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THE FIFTIES WERE CAPTURED in black and white, most often by still photographers; by contrast, the decade that followed was, more often than not, caught in living color on tape or film.
It was during the fifties, for example, that the basic research in the development of the birth-control pill took place; but it was not until a decade later that this technological advance had a profound effect upon society. Then, apparently overnight, rather conservative—indeed cautious—sexual practices were giving way to what commentators would speak of as the sexual revolution.
In the years following the traumatic experiences of the Depression and World War II, the American Dream was to exercise personal freedom not in social and political terms, but rather in economic ones.
In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society. After all, it was reflected back at them not only by contemporary books and magazines, but even more powerfully and with even greater influence in the new family sitcoms on television.
lurked on the horizon—particularly as both superpowers developed nuclear weapons—Americans trusted their leaders to tell them the truth, to make sound decisions, and to keep them out of war.
The men (and not men and women) who presided in politics, business, and media had generally been born in the previous century. The advent of so strong a society, in which the nation’s wealth was shared by so many, represented a prosperity beyond their wildest dreams. During the course of the fifties, as younger people and segments of society who did not believe they had a fair share became empowered, pressure inevitably began to build against the entrenched political and social hierarchy.
Two. The first was responsible for a massive reordering of the American economy and society, thereby creating a huge, new base for the Democrats; the second permitted Roosevelt to emerge as an international leader in a time of great crisis and to prolong his presidency for two additional terms.
July 1949, some nine months after his own shocking defeat by Harry Truman (which seemed to promise the Roosevelt coalition would go on ad infinitum), Thomas E. Dewey met with Dwight Eisenhower, then the president of Columbia University, to begin the process of coercing Ike to run for the presidency in 1952 as a Republican. Eisenhower’s notes of that meeting are unusually revealing of the Republican dilemma: “All middle-class citizens of education have a common belief that the tendencies towards centralization and paternalism must be halted and reversed. No one who voices these opinions can be
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Eastern industrial cities, and those in the powerful national media, based in New York. They were internationalist by tradition and by instinct: They had fought against the New Deal in states where the power of labor was considerable but had eventually come to accept certain premises of the New Deal. By contrast, the Republicans of the heartland were essentially unchanged by the great events that had overtaken them; they were resentful of World War Two and suspicious of how Roosevelt had gotten them into it. This was particularly true of the many German-Americans in the region. Instinctively
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They had always controlled their political and economic destinies locally, and they presumed that by acting in concert with others like themselves in other small towns, they could control the national destiny. Earlier in the century they had regarded Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover as the guardians of their values in Washington; they had considered the nation’s capital an extension of their own small towns. Now they looked at Washington and saw the enemy.
Robert Taft, the conservative wing’s great leader, believed Easterners had fallen victim to the liberal press and labor unions. As Taft wrote in a letter to a friend about Tom Dewey: “Tom Dewey has no real courage to stand up against the crowd that wants to smear any Republican who takes a forthright position against the New Deal.”
To Colonel Robert McCormick, of the Chicago Tribune, and his followers, Dewey was virtually a New Deal Democrat. “If you read the Chicago Tribune you’d know I am a direct lineal descendant of FDR,” Dewey once noted.
For all his bureaucratic skills, Dewey was a cold piece of work. He was, said one longtime associate, “cold—cold as a February icicle.” “The little man,” Roosevelt had called him privately, referring not merely to his lack of height.
“Smile, Governor,” a photographer once said to him. “I thought I was,” he answered.
But Harry Truman had not spent all those years in the Pendergast machine for nothing. That summer he ambushed Dewey; he called the Congress back into session and fed it legislation that underlined the vast differences between Dewey the modern Republican as presidential candidate and the Republican party as embodied by those conservatives still powerful in the Congress and still fighting the New Deal.
