukarno’s daughter Megawati was elected president.

* The advances in food production and intensive agriculture mean that even though the world population has surged, famines are much rarer. Five million died between 1980 and 2020, while fifty million had died between 1940 and 1980, some famines caused by droughts, some by wartime failures of food distribution, but most by deliberate political policies adopted by Marxist-Leninists in the USSR, China and Ethiopia, and by the Nazis in Europe.

* Mao’s daughter Li Na, by Jiang, worked as his secretary during the Cultural Revolution, witnessing struggle sessions for him. She became ever more haughty, threatening staff. Mao promoted her to director of the Small Group that ran the campaign. But in 1972 she had a nervous breakdown and Mao lost interest in her.

* During the 1990s, this author met Deng Pufang in Beijing. ‘Yes, let us say we have come through struggles to get here,’ is how he described his trajectory, sitting in his wheelchair.

* While Kenyatta was consolidating his power in Kenya, the British withdrew from Tanganyika and Zanzibar. In January 1964 the sultan of Zanzibar – the Arab monarch whose cousin ruled Oman – faced an invasion by a demented messianic Ugandan Christian, John Okello, who seized the island with 600 revolutionaries and tried to capture Sultan Sir Jamshid bin Abdullah, who fled on his yacht. Okello ordered the killing of all Arabs between eighteen and twenty-five, gang-raping all women, though banning the rape of virgins. Two thousand Omanis were killed – vengeance for centuries of slave trading. But Field Marshal Okello was outmanoeuvred by saner leaders who, after trying to impose a Marxist republic, expelled him and negotiated a union with Tanganyika to form Tanzania. The sultan ultimately retired to Oman: his cousins still rule Oman today.

* Lucian Freud, who had only known the famed psychoanalyst, his grandfather, in old age, lived like an eighteenth-century street-fighting rake, horseplayer and libertine, holding court with a harem of lovers and fathering at least twelve children. In 1966, painted his first reclining nude portrait, Naked Girl. His own raw, alienated, sensual and harshly impastoed style over the next fifty years mastered and gloried in the flesh, the soul and the human condition: ‘I want paint to work as flesh,’ he said. ‘My portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not have the look of the sitter, being them.’

* In September 1968, Salazar, aged seventy-nine, fell over in his bath and suffered a stroke. Yet Portugal’s Estado Novo did not fall. A loyalist was appointed prime minister, who continued the dictatorship at home and the brutal colonial wars abroad.