9. and 10. The end of the British Empire. British troops pulling casualties from the rubble of their headquarters at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, July 1946, and Greek Communist prisoners in Salonica with ‘The British Must Go’ spelled out in French on their shirts, March 1947
11. and 12. and 13. The Cold War coalesces. George C. Marshall with Vyacheslav Molotov, March 1947; Jan Masaryk and Edvard Beneš in Hradčany Castle, March 1947; Mátyás Rákosi at his desk
14. and 15. Stalin. Stalin celebrates his seventieth birthday at the Bolshoi Theatre, January 1950; from right to left: Beria, Malenkov, Vassily Stalin, Molotov, Bulganin and Kaganovich carrying Stalin’s coffin, March 1953
16. and 17. Communism on the March. Chinese Red Army troops during the assault on Shanghai, May 1949; Korean refugees fleeing from Communists in the north, with frozen rice paddies in the background, January 1951
18. and 19. Hungary 1956. Partisans with the corpses of secret policemen, Budapest, November 1956, and a Soviet tank in Budapest later in the same month
20. and 21. Colonial delusions. French African troops at Port Said (the shortly to be blown up statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps in the background); British troops posing for a street photographer in a different part of the same town, November 1956
22. and 23. and 24. Leaders. Georgy Malenkov about to watch Arsenal play Manchester United during a visit to London, March 1956; Nikita Khrushchev and Władysław Gomułka at the United Nations, September 1960; John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower leave the White House for the former’s inauguration, January 1960
25. and 26. The non-Atlantic in the ascendant. Two symbols of Communist glamour: Yuri Gagarin and Fidel Castro; the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer-Platz, August 1962
27. and 28. The Atlantic in trouble. Some of the hundreds of thousands of white settlers fleeing Algeria, May 1962; captured American airmen being paraded through the streets of Hanoi, July 1966
29. and 30. The new Europe. Ludwig Erhard and Charles de Gaulle at a dinner hosted by Konrad Adenauer, September 1962; Willi Stoph and Willy Brandt, May 1970
31. and 32. Prague 1968. Nicolae Ceauşescu and Alexandr Dubček, Prague, August 1968; Prague later in the same month
33. and 34. The 1970s. Leonid Brezhnev, southern Russia, summer 1971; Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Paris, December 1972
35. and 36. Cold War spin-offs. Salvador Allende with his new head of the Chilean armed forces, Augusto Pinochet, August 1973; Sheikh Yamani and Edward Heath in London to discuss the oil crisis, November 1973
37. and 38. Awkward social occasions. President Carter, King Hussein and the Shah, Teheran, January 1978; President Tito and the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, Heathrow, March 1978
39. and 40 and 41. Good and bad populism. Helmut Schmidt, April 1977; Jimmy Carter, September 1978; Süleyman Demirel, the great Turkish survivor, May 1977
42. and 43. The men who made Thatcher. General Galtieri (centre) with Admiral Lambruschini (left) and Brigadier General Graffigna, Buenos Aires cathedral, May 1980; Arthur Scargill, Orgreave colliery, May 1984
44. and 45. Couples. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, June 1984; Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu with folkloric Romanian children, c. 1985
46. and 47. More couples. Elizabeth II and Rupert Murdoch, Wapping, February 1985; General Wojciech Jaruzelski and Pope John Paul II, Warsaw, June 1987
48. and 49. Cold War spin-offs. President Mohammed Najibullah meeting Soviet troops, Kabul, October 1986; Prime Minister Turgut Özal meeting Ronald Reagan, April 1985
50. and 51. The end. The East German leader Egon Krenz about to lose his job, with Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow, November 1989; Boris Yeltsin earlier in the same year
It was of course a racial matter. Crime was associated substantially with non-whites, including the Puerto Ricans. Jonathan Reider, in his well-known study of the white backlash in Canarsie, Brooklyn, said that his interlocutors ‘spoke about crime with more unanimity than they achieved on any other subject, and they spoke often and forcefully… one police officer explained that he earned his living by getting mugged. On his roving beat he had been mugged hundreds of times in five years.’ In a notorious case in 1972 the police chief ordered all white policemen away from a hospital, when he gave in to the black rabble-rousing politicians Louis Farrakhan and Charles Rangel rushing in to defend criminals who had killed a policeman.
The crisis of 1973 wrecked the city’s finances, as stock exchange dealings fell, whereas welfare costs remained fixed. New York City was only narrowly saved from collapse in 1974, though Lindsay himself had by then given up, and in the later 1970s ordinary city services often came apart — snow not shifted; in 1977 a power failure that lasted for almost thirty hours, during which there was a great deal of looting. As was said, the cheerful city of Breakfast at Tiffany’s turned into the bleak battleground of Midnight Cowboy. Around this time, too, came a further extraordinary flouting of ancient rules: the release of mental patients onto the streets, as asylums were closed. Progressive-minded specialists had urged this, and New York acquired a sort of black-humour chorus to its problems. And so any American big city had the horrible sight of mentally ill people roaming the streets and combing through the rubbish. Much of this went back to sixties bestsellers, whether Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965) or Thomas Szasz’s book of 1961, The Myth of Mental Illness, and it was the judges who ruled that this had something to do with human rights. The overall sense of these works — Laing’s the best-known — was to the effect that madness was, in this world, a sane response, and there was something to be said for this view. Much the same happened as regards crime. Progressive-minded criminologists had been arguing quite successfully for non-use of prison, but crime rates doubled in the 1960s whereas the numbers in prison actually fell, from 210,000 to 195,000 (by 1990 they had risen again, to one million), in accordance with modish behaviouralist ideas, and in the later 1970s, although there were 40 million serious crimes every year, only 142,000 criminals were imprisoned. The National Rifle Association membership grew from 600,000 in 1964 to 2 million in 1981. If the police and the courts would not defend Americans, what else were they supposed to do?
Contempt for ordinary Americans also showed in the interpretation of the desegregation laws. The worst cases happened over school segregation. Boston schools that served poor districts were dictated to by judges who unashamedly sent their own children to private schools. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had expressly stated that there would be no enforced bussing of children from one district to another to keep racial quotas. But the Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued regulations in defiance of this. The argument was that if there were not sufficient white children, then segregation must be occurring. The courts backed this in 1972. Almost no-one actually wanted the bussing, but it went ahead, with riots and mayhem, and there was a move out of town, and a rise in private-school enrolment (from one ninth to one eighth). In the north-east racial isolation became worse than before — 67 per cent of black pupils were in black-majority schools in 1968 and 80 per cent in 1980 (more than even in 1954). There were horrible stories at South Boston High, where black children were exempted from fire drills out of fear for their safety if they left the building. A journalist, J. A. Lukas, wrote the classic book on the story, all the more gruesome because the grand liberals did not have to have anything directly to do with their handiwork. Michael Dukakis lived in a decent suburb and sent his children to private school; Edward Kennedy used St Alban’s School, and the liberal journalists of Ben Bradlee’s Washington Post did likewise.