When did the Biden cover-up begin? Last week, Axios published audio files from the 2023 investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, in which Biden is questioned about his recollections. The recordings are both pitiful and shocking. Never mind America’s nuclear codes — in them Biden sounds like he might struggle with the TV remote.

The audio was released just ahead of reports that Biden, now 82, is suffering from aggressive prostate cancer. I wish him a speedy recovery — but this is unlikely to be aided by publication this week of Original Sin, a new book by CNN political anchor Jake Tapper. The book documents Biden’s physical and cognitive decline during his presidency — along with concerted effort by aides and sympathetic media to smooth over this decline, allowing Biden to continue in office. Amid this slew of revelations as to Biden’s frailty, and the extent of the cover-up, both allies and enemies are asking: how did this happen?

Watergate was long mythologized as a foundational moment in modern American politics. Its scandalous impact, coverage, and the eventual resignation of Nixon in 1974 were so profoundly formative of an age, in fact, that these events spawned perhaps the quintessential political-scandal suffix. Appended to any noun, “-gate” has come to denote a political brouhaha that generates so much media noise it triggers major change, such as a leader’s resignation: such as, recently, the “Partygate” that scotched Boris Johnson in 2023.

The original Watergate turned on a break-in at the building where the Democratic National Convention had its offices. It transpired that the burglars were working on behalf of Richard Nixon, then Republican President, and were trying to gather information on his political rivals. The administration sought to cover up the burglary; this was discovered; Nixon was impeached, and press coverage of the trial became a galvanizing national event, eventually leading to Nixon’s resignation.

At the time, this was hailed as a victory for the American system of checks and balances. On taking power, Gerald Ford declared: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.” And in this sense of affirming “a government of laws and not of men”, Nathan Pinkoski recently argued, Watergate had a permanent impact on public consensus concerning the extent of presidential power: one that has boiled to the surface again in the Trump era.

The central issue sounds abstruse, but cuts to the heart of what the president’s role should be: so-called “impoundment“, which is to say whether or not a president has the right to curtail funds that have been granted by Congress, but not spent. Impoundment grants the president a partial veto power over programs he doesn’t like, a tool used extensively by Nixon. In turn, the events of Watergate played a key role in restricting it, via the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.

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The current administration wants to take back that control. Trump-aligned impoundment enthusiasts, such as OMB’s Russ Vought, argue that without returning this power to the president, the American state will remain helplessly in the grip of unaccountable patronage systems, stuffed with Left-wing partisans. A key aim of the Trumpist project, then — so Pinkoski has argued — is succeeding where Nixon failed: in restoring the power of the elected president, by curtailing the growth of bureaucratic fiefdoms and their financial patronage networks. Several of changes brought in by the Trump administration’s shortly after inauguration, such as shuttering USAID, were achieved using impoundment.

Nixon looms large for the opposing consensus, too. When, in February, five former Treasury chiefs published a statement protesting Trump’s DOGE initiative, it included a shocked reference to Nixon’s use of impoundment. Meanwhile, the publication of this protest in the New York Times points to Watergate’s second, related long-term impact: crystallizing the 20th-century mass media’s self-image, as a force holding power to account.

It was the press that uncovered the Watergate story, and as the investigation proceeded further, details were leaked on an ongoing basis: a symbiotic relation between officials and public reporting that has remained a feature of media and politics ever since. As Nixon’s trial unfolded on television, and in press discussion, it became a mass-participation event, that itself came to be understood as a new type of democracy. Writing in 1973, the essayist Mary McCarthy framed this public engagement with the trial as a kind of nationwide townhall meeting: “The story was being told, democratically, to the entire population, which was discussing it, democratically, as if at a town meeting […] in every city I arrived at, the local papers were full of Watergate.”

Turbocharged by the new, digitally-mediated pace of political debate, Trump’s first election was accompanied by a fragmenting and increasingly partisan and polarized media landscape. In tandem, many once at least formally neutral outlets grew increasingly partisan, seeing themselves as activists as much as reporters. “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, the Washington Post’s slogan, was adopted in 2017 during the furious early years of press #Resistance to the first Trump presidency.

But being an active participant can cut both ways. Two years into the Biden presidency, the 2022 MediaFest conference invited veteran Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to give a keynote, in which they reiterated how reporters must “Always dig deeper”. Watergate, they suggested, proved how the press was key institution of American democracy, alongside the courts, the legislative branch, the executive branch, and Justice Department, ready to spring into action to restore normal functioning when faced with a “criminal president”. Woodward and Bernstein made explicit the parallel they were drawing, between Nixon and Trump: “Not just that [Trump] was a criminal president,” Bernstein said, “but that he was the first seditious president in our history.”

Meanwhile, ordinary Democrats could see what the press refused to acknowledge. Two weeks after MediaFest’s celebration of digging deeper in the name of democracy, Democrat activists launched a campaign headed Don’t Run Joe. Norman Solomon, its campaign director, told Tapper: “It was not rocket science or political science to know that Biden should not run again. It was hidden in plain sight.” But a press still boastful of its Watergate legacy was determined not to dig deeper.

These stark facts will doubtless amplify the murmur of Watergate revisionism already discernible on the Right. The scandal used to be held as proof of the need for strong institutional curbs on presidential power, and of the crucial role played by the press in holding power to account on behalf of the people. Democracy, in this reading, comprised a kind of continual plebiscite, convened via TV and newspapers, mediating between rulers and ruled. Revisionist accounts, on the other hand, depict Nixon as unjustly framed, victim of a deep-state coup enabled by federal bureaucrats desperate to thwart his efforts to reassert presidential power. In this telling, Nixon was brought down because he was using federal impoundment as a policy tool to regain control of the federal bureaucracy, and in particular posed a threat to the power and vested interests of the foreign policy Blob. Building on these arguments, some today argue that the Right should not just revisit Watergate — but view Nixon as the blueprint for Right-wing revolution.

Meanwhile, it goes without saying that those for whom “democracy” requires sharp curbs on presidential power, and an activist press shaping public debate, are not keen. But however they feel about the prospect, these institutions are themselves on the cusp of their own Watergate. We have a press that was happy enough, in the Seventies, to challenge a president deemed too powerful — but which didn’t lift a finger, in our era, to challenge one who wasn’t powerful enough. Who was, in fact, a mere senile figurehead for who knows what agenda, or whose interests. It is a staggering scandal. It has perhaps only remained relatively muted so far, because so few in the media want to think about the mirror it holds up to that industry’s role in public life.

So was the Right right about Watergate all along? I dare say history, or perhaps just more shouting, will eventually settle that matter. In the meantime, though, lest anyone is still laboring under the misapprehension that the result of this reckoning will be more truth or journalistic integrity: don’t bet on it.

