The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Others were made uneasy by the degree of conformity around them, as if the middle-class living standard had been delivered in an obvious tradeoff for blind acceptance of the status quo.

Certainly, the Democratic party was divided as well, between the liberal Northern urban coalition and the Southern conservative Jim Crow wing. But for all their differences, the Democrats had a certain glue: They won, and in victory there was patronage and power, a combination that transcended ideology.

The right-wingers were furious. As far as they were concerned, he was throwing away their best issue. Yet Dewey remained adamant. He thought it degrading to accuse the President of the United States of being soft on Communism. He was not, he told Styles Bridges, the Republican national campaign manager, “going around looking under beds.” His aides got nowhere, Herbert Brownell, his top political adviser, decided, because his wife hated the idea of partisan attacks. She wanted him to be, in her words, more presidential.

But Truman won and the Republicans now faced four more years out of office. The bitterness within the party grew. So much for the high road in American politics. The Communist issue would be fair game in the near future. It was the only way they knew how to fight back.

Once, when Senator Taft called for a reexamination of American foreign policy, Acheson retorted that the idea reminded him of a farmer “who goes out every morning and pulls up his crops to see how they have done during the night.” He had many qualities, but the capacity to resist his innate snobbery was not one of them.

The setting was this: August 3, 1948, the House Committee, which included a large number of the most unattractive men in American public life—bigots, racists, reactionaries, and sheer buffoons—held hearings in which Whittaker Chambers not only said that he himself was a Communist but that there was a Communist group in the government in the late thirties and that Alger Hiss was a member of it.

At the very instant of the Trinity explosion, Oppenheimer quoted a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.... I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

The scientists were beginning to find out the limits of their power. They might have become, as C. P. Snow had noted, the “most important military resource a nation state could call upon,” but in the end they had little control over the consequences of their work; they pursued the unknown, like great explorers, because it was there. But more and more, they ventured into a world filled with moral ambiguities, if not pure terror. Yet no one exercising political power in the United States or the Soviet Union was very interested in the piety or guilt of the scientists. This was a hard lesson. In the beginning they had been the professors and the politicians, the students—Acheson remembered that right after World War Two, when Oppenheimer tried to brief him and John McCloy about atomic fission, he had used a borrowed blackboard, “on which he drew little figures representing electrons, neutrons, and protons, bombarding one another, chasing one another about, dividing, and generally carrying on in unpredictable ways. Our bewildered questions seemed to distress him. At last he put down the chalk in gentle despair, saying, ‘It’s hopeless! I really think you two believe neutrons and electrons are little men.’ We admitted nothing.”

Oppenheimer was asked about the overall military value of research isotopes, which Strauss thought were extremely important. “Far less important than electronic devices,” Oppenheimer answered. Then he had paused for a moment. “But far more important than, let us say, vitamins. Somewhere in between.”

He was the quiet man of Los Alamos. Elfriede Segre would watch him go by, a pallid bachelor, slightly hunched, so sad, so alone, caught in a world of his own, and thought of him as “Poverino—the Pitiful One.”

The problem with America, he was saying, was domestic subversion, as tolerated and encouraged by the Democratic party. China had fallen, not because the forces of history were against the old feudal regime, which was collapsing of its own weight. Rather, it was because of Soviet military and political hegemony. If events in the world were not as we wanted them, then something conspiratorial had happened.

Democrats would spend the next thirty years proving that they were not soft on Communism, and that they would not lose a country to the Communists.

Others touched the same raw nerve at the same time, but it was McCarthy who had the instincts, the intuition, and perfect pitch to know how to exploit the issue best. He had a wonderful sense of the resentments that existed just beneath the surface in ordinary people, for he himself burned with those same resentments.

Victor Weybright, the chief editor at New American Library, Spillane’s publisher, explained his appeal this way: “The Spillane books are a unique form of ‘Americana,’ a new kind of folklore ...” And it was no insignificant reflection of the times that Mike Hammer soon starting taking on Communists instead of gangsters: “They were Commies.... They were real sons of bitches who should have died long ago.... They never thought there were people like me in this country.” Kenneth Davis went so far as to call Hammer a reflection of the McCarthyite soul of the country, “the ultimate cold warrior, an Übermensch for frightened Americans who had heard tales of baby-eating Stalinists.

Yet the Americans set off for Korea astonishingly confident of an easy victory. Almost everyone, from top to bottom, seemed to share the view that the moment the North Korean soldiers saw they were fighting Americans rather than ROKs, they would cut and run. It was arrogance born of racial prejudice. One colonel in the 34th Infantry, Harold Ayres, told his troops as they were arriving in Korea, “There are supposed to be North Korean soldiers north of us. These men are poorly trained. Only about half of them have weapons and we’ll have no difficulty stopping them.”

Then, as the tanks came upon the infantry positions, some of Smith’s bazooka men, completely heedless to their own safety, closed to thirty yards and fired away. But even firing at virtual point-blank range did not help. It was only with the use of the 105 mm howitzer and the HEAT shells that they knocked out two tanks.

