David Nixon’s extraordinary life has taken him from the Cold War tension of Southeast Asia to the armed conflicts of post-colonial Africa. But his memories of that life have been stolen from him twice: once by CIA-funded brainwashing experiments, and now by the frustrating grip of dementia.
At 81 years old, the former B.C. civil servant lives in the secure Alzheimer’s ward of a Victoria care home, unable to remember anything about his years working in Cambodia, the former Belgian Congo or Germany for External Affairs Canada in the 1950s and ’60s. He doesn’t even recognize the man he’s loved for nearly four decades.
But even if Nixon can no longer tell his story, his husband is determined that the rest of the world should have a chance to hear it. Working from a steamer trunk full of letters, photographs and colour slides, Ken Sudhues has meticulously posted a record of Nixon’s life online on a blog he calls Our Mister Nixon.
“It’s what he did best — he was a raconteur. Give him a glass of wine, or a joint, and just ask him about a particular event and off he’d go. Everybody was well entertained for the next while,” Sudhues said.
“When he couldn’t do that anymore, I figured the least I could do was to get his story out there so others could share his stories and get a glimpse of this amazing life.”
Letters home to his father and brother in Ontario chronicle Nixon’s globe-trotting life between 1954 and 1962, shortly before he checked himself into the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. He was suffering from a profound depression after he was forced to resign from his job when his superiors discovered that he was gay, but instead of finding help at the hospital, he was subjected to experimental therapies meant to erase his memories and reprogram his mind.
But, as Sudhues said, “His life was really quite amazing, in spite of all that sturm and drang in Montreal.”
The chronicles of that amazing life begin in 1954, when Nixon was just 19. His first post was in Cambodia with the International Control Commission, a body responsible for monitoring the implementation of the Geneva Accords that saw Vietnam divided into communist North and U.S.-allied South. He arrived in Southeast Asia during the relatively peaceful interlude in the region between the First and Second Indochina Wars, after Cambodia had shrugged off French control but before the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.
“He was completely naive about the whole thing. He had no idea what he was getting into; he just went,” Sudhues said.
His stay in the region began with a stop in Hanoi, where Ho Chi Minh’s Communists were now in charge.
He described what he saw there in a letter to his family: “Right at this time it is a very sad city. Everywhere you look there are refugees fleeing the city with little bundles of personal belongings. Great mansions of the well-to-do Vietnamese have been left vacant and even after this short time you can see signs of deterioration.”
His notes from his time in Asia betray a colonial attitude as well as morsels of 1950s racism. He refers to Cambodians as “Chinamen” and longs to return to life among “civilized white people.” But he also writes of a full social schedule, long days of horseplay by the pool, and a lucky visit to Angkor Wat, long before it was mobbed by tourists.
“How can I ever put into words the beauty and majesty of this gigantic Buddhist temple? I know that it must take a greater writer than I shall ever be to express on paper the strange thrill one experiences in stepping from the 20th century back into the 11th century in a matter of minutes!” he writes, apparently unaware that the structure was built as a Hindu temple.
The next stop in his international career was as a cryptographer in the Canadian embassy in Bonn, Germany. Beginning in 1955, these five years were some of the most treasured of Nixon’s life, according to Sudhues.
“He loved living in Bonn,” Sudhues said. “Everything was close by — he could drive to Paris, he could take a train and a boat to London.”
It was in Bonn that romance bloomed for Nixon. His very first letter from the city introduces a man named George Howell, “the clerk to the Military Attache here in Bonn and he’s also the OTHER bachelor,” and this new friend makes an appearance in nearly every note from Germany. The pair share lunch every day, exchange Christmas gifts and travel across Europe together.
To a modern reader, the significance of this new friendship seems obvious. But Sudhues does not believe that Nixon’s family suspected the two men were anything more than good buddies.
“David’s family was … incredibly uninvolved. They were churchy folk,” he said. “There was just never any discussion or any consideration that David might be so.”
Howell was killed by a drunk driver a few years later, Sudhues added.
After Germany, Nixon returned briefly to Canada to attend Carleton University in Ottawa, but was soon packing his bags once again.
In 1960, he was posted to the city then known as Leopoldville, now called Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country had just earned its independence from the bloody colonial rule of Belgium, and an armed rebellion was stirring.
Nixon did his best to reassure his family that the situation in Leopoldville was much safer than what they might surmise from “sensational” newspaper reports.
“Oh, occasionally we do hear gunfire coming from the African section of town and, of course, the streets were always patrolled by armed soldiers and surly members of the Force Publique who often stop you to ask for identification papers, but quite frankly this city is quite like any other city in so far as daily activities are concerned,” he writes.
Leopoldville was where Nixon’s glamorous life abroad came to an abrupt end. In 1961, Nixon wrote to his superiors to ask for leave from his post, but received a reply reading, “Request for leave denied. Nixon to return to Ottawa soonest.”
In Sudhues’ telling, the young bureaucrat was summoned to meet with the RCMP, and was told, “We have reason to believe that you are a homosexual. As such, you are a security risk and must be removed from the civil service.”
Nixon now had few options for employment and descended into a deep depression. His psychiatrist referred him to the Allan Memorial Institute, where he began treatment with the director, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, in 1963.