The 20th-century mass media may be facing a reckoning, as agents of democracy. That reckoning can’t be separated from the digital revolution that first fractured the media landscape, creating the first Trumpquake in 2016, then brought him back in 2024, the first “podcast election”. Bluntly: there is no longer any such thing as a nationwide democratic townhall of the kind imagined by Mary McCarthy to have been conjured by Nixon’s televised trial.

Some imagine that this change can only be for the better; and certainly events to date suggest it has critically damaged the mass-media machine with which consensus was once formed, but which failed to defy gravity in the case of poor, ailing Biden. But I would not bet on it. In the aftermath of the consensus machine, the 21st-century’s increasingly AI-enhanced digital public discourse grows more hallucinatory by the day. I see nothing less partisan, or more truthful, waiting in the wings.

On 29 June 1971, in the midst of the uproar, the FBI sat General Edward Lansdale down for an “interview”. Lansdale was the godfather of US counterinsurgency warfare, often (falsely) believed to be the inspiration for The Quiet American by Graham Greene. He had supervised Ellsberg during their time in Vietnam and, asked about their relationship, Lansdale began to philosophise about the relationship between intellectuals and the leaders they advise. “Intellectuals are sometimes strange people,” he mused, adding that Ellsberg worked in a “cloistered atmosphere”. The FBI agents concluded that, in Lansdale’s view, Ellsberg “failed to realise the life and death of United States troops were involved” in the questions he dealt with. That last accusation might have come as a shock to Ellsberg, who had carried a rifle and walked into many life-and-death situations himself.

Lansdale’s interrogation notes formed part of Ellsberg’s FBI dossier, released after Ellsberg’s death under the Freedom of Information Act. And, read today, the files shed considerable light on the changing relationship between academia and power in the West. Ellsberg was one of the first generation of “think tankers”, originally freewheeling intellectuals drafted by the government to solve difficult problems. His line of inquiry would ultimately lead him to break the law and publicly oppose the government.

Today’s think-tank scene, for good or for ill, is far more conformist. A Lansdale figure, if he were alive today, would find little to rhapsodise about among the think-tankers who crowd Washington and Westminster. The all-purpose intellectuals of the early Cold War have been replaced by narrow specialists and single-issue activists, while the kind of principled bravery Ellsberg displayed is gone entirely. His life is an instructive parable from an age when the citizen-scholar was able and willing to serve his country — and brave enough to face being called a traitor.

Before becoming public enemy number one, Ellsberg had been the perfect example of a government-affiliated intellectual. Educated in economics at Harvard and Cambridge — and with a brief peacetime stint in the Marine Corps — he started working for the Rand Corporation in 1958, a think tank funded largely by the US Department of Defense. At first, Ellsberg’s job was to study nuclear command-and-control systems through the lens of decision theory. In 1964, the Department of Defense brought on Ellsberg as an official adviser. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the beginning of large-scale US military involvement in Vietnam, happened during his first day on the job. A year later, Ellsberg transferred to the US Embassy in Saigon, where he worked as an analyst under Lansdale.

Nixon, then a mere political candidate, even paid the embassy a visit when Ellsberg was there. Lansdale tried to convince Nixon that free and honest elections were necessary to win Vietnamese support. “Oh, sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right,” Ellsberg remembered Nixon saying sarcastically, “so long as you win!” Lansdale’s staff were unsettled, according to Ellsberg’s 2002 memoir, Secrets.

Ellsberg, like many liberals of that generation, believed in “Cold War liberalism”. He wanted a muscular United States to confront the enemies of human freedom abroad and at home, just as it had during the Second World War. Although Vietnam’s civil war was “very hard on those people”, Ellsberg later said to a journalist: “I told myself that living under communism would be harder, and World War III, which I thought we were preventing, would be worse.” Lansdale, paraphrased in the FBI document, understood this to be the general attitude of his advisers: “there was much criticism among the various agencies concerning the ways in which the various organisations were implementing United States policies, but all of this criticism was administrative, within the United States establishment there, and was for the purpose of doing a better job there”.

Ellsberg’s job sounded anodyne: “checking on specific problems in pacification work”, especially “economic problems”, according to the FBI notes. And Lansdale paints Ellsberg as something of a naïf who didn’t even realise that Vietnamese tap water was unsafe to drink. But according to Ellsberg’s memoir, he was a much more worldly employee than Lansdale let on. Ellsberg toured the countryside with “old Vietnam hands”, jaded American advisers who led him through guerrilla-infested provinces that other embassy staff refused to even visit. “These people were far from being cool, detached problem solvers. Unlike other Americans, they mostly spoke Vietnamese, and they had close Vietnamese friends,” Ellsberg wrote. “They had grown to love Vietnam and its people and wanted to believe, and did believe, that our presence there could be helpful to them.”

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Despite seeing the dirty underside of the war up close, these veterans had “retained a sense of the legitimacy of this effort because of knowing a few Vietnamese… who had seemed to have faith in our mutual efforts”, Ellsberg wrote. And, much like contemporary figures who invested years in Afghanistan and the Middle East, they must have felt that letting up the war effort would be a betrayal of the West’s loyal supporters in the region. But Ellsberg’s own faith in the project — and its benefits for the Vietnamese — were profoundly shaken by his experiences on the ground. He saw villages bombed to rubble for no good reason and apparent bystanders shot dead from the sky. Tanks crushed Buddhist altars. A drunk South Vietnamese major talked about how humiliating the American presence was and threatened to shoot his advisers. When Vietnamese children smiled and waved at visiting Americans, another South Vietnamese officer told Ellsberg that he used to greet Japanese invaders the same way during the Second World War.

Then Ellsberg’s girlfriend Patricia visited Vietnam. As a journalist, she had access to contacts that government officials did not, including refugees driven out of the countryside by US bombing. And she told Ellsberg that his colleagues, rather than brave crusaders for Vietnam’s freedom, were “desperate men, enamored of danger and the war, risk takers who didn’t feel they had a lot to lose”, as he remembers in Secrets. Speaking to the FBI in 1971, Lansdale correctly guessed that Patricia had been a big influence on Ellsberg’s worldview. While visiting her boyfriend, Lansdale said, Patricia made “academic arguments” against the war, even if she were not quite the “burn the draft card type”.