Colonel John (Mike) Michaelis, a regimental commander with the legendary Wolfhounds and one of the early heroes of the war, thought the American troops did not know their weapons, or even the basics of infantry life and survival. “They’d spent a lot of time listening to lectures on the differences between communism and Americanism and not enough time crawling on their bellies on maneuvers with live ammunition singing over them. They’d been nursed and coddled, told to drive safely, to buy War Bonds, to give to the Red Cross, to avoid VD, to write home to mother—when someone ought to have been telling them how to clear a machine gun when it jams.”

After three weeks in battle, the 24th was at half strength; of the almost 16,000 men who had been committed, only half were still able to fight. More than 2,400 men had been lost, either dead or missing. It was one of the worst periods in American military history; but gradually, fresh troops were pouring into the country.

In late July, General Walker gathered his various unit commanders at a command post at Sanju. Help, he said, was on the way. “We are fighting a battle against time. There will be no more retreating, withdrawal, or readjustment of the lines or any other term you choose. There is no line behind us to which we can retreat. Every unit must counterattack to keep the enemy in a state of confusion and off balance. There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan, a retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight to the end. Capture by these people is worse than death itself. We will fight as a team. If some of us must die, we will die fighting together. Any man who gives ground may be responsible for the deaths of thousands of his comrades ... We are going to hold the line. We are going to win.”

There was always the danger that this small war would grow larger. Averell Harriman and General Ridgway visited MacArthur in Tokyo to ask, among other things, that he make certain this did not happen. MacArthur was supremely confident; if the Chinese decided to enter the war, he would deal them such a crushing blow that it “would rock Asia and perhaps turn back Communism.” Modesty was never his strong point.

He was seventy years old in 1950, a towering figure who had worked long and hard to perpetuate his own legend. As Truman suspected, he hungered for the White House, but in the political arena he was surprisingly clumsy. He was the darling of the far right, corresponding regularly and indiscreetly with all sorts of figures on that side, encouraging them to believe he shared their views that the New Deal signaled the end of Western civilization. As early as 1944, a writer named John McCarten wrote in The American Mercury, “It may not be his fault but it is surely his misfortune that the worst elements on the political right, including its most blatant lunatic fringe, are whooping it up for MacArthur.”

This was especially relevant in Korea, a new kind of limited war, which demanded all sorts of political decisions and a certain pragmatism that was alien to MacArthur’s sense of duty. Eisenhower thought a younger commander would have been far more appropriate than, as he phrased it, “an untouchable.” There was also the danger with MacArthur that he had begun to see his mission in Asia in a quasi-religious light, as the leader of a holy crusade against a godless enemy.

He was the son of Arthur MacArthur, a Civil War hero who won the Congressional Medal of Honor at age eighteen and who later commanded American troops during the Philippine insurrection (“Arthur MacArthur,” one of his aides noted, “was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen, until I met his son”).

Ironically, the success of bombers in this particular theater—used, as they were, against fixed Japanese installations and massive Japanese convoys, marvelous targets all—left him with an exaggerated sense of what air power could do strategically. He was to pay the price for this in Korea.

Worse, at the highest levels, particularly in MacArthur’s command, there was almost complete ignorance about Mao’s army and how its extraordinary victory over Chiang had molded it into a remarkable, modern fighting machine.

MacArthur did come over to meet Truman’s plane, though wearing his usual open shirt and rumpled field cap. (“If he’d been a lieutenant in my outfit going around dressed like that,” Truman later noted, “I’d have busted him so fast he wouldn’t have known what happened to him.”)

The firing was as divisive an act as anyone could remember—in terms of class, religion, culture, and geography. It was not just that everyone had an opinion about what had happened, it was that everyone had to voice it. There were fights in bars between strangers and fights on commuter trains between men who knew each other and who had, up to that moment, been friends and had concealed their political differences. Acheson, who always managed to keep his sense of humor about the attacks from the right, got into a cab soon after the anger had erupted. The driver turned around to look at his passenger. “Aren’t you Dean Acheson?” he asked. “Yes, I am,” Acheson answered. “Would you like me to get out?” It was a story he loved to tell.

THERE NEVER WAS A country more fabulous than America,” wrote the British historian Robert Payne after visiting America in the winter of 1948–49. “She sits bestride the world like a Colossus; no other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations ... Half of the wealth of the world, more than half of the productivity, nearly two-thirds of the world machines are concentrated in American hands; the rest of the world lies in the shadow of American industry ...”

Suburbia. Indeed, people knew even what they wanted to pay for their first house: $5,000, which was then roughly equal to an average family’s wages for two years. Right after the war, auto workers made about $60 a week, or $3,000 a year, while workers in other parts of the manufacturing sector made about $2,400. If a new car was a critical status symbol, a house was something else.

It was, Levitt liked to boast, capitalism in the most personal sense. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do,” he once said.

Certain differences were most definitely not welcomed in Levittown, however. Blacks could not buy in—a Levitt policy that lasted for two decades, long after the nation began legally trying to rid itself of lawful segregation. “The Negroes in America are trying to do in 400 years what the Jews in the world have not wholly accomplished in 600 years. As a Jew I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice. But ... I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours.... As a company our position is simply this: We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem but we cannot combine the two,”

Of the boys he had known growing up, Ferkauf denied a job to only one. As a kid, that man had violated the honor code of their neighborhood softball game, erasing Ferkauf’s name from the chalkboard list of waiting players, writing his own name in.