Cameron was conducting mind-control experiments with funding from the CIA as part of Project MK-Ultra, and Nixon was not spared. According to his hospital records, Nixon was subjected to at least 36 grand-mal electroconvulsive treatments and was prescribed huge doses of the barbiturate Seconal.
“When he left, he was essentially blank, which was the aim of the exercise,” Sudhues said. “He essentially had to rebuild his life based on pictures and letters and friends and so on. Some of his memories came back, some didn’t. He said anytime he tried to imagine the work he did … it was if a hand came up alongside his head and pushed his vision away from what he was trying to see.”
A 1955 letter from Hanoi offers an unsettling bit of literary foreshadowing for Nixon’s ordeal in Montreal. He writes that he is staying at a hotel where compulsory lectures and performances of a workers’ anthem are held twice a day.
“This is the first example of brain-washing I have ever witnessed and I hope it will be the last. It is pitiful!” he tells his family.
Somehow, Nixon managed to pull himself together again, and went on to have a full life, working for a modelling agency in Montreal, then moving to Victoria in 1978, where he met Sudhues. He worked as the china and crystal manager at Henry Birks & Sons for many years, earning the fond nickname “our Mr. Nixon” that inspired Sudhues’ blog, before rounding out his working life with positions with the provincial government.
Still, those early years in Asia, Europe and Africa always held a special place in his heart. He and Sudhues often hosted a slide show at their home, displaying 400 slides from the ’50s and ’60s.
“We called it ‘the world as it was,'” Sudhues said.
In 1994, the federal government paid 77 survivors of Cameron’s cruel experiments $100,000 each in compensation for their suffering, but more than 250 people were denied their share because they weren’t completely “depatterned,” or brainwashed. Nixon was among those who lost out, but in applying for payment, he finally got to see the files from his stay at the hospital.
“It was really good for David to get the validation that yes, indeed, this had happened to him and it was right there,” Sudhues said. “Our doctor read it through and congratulated David on still being alive.”
Now, Nixon is mostly deaf, and communicating with him is a constant struggle. But in the early years after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, his mind occasionally pulled him back into those incredible years overseas.
“As his dementia started to kick in, he had what I found out were called absence attacks. He would be in the middle of something and just stop moving,” Sudhues said.
“He said that as far as he knew, he was sitting in his living room in Bonn, looking at the Rhine, or walking down a street in Leopoldville, and then suddenly be snapped back to life here in Victoria.”
David Nixon’s letters contain meticulous descriptions of his life abroad in the mid-20th century. Here are a few vignettes from the adventures of one naive young Canadian:
The glamorous world of 1950s air travel aboard the Empress of Tokyo
“Inside it was like a flying hotel. It was all finished in grey and maroon with dark wood panelling … One of the stewardesses gave me an electric razor and I had a most delightful shave overlooking the blue, blue Pacific! Later on during the day I dozed off and about four o’clock I was awoken and presented with the most delicious meal of the trip. It consisted of shrimp salad with a tasty tartar sauce, a thick tender juicy steak covered with mushrooms, 1/2 doz. small baked potatoes, mixed vegetables, rolls, 2 cups of coffee and golden chunks of juicy pineapple floating in fresh whipped cream. Um good!”
Nutritional advice for foreigners in 1950s Vietnam
“We have been advised by local doctors and doctors in the Commission itself, to drink good French wine with all our meals. This not only tends to sharpen ones’ appetite and make food tastier, but also serves as a germ killer. Sounds quite logical. Between meals we are advised to drink either tea or the local beer. Beer is mostly advised because of its food value and also because of its thirst quenching qualities.”
The evening beauty of post-colonial Leopoldville (now Kinshasa)
“The sun sets early here — six o’clock in the evening — but the darkness seems to bring out a whole new world of its own. There are many night-blooming flowers here that absolutely fill the air with fragrance …. And, of course, when there is a full moon this place is like paradise, especially when viewed from the terrace of my house in Parc Hembise. On nights like that the sky is a deep blue and all the flowers in my garden are as colourful as in full sunlight. I can see the river gleaming down below and in the distance, the Hills of the French Congo.”
Experiencing Germany’s annual Carnival in 1959
“I fail to see what fun there is in ‘having a good time if it kills me’ just one time every year (the rest of the year, the German race are so sober and staunchy it hurts!) The whole of Bonn and Bad Godesberg are submerged in frenzied fun-having, everyone is tight as a tick, and the Carnival participants are seen everywhere in (what they think are) funny costumes and hats. I even saw a dog today all made up in a clown’s costume and hat! I think the most obnoxious thing about all of this is the fact that all this nonsense is unfortunately not restricted to the children — makes no difference your age, as long as one can make a consummate ass of oneself, it’s O.K.”
Meeting Prime Minister John Diefenbaker at a Bonn hotel in 1958
“A couple of the kids and I were just sitting around at the time, drinking coffee and waiting for something to happen when Mr. Diefenbaker came hustling in from church and greeted us all with: ‘Well, well, well, nice to see you all up so bright and early this Sunday morning!’ (He didn’t know it, of course, but the truth of the matter was that I had also been up all night long doing his telegrams!) He stayed with us for a few minutes, exchanging pleasantries, etc., then breezed off to his next appointment.”