Opposing the war in theory is one thing. Leaking classified documents is another. Lansdale told the FBI that “ELLSBERG’s apparent change of feelings concerning the United State’s [sic] is something entirely new to him,” but “he is not too shocked by this change because ELLSBERG is such an intense man”. The general sighed to the FBI agents that Ellsberg did not really understand the “need to keep his lip zippered”, but added that a “hell of a lot of Americans” were loose-talkers as well, both in Vietnam and at home. But few of these loose-talkers would have the impact of Ellsberg. Even if he is now regarded as a hero, the leak would almost destroy his life. The government put Ellsberg on trial under the Espionage Act, and the case was thrown out only because a judge discovered that Nixon’s lackeys had tried to steal Ellsberg’s psychiatric files.

The modern world will not produce another Ellsberg. Conservatives activists waged an intense campaign against “Vietnam Syndrome” in the Eighties, and liberals hawks fully re-embraced the idea of military intervention by the Nineties. Although the pro-intervention arguments are basically the same — locals want Western protection and the alternative is worse — the apparatus for delivering them is much more sophisticated. In Ellsberg’s day, there were a few large think tanks mostly attached to governments, like the Rand Corporation in Washington and London’s Royal United Services Institute, or those sustained by mega-philanthropists, such as the Brookings Institution and Chatham House. Since then, political parties and business interests have set up hundreds of boutique think tanks, all competing for access to and attention from governments.

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With a few exceptions, their work no longer resembles the rough-and-tumble frontline action that Ellsberg participated in. One researcher found that around half the “Iran experts” at American think tanks had never been to Iran, and a similar number could not even speak Persian. Instead, today’s think-tankers spend much of their time flattering and being flattered in Western conference rooms. Brookings expert Jeremy Shapiro described the ritual of think-tank events in a biting 2014 essay:

“After 15 minutes of stilted chit-chat with colleagues that the thinker has the misfortune to see at virtually every event he attends in Washington, the senior government official strides calmly into the room, plops down at the head of the table and declares solemnly what a honour it is to have such distinguished experts to help with this critical area of policy… A brave thinker raises his hand and speaks truth to power by reciting the thesis of his latest article. From there, the group is off to races as the thinkers each struggle to get in the conversation and rehearse their well-worn positions.”

According to Shapiro, officials rarely find the think-tankers’ suggestions useful. Instead, these meetings are an exercise in flattery. Think-tankers, convinced that they were part of the decision-making process, are more inclined to either defend the government in public or grant it the benefit of the doubt. In turn, the think tanks can tell donors that their money is buying them influence. Ironically, the private status of these newer think tanks has therefore made them more dependent on the government, since their access to officials relies completely on those officials’ goodwill.

Back in 1971, according to the FBI notes, Lansdale “said that ELLSBERG was a very intense person, very excitable, and always very eloquent in his view”. This characterisation, or rather the dynamic characters who merit it, is precisely what is missing from government today. People like that get dangerous ideas, like airing the government’s dirty laundry in public. Better and cleaner to have a thousand dull sycophants than one Daniel Ellsberg.

To put the recent revelations in context, Greece has as proud a tradition of politically motivated phone-tapping as any other country. I still chuckle when I recall what happened in the early hours of a May morning in 2015 during my short stint as Greece’s finance minister. Soon after I had concluded a sensitive conversation with my friend Jeff Sachs, the phone rang. It was Jeff again, this time laughing uncontrollably.

“You will not believe this,” he said. “Five minutes after we hung up, I received a call from the National Security Council. They asked me if I thought you meant what you’d told me.” I had fully expected my phone had been tapped, but two things made Jeff’s news remarkable. First, the eavesdroppers not only had the capacity to instantly recognise that what I had said to Jeff was of real significance, but they must also have had an open line to America’s NSC. Second, they had no compunction whatsoever about revealing that they were tapping my phone!

I was, of course, neither the first nor the highest-ranking Greek politician to have been honoured with such attention. We now know that, back in 2008, the phones of the then-prime minister, his wife, half the cabinet and close to 100 government officials were tapped by US agencies. Nor was eavesdropping monopolised by US agencies. In 2015, operatives of EYP — the Greek intelligence agency — dropped into my ministerial office to check for bugs, and pointed out the window at two vans which, they said, belonged to the German Embassy and contained listening equipment trained at me and my team. A few months later, the Prime Minister I was serving under told me that the EYP’s head had been spreading the toxic lie that I was in cahoots with Wolfgang Schäuble (Germany’s then Finance Minister) to get Greece out of the eurozone.

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Clearly, in view of such experiences, I was not at all surprised, let alone shocked, at the news that EYP has recently been eavesdropping on politicians and journalists. So, why am I branding this latest incident as Greece’s Watergate? Why do I go so far as to believe it poses a greater threat to democracy than Richard Nixon’s original?

The short answer is: because Nixon was forced to resign once it was revealed that he had endeavoured to cover up spying. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the current Greek Prime Minister, has in contrast succeeded in neutralising the democratic institutions set up to maintain a semblance of legality — before they neutralised him.

The sequence of events leading to the exposure of Greece’s Watergate scandal began in July 2019, immediately after Mr Mitsotakis won the last general election on behalf of New Democracy, our conservative party. One of the very first decrees he issued, as incoming Prime Minister, was one that gave his office direct control over and responsibility for EYP. “Why on earth is the PM taking over the supervision of EYP?”, I remember a parliamentary colleague asking me that very day. It was, indeed, a curious move.

Our trepidation only grew following two personnel choices. First, Mitsotakis appointed a nephew of his, Grigoris Dimitriadis, to oversee EYP on his behalf. Secondly, he chose as EYP’s new head Panagiotis Kontoleon, the CEO of the Greek franchise of the private security firm G4 — a man with no record of public service, and whose appointment Mitsotakis could only complete after amending the relevant law to remove the prerequisite that the EYP chief holds a postgraduate degree.

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Given his concerted and very public efforts to take complete control of the state intelligence agency, something no other PM had ever done, it became impossible to shift blame to some other minister once the faeces hit the proverbial fan.

Of the more than 17,000 wiretaps that EYP admits it has placed during the last year alone, two cases are at the heart of the current scandal. The first is that of Thanasis Koukakis, an investigative journalist who dared look into Greek shipowners’ loans that had been illegally written off by the Bank of Piraeus (one of the banks that Greek taxpayers have had to repeatedly bailout). It turns out that Koukakis was one of EYP’s “subjects of interest”, an outrage that would have probably gone unnoticed without the second, higher profile, case.

It was this case that broke the camel’s back: an investigation begun by the European Parliament’s IT department accidentally revealed that Nikos Androulakis, an MEP belonging to PASOK (the formerly dominant party in Greek politics), was being phone-tapped by EYP. It was explosive news because, at the time his phone was tapped, Androulakis was contesting the leadership of PASOK — a contest that he, eventually, won. The significance of that contest cannot be understated, since its outcome mattered a great deal to Mitsotakis and his governing New Democracy party.

