The Fifties

by David Halberstam

He was uneasy when his son drank and danced as a young seminarian and ventured increasingly into the world of social gospel, which Daddy King thought at heart a world of leftists, which, if it threatened the white order, might threaten as well the existing black hierarchy in which he had so handsomely succeeded.

To the white leadership in Montgomery, Martin King was just another faceless preacher, surely ignorant. The popular caricature of a black minister was of a whooper and hollerer. Indeed, the whites kept calling him Preacher King at the beginning of the boycott, as if by denying him his proper title they could diminish him.

“I don’t want to look like an undertaker,” he once said, describing his undertakerlike wardrobe, “but I do believe in conservative dress.” As the bus boycott began, he would get up at 5:30 A.M. to work for three hours on his doctoral thesis and then join Coretta for breakfast before going off to his pastoral duties. (Critical parts of his thesis, it would turn out, were plagiarized, a reminder, like his womanizing, of the flaws in even the most exceptional of men.)

“The Negroes,” he said, “are laughing at white people behind their backs. They think it is funny and amusing that whites who are opposed to the Negro boycott will act as chauffeurs to Negroes who are boycotting the buses.”

Still, King had no illusions about his role: “If Martin Luther King had never been born this movement would have taken place,” he said early on. “I just happened to be there. You know there comes a time when time itself is ready for a change. That time has come in Montgomery and I have nothing to do with it.”

“It’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion,” Daddy King said.

He realized for the first time how sheltered his existence had been, how ill prepared he was to deal with the racial violence that was waiting just beneath the surface in the South. One night, unsure of whether to continue, he thought of all his religious training and he heard the voice of Christ: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth’ ... the fatigue had turned into hope.” (That was, Grover Hall noted acidly, Martin King’s “vision in the kitchen speech.”)

“The independent woman is a contradiction in terms,” Lundberg and Farnham had written. Feminism itself, in their words, “was a deep illness.” “The psychosocial rule that takes form, then, is this: the more educated a woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe. The greater the disordered sexuality in a given group of women, the fewer children they have,” they wrote.

American women, they told her, were not interested in someone like this and would not identify with her. Their market research, of which they were extremely confident, showed that women would only read articles that explained their own roles as wives and mothers. Not many American women out there had families and were successful as artists—therefore it would have no appeal. Perhaps, one editor said, they might do the article with a photograph of Mrs. Pepper painting the family crib.

The capture of the Germans was known as Operation Paperclip, and it was one of the great coups of the war, since the V-2 was not so much the last weapon of the old war as the first new weapon of the war that might come next.

It was, without anyone knowing it, the beginning of the race for outer space, or what Winston Churchill once called “the wizard war.”

Reporters repeatedly asked the officials what the true historic significance of the moon landing was. None of the officials had an answer except von Braun. For him the moon shot was one more major step in human evolution. It was comparable, he said, to the moment when life emerged from the sea and established itself on land.

The U-2 was a classic invention of the secret government and pointed up the problems of a two-tiered government in general. The intelligence provided by the U-2 was crucial information for the President as he formulated foreign policy, but he could never reveal it to the voters. 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.

Johnson seized on a metaphor of Detroit and American affluence and complacency: “It is not very reassuring to be told that next year we will put a better satellite in the air. Perhaps it will even have chrome trim and automatic windshield wipers.” Suddenly, it seemed as if America were undergoing a national crisis of confidence.

Enright soon discovered he had seriously underestimated the sheer power of the show. In his own mind he had done nothing that violated the moral code of the world of entertainment as he knew it. But the show had transcended mere entertainment: It had become the property of an entire nation. Enright had crossed over, without knowing it, into another sphere, with another set of ethics and standards. He was playing with this new instrument of television without knowing its true power.

John Steinbeck was so outraged that he wrote an angry letter to Adlai Stevenson that was reprinted in The New Republic and caused a considerable stir at the time. Under the title “Have We Gone Soft?” he raged, “If I wanted to destroy a nation I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, and sick ... on all levels, American society is rigged.... I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.”

These younger men, most of whom had fought in World War Two, and who had in some way been broadened by that experience, did not welcome integration, Ashmore thought. Most of them, in fact, probably preferred things the way they were. But unlike their parents, they were not violently opposed to integration. It was not as emotional an issue with them as it had once been. They were businessmen first and foremost, and they understood that the world had changed and that to fight to maintain white supremacy would be self-defeating—it was probably a lost cause. They accepted the idea of “social justice”—that is, a fairer legal and political deal for blacks—but they remained wary of what they considered “social equality”—which implied an integrated dance at a country club, for instance. That went against everything in their upbringing. At the heart of their position was a desire to do business as usual and an acceptance that when it came to the crunch, the presence of a white redneck mob in the street was a greater threat to tranquility and daily commerce than was the integration of a school system or other public facilities. Thus they accepted the law of the land because they saw it, in long-range business terms, as the path of least resistance.

As much as anything, he showed that the new-age black athlete had both power and speed: In 1955 he had hit fifty-one home runs and stolen twenty-four bases. A new kind of athlete was being showcased, a player who, in contrast to most white superstars of the past, was both powerful and fast.

and his word in defense of his policies. He had no

It was taking all his will to keep the military and the defense contractors from escalating the arms race. Even when he did increase defense spending substantially, he told his aide Andrew Goodpaster that two thirds of the increase was for public opinion. “God help the nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do,” he would say.