The Fifties

by David Halberstam

the Soviets held Eastern Europe because they, more than anyone, had borne the brunt of the Wehrmacht, and at a terrible price—the loss of some 20 million

Things look black. A decision will have to be made. I am going to make it.”

Abe Lincoln had said pretty much the same thing in 1862.

I have here in my hand a list

astrologer,”

“They had enlisted,” wrote one company commander, T. R. Fehrenbach, “for every reason known to man except to fight.” Suddenly,

Men, on their way back to America to the stockade, were reprieved and marched, still in handcuffs, to Yokohama. They would be allowed to fight in Korea as a means of clearing their records.

Don Carlos Faith, a battalion commander, was given a silver star and told to give two more to men of his own choosing.

600

Six thousand?

diabetic who had already lost his gallbladder.

Also a notorious alcoholic. After his death, his family established the Cork Foundation, which is still an important part of substance abuse treatment.

flip

Flippant

excited the emotions of the great bulk of half-informed voters, nor among these has he created a feeling of Trust, of Authority, of Certainty that he knows where he is going and what must be done. Eisenhower does create that feeling, or that illusion, because, God knows, he is empty of ideas or certitude himself.”

Others feared that if the Republicans remained out of power very much longer, the two-party system would be in jeopardy.

we shall have a first-class fascist party in the United States if the Republicans don’t win.

The truth was the country was changing at a remarkable rate,

“Her ladyship,” she noted at an early press conference, “is fucking bored with such formality and prefers to be known as Miss Vivien Leigh!”

he was ready to sacrifice family, friends, even his very car itself to the necessity of careening from place to place.

The editors and lawyers demanded that Holmes cut three of the six times that a character named Agatson says, “Fuck you.” On this point Holmes held his ground: “What’s the difference between three and six?”

the United States was moving into new and uncharted territory

Charlie Wilson

Roosevelt’s

The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open. This

Peurifoy’s son came home early from school, announcing that there would be no school in the afternoon because there was going to be a revolution at 5:00 P.M.

“Colonel,” he told Diaz. “You’re just not convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy.

he did not aim for victory; rather, he hoped to demonstrate a French presence so strong that the Vietminh would finally come to the negotiating table.

The ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war.

traditional views of race

The prosecutor, Gerald Chatham, told the court in summation there had been no need to kill Till. “The most he needed was a whipping if he had done anything wrong.”

more than a touch of the older Henry Ford to him;

Ironic, since Ford had been a rabid anti semite.

These television families were to be not merely a reflection of their viewers but role models for them as well.

it was his job to be just a little less smart than the average dad.

things could go wrong in a small way, but never in a way that threatened the families watching at home or cut too close to the nerve in dealing with the real issues of real American homes, where all kinds of problems lay just beneath the surface.

Jimmie

EDDIE !

Were we as a nation already well on our way to becoming faceless drones, performing bland tasks that demanded no real skill save managerial obedience?

he saw the new middle class as affluent but without purpose and cut off from its Calvinist past, from taking pride in craftsmanship.

As the bus driver continued to shout at her, Parks thought to herself,

Is this documented in a first hand account, or added for dramatic effect?

You ministers have lived off the sweat of these washwomen all these years and you have never done anything for them,”

at the time of the 1950 census, the city of Montgomery had had some 40,000 black citizens, including three doctors, one dentist, two lawyers, one pharmacist, and 92 preachers.)

Proving little more than that preachers were largely self anointed opportunists? Some detail about the educational requirements & credentialing of "preachers" would have been helpfu!.

The Marquis de Sade would have told him to wait in a corner,

Modern Woman: The Lost Sex)

Published in 1947

were comprised

At the shop he was ordered to make a perfect cube.

A standard training exercise for apprentice machinists

the real drive to integrate usually came from the children themselves.

Is there any support for this assertion?

“God help the nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do,” he would say.

American policy had apparently been established: essential indifference to the needs of the people living there in favor of the interests of the large American companies in the region,