The best owners, he learned, were people who had not yet made it but who were ready to bet their entire lives on one break: people like him. They had worked hard all their lives, saved a surprising amount of money, and always dreamt of owning their own business. Often, both husband and wife would be involved, and they did not so much work there as live there.

Toward the end of his life, after suffering several partially disabling strokes, he sat in his office in San Diego and watched the traffic at a nearby McDonald’s through a telescope, clocking it against a watch and picking up the phone to yell at the manager if he thought the service was too slow.

It was an age when it was still permissible to poke fun at ethnic foibles. No one did this better than Fred Allen, through his cast of characters on “Allen’s Alley.” In that skit Allen, as the master of ceremonies, would venture down the alley and knock on the door of its residents: Senator Claghorn was a blowhard Southern politician; Mrs. Nussbaum was a tart Jewish skeptic with a heavy Yiddish accent; Titus Moody was a New England Yankee skinflint; and Ajax Cassidy was a professional Irishman.

TELEVISION WOULD CHANGE MORE than just the face of comedy and entertainment. Politics was soon to follow, and from then on politics became, in no small part, entertainment.

The first episode was called “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub.” An announcer named John Stevenson introduced the show by speaking from the Ricardos’ living room. “Good evening and welcome. In a moment we’ll look in on Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. But before we do, may I ask you a very personal question? The question is simply this—do you inhale? Well, I do. And chances are you do too. And because you inhale you’re better off—much better off—smoking Philip Morris and for good reason. You see, Philip Morris is the one cigarette proved definitely less irritating, definitely milder than any other leading brand. That’s why when you inhale you’re better off smoking Philip Morris.... And now Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in I Love Lucy.”

This was contrary to the ideals of the American people, Taft said, adding with more than a touch of prophecy, “It is based on the theory that we know better what is good for the world than the world itself. It assumes that we are always right and that anyone who disagrees with us is wrong. It reminds me of the idealism of the bureaucrats in Washington who want to regulate the lives of every American along the lines that the bureaucrats think best for them.... Other people simply do not like to be dominated and we would be in the same position of suppressing rebellions by force in which the British found themselves during the nineteenth century.”

Reeves remembered Cleveland as being very uncomfortable. “This can lead to demagoguery,” Cleveland said. “An uninformed electorate can lead to demagoguery faster,” Reeves said, confident that what he was doing was helping to inform the electorate.

He hated the idea of using advertising with the political process. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard of,” he told Lou Cowan (a CBS executive on loan to the campaign) when he heard of the Eisenhower spots, “selling the presidency like cereal. Merchandising the presidency. How can you talk seriously about issues with one-minute spots!”

Dwight Eisenhower was the last American President born in the nineteenth century.

Taxes were almost nonexistent. People took care of their own, as the saying went. Almost everyone voted Republican. The Midwest was isolated from the rest of America, as in a subsequent age of radio, television, automobiles, and highway systems it was not.

His tank unit would be part of the big spring offensive of 1919. But the Germans surrendered before Ike saw any action. “I suppose,” he told one of his friends, “we’ll spend the rest of our lives explaining why we didn’t get into this war.”

If nothing else, he had illuminated the timidity of his fellow man.

That Streetcar, first on Broadway and then on film, seemed to transcend a mere theatrical triumph to become a cultural benchmark was due to three remarkable talents, all then at that zenith of their powers: Tennessee Williams, perhaps the greatest American playwright; Marlon Brando, the most original American actor of his time; and finally Elia Kazan, the great director. The cumulative force of these three men caused an explosion that shattered the pleasant conventions of American life. Different though they were in many ways, all three were outsiders, liberated by the changing times and eager to assault existing conventions.

Years later, talking about the kind of men who made antigay remarks in locker rooms, Williams said, “They’re all the same, shoe salesmen with bad territories and wives they can’t abide. So they take it out on us.”

In desperation, Williams wrote him a letter, pleading with him to take it: “I am sure that you must have had reservations about the script. I will try to clarify my intentions in this play. I think its best quality is its authenticity or its fidelity to life. There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts. Stanley sees Blanche not as a desperate, driven creature backed into a corner to make a last desperate stand—but as a calculating bitch with ‘round heels.’ ... Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition—all such distortions within our own egos—condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts. Such cases seem purely theoretical to me.”

Mrs. Kazan had pleased her husband on their first meeting in Turkey by not suggesting, as so many of his friends had, that he shave off his mustache. “It’s fine, leave it,” she had said. “That’s the first thing I remember about her,” he later told his son.

Work was, he later wrote, his drug. “It held me together. It kept me together. When I wasn’t working I didn’t know who I was or what I was supposed to do.... Work made it impossible for me to dwell on my personal problems. I forgot them. As soon as I stop work, my uncertainties swarm back—even now with all the flattery I’ve received.”

At one point Robert Mitchum was asked on a talk show if he had ever made a movie with Brando. He answered mordantly, “Brando’s never made a movie with anyone.”