Dewey’s chief campaign tactic was to make no mistakes, to offend no one. His major speeches, wrote the Louisville Courier Journal, could be boiled down “to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead ...” In the final few weeks a few Republicans sensed that the tide
It was a mean time. The nation was ready for witch-hunts. We had come out of World War Two stronger and more powerful and more affluent than ever before, but the rest of the world, alien and unsettling, seemed to press closer now than many Americans wanted it to.
A peace that permitted Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe was unacceptable to many Americans.
Whittaker Chambers, who would be the key witness against Alger Hiss, wrote in his book Witness, “When I took up my little sling and aimed at communism I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely and somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for the last two decades.”
The civil war in China was over, and the Communists had won. It was a bad omen.
In his first year as secretary of state he was dogged by the turn of events in China and by the growing anger among the Republicans. However, it was when the Alger Hiss case broke that he became the perfect target for the right-wing. The case symbolized (or seemed to symbolize) the divisions of an entire era. A man named Whittaker Chambers, his own background quite shady, charged that Hiss had been a fellow member of the Communist Party while serving in the government. At first it seemed an accusation unlikely to stick.
At the time of the accusations, Alger Hiss was head of the Carnegie Endowment, the chairman of whose board was none other than John Foster Dulles.
The House Committee was made nervous, even intimidated, by Hiss’s immediate and complete denial of ever having known Chambers, and seemed on the verge of withdrawing from the case. Only a very junior member, Richard Nixon (Rep. of Calif.), persisted—among other reasons, because he was being fed secret FBI documents—and kept the Committee from backing off completely.
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. Hiss denied the accusation and denied under oath that he had ever even known Chambers. His friends rallied round. Dean Acheson, then a law partner of Hiss’s brother, Donald, helped with the early legal planning; William Marbury, a prominent Baltimore attorney and a very old and close personal friend, sent a note to Donald Hiss, who had been similarly accused: “If you and Alger are party
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There was something about Hiss that he did not like and did not trust. Nixon, rejected after his graduation from Duke Law School by all the top New York law firms, was always conscious of social distinctions and East Coast snobbery, and he was irritated rather than impressed by Hiss’s imperiousness. Someone was clearly lying. Why not have the two men confront each other? Nixon suggested.
Anyone who later read his personal memoir, Witness, could understand why he was so tortured. His had been a childhood of unrelieved misery. His father was an alcoholic who eventually left home for a homosexual lover. As a boy, Chambers used to say to himself: “I am an outcast. My family is outcast. We have no friends, no social ties, no church, no organization that we claim and that claims us, no community.”
For the liberals, and thoughtful people of any stripe, a dilemma arose: Could it be that this committee—so scabrous, indeed almost farcical, so insensitive to the rights of individuals and which had so often and so carelessly thrown around charges of Communism—was actually on to something? And if so, was there a larger truth to this? Was the New Deal itself on trial, as Hiss himself was quick to claim? Look who spoke well of Hiss: Dean Acheson; Adlai Stevenson; even John Foster Dulles (at least early on, anyway, until warned privately by Nixon to keep some distance). Two members of the Supreme
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This was buttressed with dramatic documentary evidence that Chambers said he had squirreled away for just such an occasion some ten years earlier, when he had left the Party. The evidence—State Department documents copied either in Hiss’s handwriting or some documents typed on what was claimed to be Hiss’s typewriter—was particularly incriminating.
They took heart in 1992 when a top Soviet intelligence officer seemed to exonerate Hiss. But a few weeks later the Russian qualified his statement, saying he had been pushed by friends of Hiss, who asked him to comfort an old man. Chambers’s memoir, Witness, was published in 1952, and became a national best-seller. Chambers still brooded about the future and not just Communism, but liberalism, as the enemy.
But now Yalta was an even more powerful and divisive word, a synonym in the new political lexicon for “betrayal.” For Alger Hiss had been at Yalta, albeit, as diplomat Chip Bohlen noted, in a rather minor capacity. That didn’t matter.