Since the middle of the pandemic, opinion polls have persistently suggested that the next election, which must take place by July 2023, will result in a hung parliament. While Mitsotakis’ New Democracy seemed likely to remain the largest party, it was not even close to an absolute majority. PASOK, in third place, was therefore positioned as kingmaker: whoever the party chose to side with would end up in government.

The stakes of PASOK’s leadership race suddenly seemed very high. Of the three main candidates, the one that would almost certainly choose to back New Democracy and Mitsotakis to form a government was Andreas Loverdos — an MP and former minister who had served gladly in New Democracy-PASOK coalition governments between 2011 and 2015. Every newspaper, radio and television station supporting Mitsotakis was rooting for Loverdos to beat Androulakis in the PASOK leadership primary. Is it any wonder that the revelation of EYP’s surveillance of Androulakis was big news? In a period during which the ruling party was rooting for Androulakis’s opponent, the nation’s spy agency — which ruling party’s leader and his nephew controlled and supervised to the full — was tapping Androulakis’ phone!

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As if that were not sufficiently outrageous, the Prime Minister doubled down with a disgraceful reaction to the ensuing uproar. In a six hour-long parliamentary debate on the subject, the Mitsotakis repeatedly insisted that the wiretap on Androulakis was perfectly legal, even if it was politically disingenuous. When we pressed him on the legal and logical justification for tapping Androulakis’ phone, he referred vaguely to grounds of “national security” — claiming that such sensitive matters cannot be spoken about in an open parliamentary session. At that point, we — the leaders of the opposition parties — called his bluff and voted to convene a special parliamentary Select Committee, which would debate these “national security” grounds in confidence.

And so it was that, a few days later, a Select Committee convened. Among the summoned witnesses were, naturally, the two men Mitsotakis had appointed to run EYP: Dimitriadis and Kontoleon. Both appeared in front of the Committee and both, reading from the same invisible script, repeated the same mantra: “We cannot answer your questions because the information the Select Committee seeks is privileged.” After a few pointless and cacophonous sessions, lacking any power to arrest witnesses for contempt of Parliament, the Committee disbanded and the case was closed.

And here’s the rub. Politicians, like corporations and athletes, often try out illegitimate practices to tilt the playground in their favour. In our surveillance society — in which our every move, thought or click is turned into a valuable commodity — phone-tapping is, unfortunately, commonplace. However, when a President or a Prime Minister seeks direct control over the nation’s spooks in order to press them, and their gadgets, into spying on opponents, they cross a Rubicon. If a leader is caught red-handed, our democratic institutions may be judged on whether they can neutralise him. In the case of Watergate, it was hard to unveil Nixon’s complicity, but the moment the President’s involvement was established, he was gone. In the case of Greece’s Watergate, our parliamentary sovereignty was jettisoned so that the guilty PM could stay put. In this sense, Greece’s Watergate bodes more ill for democracy than America’s original.

The reader may, understandably, ask: why should this defeat of Greece’s parliamentary democracy, however sad it may be, matter in the grander scheme of things? Because, my dear reader, you should never underestimate Greece’s capacity to be the harbinger of terrible developments that will come to your shores before you know it. Can you recall where the Cold War began? Not in the streets of Berlin in 1945, but in the streets of Athens in December 1944! Do you remember where the eurozone crisis began? Not in Italy or Spain or France, but in Greece in 2010! For some reason I am not privy to, my country has a proven record of giving birth not only to some important values, like democracy, but also to existential threats to Western civilisation. Which is why the ever-complacent West should be paying attention as our Greek Watergate scandal unfolds.

The dominant narrative in the press is that Republicans, or at least a significant cohort of them, were participants in the Senate Watergate Committee’s search for the truth in 1973 and not strictly partisan or obstructionist. This narrative, of course, has enjoyed renewed popularity because of the obvious comparisons between Watergate and the serial high crimes and misdemeanours committed by President Donald Trump.

One question, uttered on June 28, 1973, supposedly exemplified Republicans’ bipartisanship. “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Tennessee Senator Howard Baker famously asked John Dean, President Nixon’s former White House counsel, who was now fessing up to his role as desk officer for the Watergate cover-up. For some reason, the context of Baker’s very first question to Dean has been forgotten. The ambitious senator was not engaged in a bipartisan search for the truth; rather, Baker was creating a firebreak that he hoped would protect Nixon’s presidency against what he realised had been three-and-a-half days of extremely damaging testimony. But there was one very large hole in Dean’s cool and detailed account. His first direct meeting of any consequence with the President had not occurred until February 27, 1973, more than eight months after the June 17th break-in. So while Dean believed he was carrying out the President’s wishes, he could not actually offer direct testimony about what Nixon knew and did in the earliest and most crucial phase of the cover-up.

Baker’s gambit gave every evidence of working — for two weeks. Then, in mid July, White House assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of an extensive, voice-activated tape recording system that promised to resolve what appeared to be an insuperable obstacle: who was telling the truth? As the late Stanley Kutler, the dean of Watergate historians, wrote, “discovery of the tapes undid Baker’s careful handiwork. The tapes made irrelevant his question to John Dean… [Because now] Richard Nixon himself could answer Baker, and in indelible words.”

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Kutler’s observation was an understatement. Baker’s question had transmogrified into a battering ram against Nixon, until he was ultimately forced to give up the tapes, and it was his own words, more than any other single factor, that forced him into a humiliating resignation.

And what Baker did after his strategy backfired should not be forgotten either. He did not give up on his aim of being seen inside the GOP as the senator who saved Nixon’s presidency, a reputation that he hoped would put him head and shoulders above his party rivals for a future presidential run. While the president fought his way through the courts for months, hoping to avoid having to turn the tapes over to the special Watergate prosecutor, Baker and the minority counsel, Fred Thompson (a future Tennessee senator), desperately attempted a rearguard action. They sought to implicate the Central Intelligence Agency in the break-in, rather than the White House and Committee to Re-Elect the President. It was one of the most cynical acts in a scandal brimming with them.

About two weeks before the Senate Watergate Committee released its final report, in mid-July 1974, Baker and Thompson leaked their findings of alleged CIA complicity to the press. They landed with a thud, and were completely forgotten once the president released on August 5 what instantly became known as “the smoking gun” tape: an Oval Office conversation between Nixon and his top aide Bob Haldeman discussing how to use the CIA to impede the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Baker finally had the answer to his question.

