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HIGH AND MIGHTY

World leaders on drugs
The Guardian, March 2003

“THEY could settle wars with this, if only they will - imagine the world’s leaders on pills.”
– “Weak Become Heroes”, The Streets

HISTORY was clearly one of the many classes in which young Mike Skinner wasn’t paying attention. If he’d unplugged his Walkman for five minutes, he might have learnt that there is no need to “imagine the world’s leaders on pills”. The truth is that many great nations have been led, and many great decisions taken, by people who were, to borrow a phrase from The Streets’ own lexicon, “leaning like the Tower of Pisa”. This is the thrust of Discovery’s agonisingly titled five-part series “Altered Statesmen”, which posits that John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Boris Yeltsin, Ronald Reagan and Anthony Eden were all, at best, in irregular radio contact with planet Earth.
  “Altered Statesmen” uses the standard documentary devices of theatrically portentous voice-overs, annoying Janet-and-John reconstructions – any mention of any kind of surgery, for example, is illustrated by shots of gloved, bloodstained hands waving scalpels – and the odd breathtaking logical leap between the political and personal, to make the viewer sweaty with alarm at the thought that our leaders have often been so bombed it’s a wonder we weren’t. The episode on Kennedy ascribes the resolute stance he took in his game of nuclear chicken with Nikita Khruschev during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 more to the cortisone and amphetamines JFK took to relieve the symptoms of Addison’s Disease than to any capacity for sound judgement on JFK’s part, which is somewhat ungenerous; quite aside from Khruschev, JFK also had to face down an American defence establishment which wanted to invade Cuba, and if he hadn’t, this newspaper would be a series of stick figures painted on a cave wall.
  This is the most irritating flaw in the execution of a fascinating idea – “Altered Statesmen” is delivered with a consistent tone of priggish reproach, as if ambition and impulse to greatness are tributaries of the same dysfunctions that promote drug abuse. The episode on Churchill is especially infuriating in this regard. It quotes an excerpt from the World War II diaries of Churchill’s Chief of Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, in which Alanbrooke expresses exasperation at Churchill’s whisky-fuelled volatility, but “Altered Statesmen” doesn’t acknowledge that Alanbrooke’s diaries also contain astonished testaments to Churchill’s energy and vision (and if they wanted to use Alanbrooke’s diaries to demonstrate Churchill’s alleged departure from reality, they missed the really good stuff – Alanbrooke records that, in 1942, Churchill advanced the idea of building aircraft carriers out of icebergs). Even more annoyingly, the voice-over tuts that by the time Churchill was voted out of office in 1945 at the age of 70, old age and his lifelong fondness for a drink were “stripping away his mental vigour”. Really? In the remaining 20 years of his life, Churchill wrote the magisterial six-volume history of World War II that clinched his 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature, got re-elected prime minister, and after leaving office for the final time in 1955 oversaw the publication of his four-volume “History Of The English-Speaking Peoples”. All pension cheques should be accompanied by a pint of whatever he was having.
  “Altered Statesmen” is also afflicted by an insufferable smugness, the absurdly bombastic introduction of each episode relentlessly emphasising that favourite television documentary trigger word “reveal” – here as ever, code for “telling you something you already knew, but with an accompaniment of dramatic music”. Nobody who has taken even a passing interest in modern history will find it necessary to hang onto their hats as they hear that Kennedy and Anthony Eden took Benzedrine (Lord Deedes pops up as a talking head in the Eden episode, with a charming Rowley Birkin-esque recollection of addressing a Tory conference in the 50s while comprehensively whizzed). And nobody at all will slap their foreheads and yelp “Gadzooks!” upon being told that Churchill and Boris Yeltsin were prone to severe mood swings and liked a tipple (the episode on Yeltsin includes a wonderfully gratuitous interview with an Irish barmaid who confirms that following Yeltsin’s celebrated failure to get off his plane to meet the then Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, in 1994, the phrase “circling over Shannon” passed into the Irish vernacular as a metaphor for extreme drunkenness).
  As for the somewhat incongruous episode on Ronald Reagan (he may have occasionally acted like he was ingesting hallucinogens, but he wasn’t), probably the only person on Earth now unaware that Reagan’s second term was conducted through a descending fog of Alzheimer’s disease is Ronald Reagan himself. In fairness to the producers of “Altered Statesmen”, the footage of Reagan floundering at the 1990 conspiracy trial of his former National Security Adviser, Admiral John Poindexter, really is profoundly shocking however many times you’ve seen it – Reagan, out of office just two years, answered 124 questions about the Iran-Contra affair with variations on “I don’t recall”, and couldn’t remember the names of any of his cabinet other than Vice-President Bush.
  Despite the series’ overarching tone of prurient outrage, the most scandalous truth communicated by “Altered Statesmen” is one that it won’t dare own up to. Aside from a propensity to excessive behaviour of one sort or another, the five leaders profiled have another thing in common: Kennedy the amphetamined womaniser, Churchill the clinically depressed boozer, Yeltsin the perpetually sloshed and possibly suicidal self-harmer, Reagan the stubborn titan who would not admit to himself or anyone else that he was neither physically nor mentally fit to hold office, and Eden the speed freak are all, on balance, remembered pretty fondly. Kennedy’s reputation has sauntered through posterity in a halcyon haze, a multitude of political and personal sins forgiven the instant his brains hit the windscreen. Churchill was voted the Greatest Briton of all time in a BBC poll last year. Yeltsin is not half so heartily loathed by most Russians as his sainted predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan, now reportedly unable to fit names to the faces of his own family, has ascended to a plateau beyond criticism, like an American Queen Mother. Eden, though forever saddled with the 1956 Suez fiasco, was previously Foreign Secretary before, during and after World War II (he resigned the position the first time in protest at Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler), and won the Military Cross at the Somme; worse people have lived at 10 Downing Street.
  Most tellingly, none of the people interviewed for the series, many of whom worked intimately with its subjects and knew full well what was going on, thought their bosses were so dangerous or deranged that it was necessary to blow the whistle. This is not, of course, to suggest that people with the power of life and death over all of us should be actively encouraged to take drugs. The dangers of this were illustrated at a microcosmic level last year, when investigations into the incident in which US Air Force planes bombed a group of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan revealed that, at the time, the two pilots involved were taking speed (it is routinely offered to US military pilots, presumably even those engaged in operations in Colombia – which, if nothing else, would lend added meaning to the phrase “War On Drugs”). And, on a larger scale, it has to be conceded that someone so frequently and sensationally inebriated as Boris “Mine’s a treble” Yeltsin is probably best kept away from nuclear launch codes.
  But before we accept the implicit suggestion of this series that it would be preferable for affairs of state to be conducted by abstemious early-rising vegetarians, we should consider that George W. Bush hasn’t touched a drop since 1986, and that Tony Blair is hardly one of life’s born carousers – and between them they’ve concocted a foreign policy that Kennedy, Churchill, Yeltsin, Reagan or Eden (well, okay, possibly Eden) couldn’t have contemplated without first lunching on magic mushrooms washed down with methadone, with big crack pies for dessert.

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