The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Even so, no one really believed he could win. Dewey’s chief campaign tactic was to make no mistakes, to offend no one.

2016

Pressed further, Acheson said to look in their Bible for Matthew 25:36, a passage in which Christ called upon His followers to understand that anyone who turns his back on someone in trouble turns his back on Him:

“Always be shot in front, never [from] behind.”

Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and said, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.”

We were leaving behind something of an unloved and unattractive government with a new, uncertain ragtag army; the Soviets, by contrast, were leaving behind the real thing: a tough, modern dictatorship with a strong, well-trained, well-armed military force.

To Omar Bradley, it could not “fight its way out of a paper bag.”

at the time, Germany was not just a mecca for the emerging study of the natural sciences but something of an oasis for Jews as well—

When he had friends over to dinner, he would often excuse himself to go into an adjoining room to work—though he’d still listen in on the conversation and comment when something interested him.

Egalitarian societies like America, von Neumann told his colleague Herman Goldstine, are very cruel to truly gifted people:

In 1944 there had been only 114,000 new single houses started; by 1946 that figure had jumped to 937,000: to 1,118,000 in 1948; and 1.7 million in 1950.

a pioneer of the great migrations that were soon to come—blacks moving from the rural South to Northern inner cities, and whites fleeing them from the inner cities to the suburbs.

In truth they were already content with their lives and saw no reason to expand—they were making more money than they had dreamed of, they had lovely houses with tennis courts, new Cadillacs every year. Neither had children

In his view, the commuters would desert during peak dinner hours, and he was not enthusiastic about the remaining clientele:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence,” he liked to say. “Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a problem. Talent will not. The world is filled with unsuccessful men of talent. Education alone will not. The world is filled with educated derelicts.”

Money can become a nuisance. It’s a hell of a lot more fun chasin’ it than gettin’ it. The fun is in the race.”

Without even knowing it, he had become the prototype for a new kind of politician, who ran not against his opponents but against the political system itself.

At such close range there was a danger the President would lose the illusion of heroic proportions that distance created.

“I find myself constantly blackmailed by the virtual certainty that we shall have a first-class fascist party in the United States if the Republicans don’t win.

They are finally the men who seemingly believe that we can confound the Kremlin by frightening ourselves to death.” Stevenson’s gift to the nation was his language, elegant and well crafted, thoughtful and calming.

“Joe, you’re a real SOB,” Senator John Bricker of Ohio once said, “but sometimes it’s useful to have SOBs around to do the dirty work.”

He scorned authority not so much because he wanted to replace it with something else, but because he instinctively disliked authority.

He answered mordantly, “Brando’s never made a movie with anyone.”

“Planned Parenthood.” That was a euphemism. “It irks my very soul and all that is Irish in me to acquiesce to the appeasement group that is so prevalent in our beloved organization,” she wrote.

Such men, almost surely, eventually do get the enemies they so desperately want.

Nixon was always the outsider; his television adviser in his successful 1968 presidential campaign, Roger Ailes,

But Hoover fought off any attempts by the press to lionize Purvis;

He mastered early a trick of the successful lawyer: to speak last, after others were tired, and to sum up their arguments while tilting the presentation in his own direction.

From the article came the famous term for Dulles’s foreign policy, brinkmanship.

The vote against Plessy was seven to one, the one dissenting cast by John Marshall Harlan, the leading intellect of the Court

“that big dumb Swede,” in the words of Judge

Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Jerry

Therefore, the new black ministry was where talented young black men went to learn how to lead their people:

Walter Rauschenbusch,

Thus, at a moment when the U-2 was proving just how limited the Soviet military build up was, there was no public appreciation of it.

A play required good casting and Martin King soon learned to pick not just his venues carefully, but also his villains.