The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Faubus screamed about the encroachment of states’ rights by the federal government and bemoaned the fact that Arkansas was occupied territory. Why, he himself, he said, had helped rescue the 101st when it was pinned down at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (which was untrue—by the time his outfit had arrived, the 101st had already stopped the last German drive).

How, in retrospect, the nine children stood all of this is amazing, but they did, showing remarkable inner strength and character, again and again turning the other cheek.

His decision to block integration set the stage for a generation of Southern politicians, most notably George Wallace, who had learned from Little Rock how to manipulate the anger within the South, how to divide a state by class and race, and how to make the enemy seem to be the media. The moderate position had been badly undermined at Little Rock, and an era of confrontation was to follow, Harry Ashmore wrote prophetically in Life in 1958.

No aspect of the crisis, particularly the role played by Orval Faubus, escaped the notice of Martin Luther King, Jr. He was nothing if not political, and he understood the emerging politics of protest brilliantly.

Along with John Kennedy, King was one of the first people who understood how to provide action for film, how, in effect, to script the story for the executive producers (so that the executive producers thought they were scripting it themselves).

Professional football, which, in comparison with professional baseball, had been virtually a minor sport before the arrival of television, now flowered under the sympathetic eye of the camera, its importance growing even as the nation was being wired city by city and house by house for television.

He played for the Celtics, but Boston was never his home. He was acutely aware of the city’s prejudices, that the Celtics, though champions, rarely sold out at home. He responded to the schizophrenia of the white sports fan who covets autographs but, at least in Russell’s opinion, does not covet black neighbors, by refusing to sign autographs.

Nevertheless, in the last three years of the Eisenhower administration, a debate began over an alleged missile gap, which did not, in fact, exist. In a way it was not without its own justice: The Republicans had won in the past in no small part because they had blamed the Democrats for losing countries to Communism; in the early part of the Cold War, the Republicans had exaggerated the natural anxieties of the Cold War.

The exhausting quality of the job was taking its toll. The doctors told him to avoid “irritation, frustration, anxiety, fear, and above all anger.” “Just what do you think the presidency is?” he asked.

After one meeting with congressional leaders late in his presidency, he turned to an aide and said, “I don’t know why anyone should be a member of the Republican party.”

Stalin had been a completely foreboding figure, the paranoiac as ultimate dictator, inflicting his dark vision on all those unlucky enough to fall under the rule of the Soviet empire. Khrushchev was quite different—ferocious, volatile, shrewd, vengeful, very much the angry peasant. If Stalin had represented the worst of Soviet Communism, then Khrushchev to many Americans was even more threatening, for he seemed to reflect the peasant vigor of this new state.

There was something chilly about Khrushchev, pounding his shoe and threatening to bury capitalism, at the UN. Contrasting his own poverty with the affluent backgrounds of those Western figures he dealt with, he seemed to imply their good manners were a weakness. “You all went to great schools, to famous universities—to Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne,” he once boasted to Western diplomats. “I never had any proper schooling. I went about barefoot and in rags. When you were in the nursery, I was herding cows for two kopeks.... And yet here we are, and I can run rings around you all.... Tell me, gentlemen, why?”

Was there strength and truth in poverty? Styles Bridges, a conservative Republican senator, seemed to talk in this vein when he said that Americans had to be less concerned with “the height of the tail fin in the new car and be much more prepared to shed blood, sweat and tears, if this country and the free world are to survive.”

Eisenhower disliked Walter Lippmann, the great sage of the era, and thought him usually wrong. He hated Ed Murrow: “I can’t stand that gangster [Ed] Murrow. I can’t stand looking at him. I have no use for him. He always looks like a gangster with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.”

Eisenhower’s last three years as President saw him virtually alone on this issue, standing up to a powerful array of critics in insisting that America had more than enough defense, that there was no missile gap, and that the nation’s security was not in jeopardy.

The truth was that as Eisenhower entered the final years of his presidency, his primary objective was to establish his legacy, which he saw as limiting the arms race. He knew from the U-2 photos that the Soviets were not a threat, so it seemed logical to get a test-ban treaty of some sort.

It is our contradictions that make us interesting. Eisenhower, the famed general, wanted more to be a man of peace than a man of war. Jingoism in other men had always made him uneasy. When he heard the news of the success of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, though it meant a quick end to the war in the Pacific, he was left with a feeling of severe depression, caused by the arrival of a new and terrifying chapter in man’s capacity to destroy man. Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles’s acute lady friend, even thought that Ike’s hatred of war was a weakness, not unlike, she said, a prostitute who values her chastity.

What the President did not know was that the U-2 pilots themselves were becoming more nervous. There was evidence by the fall of 1958 that the Soviets were not only tracking them with radar but firing SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) that were coming, as Powers put it, uncomfortably close.

said, he was just the kind of man the CIA would want. “Powers was a man, who, for adequate pay, would do it (fly a virtual glider over the Soviet Union) and as he passed over Minsk, would calmly reach for a salami sandwich.”

He wanted the premier to fly in a chopper with him and see the District. In addition, he wanted Khrushchev to go to Abilene, “the little town where I was born,” and see for himself “the story of how hard I worked until I was twenty-one, when I went to West Point.”

For Eisenhower, this was everything he had hoped for: He would visit Moscow and bring back a limited test ban treaty; personally, he would end the worst of the Cold War. This was why he had become President.

As Michael Beschloss noted, knowing about the U-2 became something of a status symbol on the Washington dinner-party circuit. In Washington,

At the U-2 base in Turkey, Powers, by this time the only remaining member of the original group, was assigned the flight. For the first time, a U-2 would fly all the way across the Soviet Union. The flight would begin in Peshawar, Pakistan, and would end nine hours and 3,800 miles later in Bodo, Norway.

The pilots had always had unanswered questions about what to do in case they were shot down. Was there anyone they could contact? Powers had asked one of the briefing officers. No, he was told. How much should he tell? he asked. “You may as well tell them everything because they’re going to get it out of you anyway,” he was told.