The Fifties

by David Halberstam

One of the few times her public facade slipped was when her husband was running for President in 1968. On board her plane was a young journalist named Gloria Steinem, one of the leaders in the women’s movement and obviously a supporter of her husband’s opponent. Though Ms. Steinem, a strikingly attractive young woman, had suffered through considerable adversity herself as a child, she must have seemed at that moment for Pat Nixon to epitomize the new liberated American woman, someone who enjoyed all the pleasures of success on her own terms, not derivatively through her husband’s accomplishments. Ms. Steinem led a highly visible life as a celebrity, and the list of her boyfriends was dazzling. Between her and Pat Nixon was not just the usual generation gap of twenty years—it was a chasm.