Baker’s reputation suffered no lasting damage, in or out of the GOP. When his devastating question was remembered, as it often was, it was taken out of its intended context. And Baker exhibited no abiding impulse to correct the misunderstanding after Nixon’s disgrace was complete. Indeed, as time went on he absolutely welcomed the erroneous interpretation.

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If rose-colored glasses and wishful thinking drive the false narrative about Watergate bipartisanship, the same cannot be said for the driving force behind the other misleading narrative. Here, vested interests, reputations, and a lot of money are at stake.

Philip L. Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post before Katherine Graham of Watergate-era fame, is frequently credited (albeit erroneously) with coining the saying that “journalism is the first rough draft of history.” That phrase is the problem in a nutshell. Those who wrote the first rough draft of Watergate have persisted in doing everything to ensure the first draft is also the final draft, aided enormously by the press writ large, eager to bask in the reflected glory.

The ubiquitous narrative about Watergate is still largely the one laid out in All the President’s Men, the 1974 book by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, which became an eponymous Hollywood blockbuster starring Robert Redford in 1976. As the literary critic Wilfrid Sheed noted, Americans might be getting fuzzy about the details of Watergate, “but at least they remember the movie: a couple of nosy journalists and an informer, wasn’t it?”

No one much noticed the degree to which the book was a product of, and influenced by, a passing fancy at the time, the so-called “New Journalism.” Books in this genre employed literary devices normally considered the domain of novels and put them to work in books that purported to be nonfiction. “Woodstein” exploited their factual authority as journalists while simultaneously enjoying the license granted novelists. The result was a gripping newspaper procedural focused most intensely on the first eight months or so of the scandal — but one that was a very narrow slice of that history and bore only a faint resemblance to what had actually gone on inside the confines of The Washington Post.

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Most notably, All The President’s Men neatly sidestepped the truth that a troika — not a duo — was responsible for the Post’s coverage. Barry Sussman, a city editor who became the special Watergate editor in mid-July 1972, had been indispensable in producing the stories that won the Post a Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, managing editor Howard Simons believed that if any one individual, rather than the paper as a whole, deserved a Pulitzer, it was Sussman, not Woodstein. As Simons told Alan Pakula, director of the feature film, “Barry made acceptable the work of two junior reporters . . . [who] didn’t understand what they had often and couldn’t write it.”

Other principal actors slighted, if not maligned, in Bernstein and Woodward’s fabulistic account were the three federal attorneys assigned to prosecute the Watergate burglars; a slew of FBI agents doing the investigating; and the grand jury empaneled to hear the evidence, issue subpoenaes, and draw up indictments. The Watergate cover-up was not broken by the press, but by the legal pincers these actors built, which inexorably closed in on those who had committed perjury during the January 1973 trial of the burglars or otherwise conspired to obstruct justice. No one has ever conveyed a more balanced account of the press vs. the government’s role than Sandy Smith, a legendary reporter for Time magazine who broke as many important stories about Watergate as anyone in the Washington press corps, including Woodstein. After Nixon’s August 1974 resignation, Smith observed,

There’s a myth that the press did all this, uncovered all the crimes . . . It’s bunk. The press didn’t do it. People forget that the government was investigating all the time. In my material there was less than 2 percent that was truly original investigation. There was an investigation being carried out here. It may have been blocked, bent, botched, or whatever [at times], but it was proceeding. The government investigators found the stuff and gave us something to expose.

Finally, there is one last aspect that tells us more about the false narrative presented in All the President’s Men than any other element in the book. It involves the shadowy figure who became as inseparable from the book as the authors themselves, i.e., Sheed’s informer, aka “Deep Throat,” aka W. Mark Felt, the number two executive at the FBI when the Watergate break-in occurred. From 1974 to 2005, Bernstein and Woodward, wined, dined, and gave lectures for which they were handsomely paid, telling and re-telling stories of their reportorial prowess, with their cultivation of Deep Throat the apex of their Watergate reportage. Both journalists were hailed constantly for their supposed fidelity to their über-secret source. You could remove their fingernails and they still wouldn’t reveal Deep Throat’s identity.

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It was actually a phoney mystery. A wizened, razor-sharp retired newspaper editor named Frank Waldrop, who was said to be “absolutely wired [in] to the FBI”, told the Washingtonian magazine, when asked about the Deep Throat guessing game in the spring of 1974, “Read the February 28 [1973] and March 13 [1973] Nixon presidential transcripts and then try someone like Mark Felt on for size.”

Nonetheless, that Woodstein held fast to their pledge of confidentiality to Deep Throat was widely accepted at face value. And it was true that they had, more or less, abided by all the “deep background” stipulations Felt laid down when he agreed to be a source for newspaper stories. But it was also true that Bernstein and Woodward had glaringly violated these same stipulations when writing their book. The public became aware of Felt’s existence as a source; his instrumentality in the stories; what he told Woodward and when. His words were supposedly quoted verbatim, and information he supplied Woodward was linked to specific Post stories, even exact passages. The only fig leaves left for Felt to hide behind was his risqué code name, after a pornographic film popular at the time, and the fact that he was identified as having worked at an unnamed “executive branch” agency.

Eventually the guessing game grew so popular, but wearying and tedious for the authors, that in 1976, Woodward developed a gambit that relieved the pressure while doing nothing to lessen public interest. Now celebrities in their own right, the duo declared that someday, they were fairly certain, history’s most famous whistleblower would come out of the shadows, claim his just reward by writing a fascinating book, and receive the acclaim that was his due. But until then, they were going to keep their word — unless Deep Throat were to die before publishing his story. No one imagined this was an entirely unilateral decision, just as the decision to include him in the book had been. Felt was already furious over the book’s serial violations of the “deep background” arrangement. He was not asked, and certainly did not agree, to be identified in the event of his death. Yet Woodward and Bernstein acted if this were a signed agreement stowed away in a safe-deposit box.

The dénouement finally occurred in May 2005, when Felt’s family and his lawyer outed him in the pages of Vanity Fair, hoping to cash in on the untold story. Bernstein and Woodward grudgingly admitted that Felt was Deep Throat, and the identification finally allowed for careful analysis about what Felt’s design had been all along — or what the late Christopher Hitchens said “rank[ed] as the single most successful use of the news media by an anonymous unelected official with an agenda of his own.”

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Woodstein had long fostered, of course, their preferred interpretation of Felt’s motive: Deep Throat was a selfless, high-ranking official intent on trying to protect the office of the presidency from a criminal in the person of Richard Nixon. Felt “was trying to protect the office [of the presidency],” they wrote in 1974, “to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” Actor Hal Holbrook’s brooding portrayal of Deep Throat in the film version had then turned Woodstein’s portrait into something indelible.

