* On 19 May, JFK had celebrated his forty-fifth birthday at a fundraiser where Marilyn Monroe, in a beaded dress, breathily sang ‘Happy Birthday’, the apogee of Kennedy Camelot. Monroe had been introduced by her ex-lover Sinatra, who occupied a unique place in US culture at the nexus of entertainment, presidential power and organized crime. She had affairs with both JFK and Bobby (father of eleven children with a long-suffering wife) between failed marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller. Marilyn suffered bitterly from the wounds of a desolate childhood in foster homes, and she was cold-shouldered when she fell for Bobby. In August, she was found dead of an overdose of sleeping pills, the Kennedys suppressing any evidence of their liaisons. Her life personified American glamour at the height of the American Century, her death the fragility of beauty and the darkness of fame.
* Since 1959, the Pentagon had been working on a ‘survivable’ communications system that would function if a nuclear strike destroyed telephone cables and radio networks. Paul Baran, a Polish-born Jewish scientist whose family had arrived in America in 1928 and who now worked for the Rand Corporation, had just created a cheap, quick new way of sending data separated into what he called ‘message blocks’, findings he published in his On Distributed Communications. Demonstrating how ‘discoveries’ are the result of cumulative knowledge, a British engineer, Donald Davies, simultaneously developed the same idea though he called the data ‘packets’. In 1967, the two shared their ‘packet switching’ ideas, Baran telling Davies, ‘You and I share a common view of what packet switching is all about, since you and I independently came up with the same ingredients.’ In 1969, the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency used their work to create a network to communicate between computers. Over the next twenty years, a galaxy of scientists developed the technology out of which came the internet and email.
* Sergo Mikoyan, who had accompanied his father as his aide, recounted the drama of the journey to this author. ‘My father said, “The future of the world requires that my mission succeed. That’s it.” You can appreciate it was a very tense flight but my father was always calm. He was used to high tension: after all, he had lived with Stalin for thirty years!’
* In the tiny elite of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh and the younger General Giap had both attended the French lycée, Quoc Hoc, in Hue founded by the Catholic Vietnamese official who was father of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Giap and President Ngo were pupils at the same time. After rising to provincial governor, Ngo collaborated with the Japanese against the French. Appointed as premier by the last emperor of Annam, he removed the monarchy and as president the celibate, puritanical Catholic, who surrounded himself with handsome young men, led a murderous kleptocratic dynasty. One of his brothers, Nhu, Hitler admirer and drug addict, ran Ngo’s party and secret police, which he modelled on the SS; his wife Madame Nhu was beautiful, fiery, always gorgeously attired and packing a pistol. Of the others, Thuc was archbishop of Hue, Can ran Hue, and Luyen was ambassador to London. But all of them lived in the presidential palace. The irrepressible Madame Nhu terrorized the president and her husband, declaring, ‘Power is wonderful, total power totally wonderful,’ and adopted a moralistic programme, burning pornography and trying to ban prostitution – while complaining that her husband neglected to have sex with her. When monks burned themselves alive in protest at Ngo predations, Madame Nhu called them ‘barbecues’: ‘Let them burn!’ she said, and menaced her enemies: ‘We’ll track down and exterminate all these scabby sheep.’ Vietnamese were horrified by her; Americans half appalled, half fascinated.
* ‘There are two things that people will always pay for: food and sex,’ Madame Claude said. ‘I wasn’t any good at cooking.’ Claude (Fernande Grudet), proprietor of Paris’s leading maison close, specialized in sophisticated middle-class girls, often second-rank actresses and models, who were not full-time professionals. Almost the carnal division of the French intelligence services throughout the 1960s, her clients included film stars (such as Marlon Brando), plutocrats (Rothschilds, the Italian Fiat magnate Agnelli, the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, who later married Jackie Kennedy) and potentates from the shah and Saudi fixer Muhammad Khashoggi to President Kennedy, who on his visit memorably requested a girl ‘like Jackie. But hot.’
* Israel was still dependent on French weaponry, though de Gaulle had ended any nuclear assistance. America was just starting to supply Israel with weaponry but JFK was infuriated by its nuclear programme. When Shimon Peres, its mastermind, visited the White House, JFK asked him about the nuclear weapons; he replied with deliberate vagueness, ‘I can tell you clearly that we shall not introduce atomic weapons to the region. We shan’t be the first to do so.’
Hashemites and Kennedys, Maos, Nehruvians and Assads
LYONIA THE BALLERINA: BREZHNEV IN POWER
Brezhnev was energetic and sharp, good-natured and humorous, a cautious realist, always making jokes, giving nicknames and laughing loudly. His judgements on American politics and foreign leaders were surprisingly on point, and in the Kremlin he tried ‘to win over his interlocutors and create a free and open atmosphere for conversation’, recalled the young secretary of Stavropol, Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he always teased about his ‘sheep empire’. A hard-drinking, hard-hunting muzhik and womanizer, both vainglorious and self-deprecating, Brezhnev collected fast cars and undeserved medals: visiting Berlin, when given a new Mercedes by his East German vassal Honecker, he drove so recklessly he crashed it on a sharp right turn.
After promoting himself to the marshalate, he was derided for bellowing, ‘Make way for the marshal,’ but on Marxist scholarship he joked, ‘You don’t expect Lyonia Brezhnev to have actually read all that.’ He kept a diary, Habsburgian in its dullness: ‘Killed 34 geese’ was a typical entry. ‘With Lyonia, all I had to do was tell a few jokes,’ recalled KGB chief Semichastny, ‘and that was it.’ While the Americans were convinced that the Soviets were the puppet masters, the Vietnamese made their own decisions, and Mao was now asserting himself.
In Hanoi, as the venerable Ho retired, Le Duan escalated their war, infiltrating 40,000 regular troops into the south to join 800,000 Viet Cong guerrillas. ‘The Communist threat,’ said Johnson ‘must be crushed with strength.’* By the end of 1965, he had deployed 200,000 troops and was bombing the north. He underplayed US escalation: ‘If you have a mother-in-law with only one eye … in the center of her forehead,’ he explained, ‘you don’t keep her in the living room.’ Sihanouk, now Cambodian head of state, was at his height, ruling absolutely, giving long speeches, boasting of sexual conquests, performing his own jazz songs with his band and presenting ballets starring his own beautiful daughter. He also assassinated opponents, and allowed Monique’s family to make fortunes as the Vietnamese cauldron overflowed into Cambodia.
The Viet Cong used the Cambodian and Laotian borderlands as supply routes into South Vietnam – the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1964, Sihanouk, close to Zhou Enlai, who visited Phnom Penh, allowed Chinese supplies to be delivered through Cambodia to the Vietnamese – the Sihanouk Trail – in return for a share of military equipment. As America deployed more troops, Sihanouk tacked left, recruiting into his government Khieu Samphan, a Marxist intellectual educated at the Sorbonne who was a member of the secret Maoist faction led by the teacher named Saloth Sar. When Sihanouk accused him of backing a peasant rebellion and arranged his public debagging, Khieu Samphan vanished. Many thought he was dead. He was joined in the jungle by Saloth Sar, who flew to Beijing where he was hosted by the deputy premier Deng Xiaoping. But it was Mao’s secret-police chief Kang Sheng who grasped his grim potential. In 1966, as China turned against Sihanouk, he realized something was happening in Beijing.