BRATTLEBORO — Different eras have their own pathologies. The 1950s were the “age of anxiety,” in W.H. Auden's famous phrase, and I came of age in the era when paranoia and cults were a predominant feature.
In the epigraph to his novel Howards End, E.M. Forster wrote: “only connect.” This phrase, which I first read in 1978, has always stuck with me, as I am a veteran of conspiracy theories and the cults built around them.
It has been a long time since I have been reminded of Forster's injunction.
Secret acts have influenced our presidential results.
And those acts have put into motion a transition of power from one of the most qualified men ever to hold the presidency to one of the strangest and least qualified.
The Siberian candidate, Donald Trump, won in part because of efforts by a foreign power - Russia - that will always be an enemy, no matter how friendly we might become in temporary ways.
The sedulous apes of the mainstream news covered leaks from Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee as if they were news, while giving Trump a free ride for far too long.
A Trump wing of the FBI in New York City, affiliated with Rudy Giuliani, forced FBI Director James Comey to deliver a vaguely sinister finding just a week before the ballot, likely sabotaging Hillary Clinton's candidacy.
And now - presto! - we have an unbalanced man as president-elect and a Republican party controlling all reins of power, ranged to undo any progress made in the past eight years, small as it was because of that same party's intransigence.
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Recently, almost buried amidst the sturm und drang of the Trump ascendency, The New York Times ran two stories that finally validated the longstanding rumor that Richard Nixon, in his presidential run in 1968, sabotaged attempts at a cease-fire and peace talks in our war on Indochina.
Notes uncovered in the archives, written by Nixon's henchman, H.R. Haldeman, make clear that the then-candidate's team used back channels to the corrupt South Vietnamese government to prevent any peace talks before the election.
As a result of this treason - that's the word for it, actually, according to law - the war in Vietnam might have ended but instead lasted seven more years, with so much loss of life, blood, and treasure.
It makes the Russian hacking gambit and the New York City FBI collusion behind Trump seem like small potatoes - so far, at least.
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There are two difficulties with any attempt at understanding our country's secret history.
One problem is that it is not clear how well secrets can be kept. A lot of ideas about conspiracy - like the moon-landing denial or the “truthers” who think George W. Bush brought down the towers - just can't be sustained if one thinks about the depth of involvement required. How many people would be needed to execute such plans? And how many can keep a secret? Not that many.
The second problem is that conspiracy is a sort of rabbit hole: the deeper you dig, the crazier you can become.
I've known people like that.
I am grateful for my skepticism.
I think that's why the revelation of Nixon's darkest misdeed, among so many others - a misdeed that cost at least 25,000 U.S. soldiers their lives and wounded 10 times that many - strikes me so sharply in this time when our new hegemony of power is so good at hacking and at keeping secrets.
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Our secret history started on Nov. 24, 1963, the day Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
At the end of his presidency in 1961, Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, took great care in delivering a final message, warning of a military-industrial complex that had the potential to go out of control.
Two years later, Kennedy, the new young president, talked down the generals who wanted to launch nuclear weapons in response to Soviet aggression in Cuba. He cut a deal with Moscow and the world was saved - for a little while, at least.
On Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy was killed while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. A young ex-marine who had spent some time in Russia and then was trailed by the CIA on his travels through Mexico and back to the U.S. was accused of the killing. Two days later, he was killed by Ruby, a small-time nightclub owner affiliated with the Mafia.
Ruby said he wanted to spare Kennedy's widow, Jackie, any more suffering by avoiding a trial. But Ruby's phone logs before the event are filled with calls to higher-ranking Mafia men.
Later, he recanted and asked to have his new testimony heard. It wasn't. He also claimed that he had been injected with poison while in prison. Ruby died there before standing a second trial.
Less than a year later, in August 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the war in Vietnam.
It later became clear that the incident that lay at the heart of the resolution - gunboats firing on a U.S. Navy vessel - had been faked.
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In 1968, the world was crazy, more or less as it is now: riots in the streets, an uprising in Paris, an intensifying war in Vietnam, the transformation of the Democratic National Convention into a police riot.
Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968. He had been followed for years by the FBI, whose agents also recorded his private affairs.
King knew he was going to be killed - anyone who listens to his last speech in Memphis knows that. The man who killed him, James Earl Ray, was hired by a secret consortium of St. Louis businessmen, according to a report from a House committee. God knows what that meant.
Ray tried to recant his story of being a lone gunman and get a new trial, but he died in prison.
The night of King's assassination, Robert F. Kennedy was talking at a campaign rally in a largely black neighborhood in Indianapolis, delivering what might be the finest political speech of our time.
Two months later, RFK was assassinated by a man named Sirhan Sirhan after winning the Democratic primary in California. The killer's motives were never made clear, and he is still in prison.
Other killings and attempted assassinations also don't have clear explanations.
Arthur Bremer took George Wallace out of the 1972 Democratic race, recording his thoughts in a diary that some people think was written by Dick Cheney.
Mark David Chapman murdered a generation's childhood when he killed John Lennon.
Mehmet Ali Agca attempted a hit on Pope John Paul.
John Hinckley Jr. tried to kill Ronald Reagan.
It was a strange time in which to come of age.
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And now this news about Nixon reminds me of two other stories: of how Reagan's people cut a deal with Iran to hold the hostages until after he had defeated Jimmy Carter, and of that whole mess of the arms for hostages and coke for contras scheme his White House ran in the 1980s.
Was the crack epidemic in New York in the 1980s run on the same deal as the heroin epidemic that destroyed Harlem, a vibrant black community, after the second World War? The evidence is strong that both of these epidemics were manufactured.
Gary Webb, a reporter who was covering the coke-for-guns CIA story in Central America in the 1980s, died of suicide in a way that, rereading those old news clips, still seems improbable. John Kerry supported the Christic movement that was trying to show the truth of that time, for a while, before he backed off.
The lies about weapons of mass destruction that precipitated more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan seem almost trivial beside these larger crimes.
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And yet, who knows, really, in the end? None of us can put the pieces together in a way that makes sense. If we do, we're probably crazy, because our history is secret and crazy.
But one thing is clear now: Richard Nixon conspired to extend the Vietnam War, for almost seven years, as it turned out, when he was running for president in 1968.
I know some Vietnam vets who fought in the 1970s. I think of the depth of their betrayal. It is beyond words.
We all live within a secret history, one that will not be told in our lifetimes, and that might never be told. Its latest chapter involves manipulation of our electoral process by an ancient enemy, lies told constantly in public spaces and recorded by the mainstream press, and a collusion within the FBI to make sure the news sabotaged the Democratic candidate in the last week of the election.
Now we have what we have: a world gone crazy. God help us if some future history records these days in the same way we now record the burning of the Reichstag in 1933.
Pay attention. Only connect.