But then a curious thing happened. In his own 2005 book about Felt, The Secret Man, Woodward backed away from Felt-as-principled whistleblower, and offered a far more pedestrian — and bureaucratic — explanation familiar to anyone who has laboured in the federal government. Felt leaked because he “believed he was protecting the [FBI]” from a corrupt, lawless president. Eventually Woodward reluctantly threw a third element into his admixture of motives: Felt was “disappointed that he did not get the directorship” following the untimely death of J. Edgar Hoover, who had died seven weeks before the break-in.

The sale of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate papers to the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas for $5 million in 2003, however, along with the release of the FBI’s Watergate files, opened the door to an independent assessment. When Woodward’s raw notes from his conversations with Felt were finally opened, none of the above explanations made sense. But a new one did: that Felt’s actions were entirely and only consistent with the “war of the FBI succession,” a no-holds-barred, vicious, internal struggle to succeed Hoover that had been going on for years. Felt leaked not out of pique or bitterness, not to protect the FBI, and not out of any concern over the office of the presidency. His sole aim was to destroy Nixon’s confidence in the acting FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, smear presumed rivals for the job, and steer Nixon toward appointing Felt himself. Richard Nixon was Felt’s only ticket to the directorship and the idea that Deep Throat ever intended to bring the president to ruin was absurd.

It defies belief that two of the most celebrated investigative reporters of their generation did not understand Felt’s true design contemporaneously, or, say, no later than 20 years after Nixon’s resignation. That Bernstein and Woodward still pretend otherwise tells one everything one needs to know about their first rough draft.

It was a fable, almost as self-serving as Felt’s leaks.

That got my attention. At the time, I was a member of the White House staff. I ate lunch almost every day in the White House Mess with Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, Deputy Chief of Staff John Erlichman, and a crowd of other political aides. I wondered if any of them were involved in this very strange political espionage operation.

Fortunately, my presidential appointment had nothing to do with domestic politics. Along with receiving a White House pass, I had been confirmed by the Senate as an ambassador and in practice was working as the president’s chief trade negotiator. Although I carried a diplomatic passport issued by the State Department, Nixon distrusted State. He often used me as his personal representative for sensitive discussions with foreign leaders and officials.

I had served Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in several posts since 1962 and had decided, when Nixon was elected, to leave my assignment in the Office of the US Trade Representative. But shortly after Nixon was sworn in, a stranger wandered into my office, whom I soon discovered had been sent by the White House personnel office.

The stranger said his name was Murray Chotiner and that he had been Nixon’s campaign manager in California and during his first run for president in 1960. Murray said Nixon had originally planned to give him a presidential appointment after entering office, but the press had characterised him as Nixon’s “dirty tricks manager”, making Senate confirmation problematic. So he was assigned as general counsel in the USTR.

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Murray said he had been advised by several members of Congress that I was the best informed official on political and trade disputes with European nations. Could he accompany me on my visits to foreign capitals?  I told him I was planning to resign but would stay three months to bring the incoming Nixon team up to speed. Murray travelled with me for about 10 weeks. After a while we became travel buddies, and I came to like his humour and deep insights into politics.

Two years later, in mid-1971, Murray called me to ask if I would be willing to be a consultant to Nixon on international issues, and I agreed. At the start of 1972, Murray called again and said “the President needs you”. I agreed to join his staff full-time and my name was sent to the Senate for confirmation. When I met the president alone, he said he had several international tasks in mind that would likely be subject to political controversy in Washington. When I needed his approval for my decisions or initiatives, he said I could bypass the Haldeman bureaucracy and just tell Murray, who would notify him. “Just don’t tell anyone you have direct access to POTUS.”

In the early days in my new post, Murray took me aside, “Be careful when you speak in or near the Oval Office”, he said. “Recording devices are keeping records of everything said.” This was Haldeman’s idea. A control freak, he wanted to know whatever Nixon was saying or doing with other visitors whenever Haldeman was not present. Murray said he had warned the president that the recordings were a bad idea that would bite him eventually, but Nixon shrugged it off.

As the months rolled on and the Watergate scandal broadened, more and more White House officials and Cabinet officials seemed to be caught covering up inappropriate or even illegal actions.

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During this turmoil, I was busy doing my own job. In 1973, for example, Nixon and French President Georges Pompidou agree to hold a Summit in Reyjavik, Iceland, to address US-French tension following Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard. Nixon asked me to accompany him alongside Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, Treasury Secretary George Shultz, Treasury Undersecretary, Paul Volcker, and other key officials. A special side meeting had been planned for Shultz, Volcker and I to speak with French Finance Minister Giscard d’Estaing. To my surprise, Nixon asked me to do the talking. Later, Shultz explained that Giscard deeply disliked Volcker but seemed to respect me.

When Kissinger and Shultz scheduled a trip to Moscow to meet with Leonid Brezhnev and other high Soviet officials, Nixon asked me to tag along. He also asked me to go to London to assist the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office in their negotiating UK joining the European Common Market in 1973. After Kissinger laid out a new Pacific security policy framework known as the “Guam Doctrine”, Nixon suggested I go to Canberra and Tokyo to begin dialogue on a potential US economic arrangement with Asia-Pacific nations, which I did.

During 1974, most of my time was spent shepherding Senate approval of the Trade Act of 1974. During this period of Congressional bargaining, Nixon gave me personal authority to sign off with Senate leadership the final drafts of that historic law.

As I was busy doing my job, I saw a building series of actions and cover-ups among the political appointees, resulting in the resignation of the Attorney General, and then successor Attorney Generals and their appointees. A Senate Committee was finally established to investigate the question: was Nixon personally involved in the cover-up? As Senator Howard Baker asked, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

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It turned out that the president knew a lot. On 16 July, 1973, one of Nixon’s aides, Alexander Butterfield, revealed the existence of the White House taping system in a televised interview, elevating the scandal from a curiosity to a national obsession. Senate investigators demanded the tapes; Nixon resisted, prevaricated, and dragged his feet, but eventually, in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the president had to make them available, and he complied. It then became clear that Nixon had long been complicit in the elaborate cover-up. Given the choice of impeachment or resignation, Nixon resigned in order to avoid further damage to the institution of the presidency.

Looking back, I saw catastrophic damage done to a president by a bunch of inept thugs bent on undermining his political adversaries. Sadly, I could not ask Murray for his opinion because he had been killed in a car crash in 1973. I thought Nixon should have fired everyone involved in the Watergate break-in as soon as the illegal raid on the DNC came to light. I remembered Murray’s warning to me that the White House recording system would come back to bite the president someday.