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: “Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me.” Later he explained that he was following “Christ’s words setting forth compassion as the highest of Christian duties.” His words were those of a very brave man, but they were also political dynamite. Had he, mused Scotty Reston of The New York Times years later, phrased his thoughts in
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As President he was accused of demeaning the Oval Office by turning it over to Missouri roughnecks
and poker-playing back-room operators who drank bourbon and told off-color jokes—his “cronies,” as Time magazine, then the semiofficial voice of the Republican party, called them.
Once he wrote a letter threatening to kick a music critic in the genitalia because the critic had panned a concert by his daughter.
Much to the annoyance of Dean Acheson, he referred to the State Department people as “striped-pants boys.”
He was the last American President who had not been to college and yet he was quite possibly the best-read President of modern times.
had a sterling record for honesty. “Three things ruin a man,” he liked to say: “power, money, and women. I never wanted power, I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.”
If there was a mandate, it was for anti-Communism rather than genuine internationalism. That the postwar peace was both uneasy and expensive was difficult for many Americans to accept. Once allies, the Soviet Union and China were about to become adversaries: archadversaries Japan, Germany, and Italy were becoming allies. For a time the atomic monopoly had offered us something of a bargain-basement defense policy.
Thus America had been cheating as a military power, and, for Truman, the Soviet explosion was terrible news: Already besieged for being soft on Communism, he now faced the terrible decision of whether or not to pursue the development of a hydrogen bomb, a weapon far more powerful than the atomic bomb.
Right after the successful use of the atomic bomb, reporters questioned Oppenheimer about the morality of what the Los Alamos team had achieved and he answered, in words that were to haunt him later, “a scientist cannot hold back progress because of fears of what the world will do with his discoveries.”
Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and said, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.” Oppenheimer himself went back to his base and found a normally cool-headed young researcher vomiting outside the office.
The debate over the hydrogen bomb was different in every way. It was being made in a time of peace, albeit a shaky one, and unlike the atomic bomb, the very fact of its development was not a closely held secret. Its nickname in defense and scientific circles said it all—the super bomb or, simply, the Super.
There was, Winston Churchill wrote in 1955, “an immense gulf between the atomic and hydrogen bomb. The atomic bomb, with all its terrors, did not carry us outside the scope of human control or manageable events in thought or action in peace or war.”
Before Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was seen as privileged and spoiled. As a graduate student and then as a young instructor, he had been unbearably arrogant. He was so much smarter and quicker than anyone else that when a colleague would start to say something, Oppie would finish the sentence for him.
He found out about the Depression only when friends told him of it. In fact, he knew almost nothing of politics; but living in the hothouse world of Berkeley during the Depression and the Spanish Civil War, he soon began to join fellow-traveling groups.
The day after the Nagasaki bombing, Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron, found Oppenheimer exhausted, depressed, and wondering aloud whether the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not luckier than the living.
answered. “It will all come out in the wash.” But at that moment Truman decided Oppenheimer was “a crybaby.” “Don’t you bring that fellow around again,” the President told Acheson later. “After all, all he did was make the bomb. I’m the guy who fired it off.”
The members of the AEC met with Senator Brien McMahon, a Democrat on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who had written the Atomic Energy Act and was generally considered a moderate. McMahon might have been by the standards of the day a domestic liberal, but he was a devout Catholic, with a heavily Catholic constituency, and thus a hard-liner on the subject of Communism. He had become the single most important congressional figure on the issue of atomic weapons, and unlike the scientists, he had no doubts about using them. The bombing of Hiroshima, he had said on the Senate floor, was “the
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Periodically, he would slip off in a broken-down car to nearby Santa Fe. There, unbeknownst to the others, he would contact his courier, a man named Harry Gold. He gave Gold detailed reports—for example, in June 1945, a month before the Alamogordo test, he supplied a description of the plutonium bomb.
As development of the hydrogen bomb proceeded, someone asked Albert Einstein, whose original equations had paved the way to the atomic age, how the Third World War would be fought. Einstein answered glumly that he had no idea what kind of weapons would be used in the Third World War, but he could assure the questioner that the war after that would be fought with stones.