In some sense, history has been unkind to Nixon. Recently, Watergate has been compared to the raid on the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021, no doubt because both involved a presidential scandal followed by high-profile Congressional hearings. But Nixon was no Trump. His decision to cover up the break-in was a regrettable lapse in judgment, but when confronted with evidence that he was personally involved, Nixon chose his country over himself, resigning to avoid the impeachment of a sitting president. Trump, by contrast, sought to overturn a national election, and at no point since has he been willing to admit responsibility or even acknowledge reality.

In my experience, Nixon was an excellent foreign-policy president. He was actively involved in foreign policy and demonstrated more strategic thinking in this regard than most of his successors, even pulling off a handful of impressive diplomatic coups. His domestic policy decisions, on the other hand, were often questionable. But in that — going by the record of America’s more recent presidents — Richard Nixon was hardly alone.

At the time, exactly 50 years ago, the US was deeply divided by the Vietnam war. Congress was refusing to fund both that increasingly unpopular war and also the broad build-up needed to match the Soviet Union’s huge military upsurge. It would ruin the Soviet economy a decade later, but in the meantime, the US was being outmatched — until, that is, Nixon went to China and secured a diplomatic revolution that would open up a “second front” for the USSR. Among other diversions of Soviet energies, by 1976 at least 45 Soviet tank and motor rifle divisions were deployed towards Beijing, thousands of miles from Nato’s front in Germany.

Whatever else may be said against Nixon or Kissinger, their decision to open up to communist China at its worst — in 1972, the murderous cultural revolution was still in full swing — was a clever idea that many might have thought of only to dismiss it out of hand. All President Nixon had to do was embrace the malodorous Mao (his doctor would reveal that he never brushed his teeth, or bathed, unless he was in merry company).

But for Nixon the politician, the sacrifice was much greater, although he did not know it until the Watergate scandal drove him from office on August 9, 1974, two years after he had triumphantly landed in Beijing. The connection was straightforward: the centre-Right core of the Republic Party coincided with the “Taiwan Lobby”, which in turn encompassed the anti-Communist bloc, and which formed the hard core of Nixon’s supporters from the start of his political career. When Nixon betrayed the cause by embracing the very worst communist on the planet — altogether more extreme than the Soviets when it came to abolishing private property — and when he turned his back on Taiwan, the Republican Right did the same to him as he pleaded for help to fight off the Watergate charges.

A strange man in many ways — who else would think of himself as an absolute underdog while sitting in the White House’s Oval Office? — Nixon was also a real patriot: in 1942, assigned to the safest of Navy billets in Iowa, he strove very hard to manoeuvre himself into a combat zone. But had he known that his Beijing foray would leave him unprotected before his enemies and cost him the White House, he might have stayed well away from Mao.

Neither the American nor the Chinese media misrepresented that momentous strategic encounter, but they did join hands in utterly concealing the reality of China itself. For example, none of the admiring descriptions of Beijing and its imperial monuments in the New York Times prepared me for the stomach-turning stench that pervaded the city, and reached indoors as one tried to eat in the Beijing Hotel dining room. Throughout the city, human waste was not flushed away but carefully collected as precious “night soil” fertiliser, and then ladled into handcarts that were slowly pulled through the city to the surrounding vegetable fields.

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Nor did I read in 1972 about how the crowds in Beijing’s streets trudged from place to place in various states of clinical depression, understandably enough given the deep misery in which they were living — from their one-room-per-family, courtyard houses with no hot water to everyone’s shabby Mao suits and grey faces that evidenced border-line malnutrition. All this stood out even more because of the ubiquitous posters depicting ecstatically happy, rosy-cheeked enthusiasts applauding Mao.

Nor did anyone in 1972 care to mention that the officials they encountered — as I did four years later — were all suffering from intense sleep-deprivation: they had to reach their offices soon after dawn for lengthy pre-work “struggle sessions”, with the janitors and junior staff who run their ministry’s Revolutionary Committee playing Red Guards to upbraid them. The topsy-turvy rituals of the Cultural Revolution persisted until Mao died.

Instead of any criticism, the US press praised everything, including the health-giving virtues of riding a bicycle to and from work, even though Beijing’s summer air was full of faecal dust, with carbon monoxide added in the freezing winters of the coal-heated city.

A journalist of great fame at the time, James Reston, had already recounted his own marvellous experience of Beijing when he suddenly needed emergency surgery there in July 1971. His acute appendicitis could have killed him, but it turned out that the nearest hospital was fully equipped, and the surgery went well. It was only many years later, when Mao’s doctor defected and wrote his memoirs, that it emerged that Reston was taken to the hospital reserved for the top party leaders — the only one in Beijing fully equipped to treat him, or anybody who needed surgery.

The smell went away in later years as chemical fertilisers arrived, but many of the misrepresentations of that 1972 trip linger till this day — of which the most important by far is the legend of China’s strategic statecraft, superior by virtue of its very long-range perspective, then personified by Zhou Enlai. Because Kissinger negotiated primarily with Zhou, he elevated that servile toady — who never once tried to save life-long colleagues from Mao’s murderous intrigues — into a statesman of transcendental wisdom, fully endowed in the long-view department.

This was exemplified by Zhou’s answer to Kissinger’s fawning request for his retrospective view of the French Revolution. Indeed, Kissinger never tired of relaying the Great Man’s answer: “Too early to tell”. You see, you see, Kissinger would add, China’s greatest minds look ahead 200 years. Today, authors and publishers still use “playing the long game” in the subtitles of books about China.

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They should not. Chas W. Freeman, the interpreter, immediately told Kissinger that Zhou was referring to the 1968 student uprising that overthrew De Gaulle, whose final outcome was indeed still unclear in 1972. But Kissinger refused to give up his two centuries for a mere four years, and continued to repeat the story when gracing the dinner tables of the extremely rich in subsequent decades. It was one of the simpler Kissinger mystifications: by turning Zhou into a great statesman, he qualified himself as one — unnecessarily, it would later transpire, because he had so little competition until Reagan arrived to deflate the balloon of Soviet power.

Kissinger’s lie about Zhou was only the tail of a much bigger rat: the historical falsification that ignores China’s stupendous record of strategic incompetence down the ages, in order to attribute profound strategic wisdom to the Han — a wisdom also embodied in China’s classic strategic manuals, with Sun Tzu’s the most famous.

To believe that legend, the most basic fact about Chinese history had to be ignored: again and again, after the downfall of the Tang — conventionally dated 618 to 907 — the Han were defeated, conquered and long-ruled by much less advanced invaders whom they hugely outnumbered. One can visualise how it went: a few steppe warriors in rags and furs would arrive, the Chinese generals in silks and shiny armour facing them would exchange oh-so-clever Sun Tzu citations, their army would be overrun, the country conquered, and then ruled for decades or centuries.

Over the thousand years down to the fall of the Jurchen-speaking Manchus in 1912, it was only during the Ming dynasty 1368–1644 that the Chinese were ruled by Chinese — very likely because the founder Zhu Yuanzhang started off as a monastery servant and could not have read Sun Tzu or any other of the delusional manuals that reduce warfare to clever tricks. Their uselessness was proved right into the 20th century, when the Japanese became the last of the badly outnumbered foreign conquerors to conquer Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Canton and as much of China’s territory as they wanted, with both Communist and Kuomintang forces equally incapable of fighting them successfully.

At present no steppe warriors threaten Beijing, but the strategic incompetence of its rulers persists. Exactly at a time when the deeply divided United States needs allies to contain China, Beijing’s erratic aggressions since 2009 have overcome the neutralist preference of India (attacked in Ladakh and provoked over Arunachal state), the neutralist temptations of Japan (during the three-year ascendancy of the Democratic Party of Japan now extinct), the neutralist ambitions of Indonesia, and the pro-China tendency in the Philippines (just when many in the Philippines were inclined to slide into Beijing’s sphere, the Chinese responded by stealing islets and shoals).

Collectively, America’s new allies add enough mass to Vietnam and Australia — the first country to understand the China malady, in 2009 — to outnumber the Chinese, outweigh their economic achievements, and wholly overtake their less-than-stellar technological attainments. (Pentagon hyping of hypersonic FOBS missiles is shameless budget-pumping: they have no discernible purpose in the absence of ballistic-missile defences to underfly.)

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As for quantum computing and artificial intelligence, only the severely ill-informed think that the Chinese are ahead. As late as 2020, Huawei’s boasts about its supposedly superior Kirin 980 microprocessors were widely believed; they even deceived poor Xi Jinping. Yes, they were indeed quite good but the technology was not Huawei’s — it belonged to the UK and US, which meant that Trump’s National Security Council could and did shut down Kirin production and much of Huawei’s as a whole with a couple of phone calls.

But Kissinger, who is still going strong, rated Chinese statecraft very highly when he published his China book in 2012. He believed, correctly, that the Chinese would continue to work hard, expand their economy and overtake slow US growth. He also thought, incorrectly, that Chinese leaders would transcend their zero-sum mentality, thereby allowing Washington and Beijing to arrange the affairs of a “G-2” world, in which — as he wrote — countries like India and Japan would have to find their places.

Always improbable, G-2 became impossible when Xi Jinping arrived. For him only G-1 is good enough. Not because he is a megalomaniac but the opposite: he thinks, accurately, that unless the Party establishes an unchallenged global hegemony, with its rule is deemed superior to democratic governance, Communist China will collapse just as Soviet rule did. He is right.

On September 9, 1976, while visiting a military unit near Beijing — I was the number-two in the delegation of J.R. Schlesinger, the just-fired Secretary of Defence — everything suddenly ground to a halt. Mao had just died. What followed was a series of bizarre events that would transform China forever.

First, there was the lying-in-state, in the shabby immensity of the Great Hall of the People in front of the imperial palace compound. The diplomats already in Beijing formed a long queue going up the steps — not in order of precedence, as is the custom, but in order of preference: Romania was then Number One because the Chinese had quarrelled with Albania while the “revisionist” Soviet Union was way in the back.

When we entered the hall where a very green Mao was lying dead, we saw that we were alone with China’s absolute rulers, “The Gang of Four”, were standing there: Jiang Qing Mao’s half-mad, super extremist, last wife; (he had long preferred sex with his very young “nurses”), Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan (two shabby Party bureaucrats), and Wang Hongwen (Shanghai’s tall, good-looking absolute boss, who had even transferred tanks from the border to strengthen his own huge workers’ militia).

He was the only one who greeted us with a nod while the others seemed… terrorised. They knew, as we did not, that they would be locked up very soon. Next, after I had made quite sure that Mao was dead, we were ushered into another room to mourn with the selected “best friends” of China: the North Vietnamese and North Korean ambassadors, with whom we could not speak given the absence of diplomatic relations, two Khmer Rouge envoys who looked like  murderous dwarfs, and the Romanian ambassador who walked around saying what a really, really sad day it was, frantically trying to generate a minimum of civility between people determined to ignore each other.

Nor was I of any help: born in Romania’s Arad, I answered nu sunt sigur (“I am not sure”) to his “sad day” incantation. Utterly startled to hear me speak in his language, and totally embarrassed by my remark, he went to Schlesinger to be reassured that we were not all Romanians sent to catch him out.

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I had left Beijing when the Gang of Four were arrested, but was back again when Deng Xiaoping announced that it was all over: the Cultural Revolution, the closure of China, Maoism. After that, it all went smoothly until the 2009 financial crisis when the Party bosses thought it was all over for democratic capitalism. Their reaction was perfectly predictable: since 2010, the PRC has behaved as if it were a cheap wind-up toy car, rolling straight ahead to collide with its neighbours, provoking increasingly adversarial reactions, and persisting regardless.

One example is enough for all: just when the Japanese government was sliding into neutralism, the PRC leadership turned a banal, drunken fishing-boat skipper episode just off the Senkakus (absurdly claimed by China) into an all-out attack on all things Japanese, from embassies and consulates that were besieged by hostile mobs to attacks against Japanese corporate offices, car dealerships, and even against individual Japanese — all provoked by incessant calls for revenge from hysterical officials. The final outcome was the election of Abe Shinzo’s LDP, which squarely took on China as an adversary.

Meanwhile, the US elite, both with Nixon at the start and then after Deng Xiaoping’s opening of China’s economy, was more than content to preside over the de-industrialisation of the United States, uncaring of the ultimate political consequences of replacing many millions of $30 per hour factory jobs with $10 an hour “service economy” jobs, with the incoming flood of cheap consumer goods supposedly alleviating the impoverishment.

Now, of course, China presses against all its neighbours, endowing the United States with new alliances, some overt and official, others overt but without any formal treaty, and others emerging — a process destined to continue until Xi Jinping, who, with his talk of “war readiness”, is now in his Mussolini phase, triggers an armed affray serious enough to stop the arrival of tankers and bulk carriers into Chinese ports.

When that happens, malnutrition will not be far behind, because of China’s critical dependence on imported animal feed. In 1976, rice, sorghum, cabbage and rare slivers of chicken were enough. Not today. If Xi Jinping falls, pork prices could be the cause.