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Lucy and Desi were forced to follow much of their audience to the suburbs. How, otherwise, could the housewives of America sympathize with Lucy? Fred and Ethel with them, they moved to Westport, Connecticut.
AFTER HIS RETURN, GENERAL MacArthur waited for political lightning to strike. It never did. The polls reflected both his personal triumph and the wariness of the American people toward his policies: 54 percent of those polled by Gallup favored MacArthur’s more aggressive tactics against China, but only 30 percent favored them if they meant escalating the war.
His challenge was answered with silence. The Senate hearings that followed MacArthur’s speech had been sobering, particularly when Omar Bradley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had declared that MacArthur’s politics “would involve us in the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong enemy.” That one sentence had cut to the heart of the argument. MacArthur’s political decline was quick indeed. Part of it was due to the nation’s wariness of men on horseback: It might cheer them, but it hesitated to vote for them.
MacArthur still, on occasion, referred to Ike as “the best clerk I ever had.” It was the final irony that Douglas MacArthur’s desperate desire for the White House eased the way there for Dwight Eisenhower, who did not seem to want it at all.
Eisenhower issued no Sherman-like disclaimer. But just as he’d told MacArthur, there was no driving desire for the job. After all, he had already handled a more important one—the invasion of Europe: He had commanded the mighty force that eventually defeated Nazi Germany. As for politics, in his own mind, it turned out, he was a Republican, conservative at heart, more comfortable with powerful businessmen than with their liberal critics. Yet he had strong ideas about internationalism, and he was reluctant to turn the Republican party, and possibly the country, over to isolationism.
Slowly, Eisenhower began to inch toward running. There were signs that his hesitation was not entirely uncalculated. He told his friend Bill Robinson, one of the many Eastern Republican power brokers who came to court him: “The seeker is never so popular as the sought. People want what they can’t get.”
by his intense dislike of two other potential Republican candidates, Douglas MacArthur (“now as always an opportunist,” he told Cy Sulzberger) and Robert Taft (“a very stupid man ... he has no intellectual ability, nor any comprehension of the issues of the world”).
Adams asked his attorney general to write to the county clerk in Abilene, Kansas—Eisenhower’s hometown—to see if Ike had ever registered with either party. In return he got a memorable letter of regret from a crusty old clerk, C. F. Moore, who wrote that Eisenhower had not voted in the county since 1927, and then added: “Dwight’s father was a Republican and always voted the Republican ticket up until his death, however that has nothing to do with the son as many differ from the fathers of which I am sorry to see.... I don’t think he has any politics.”
They knew how to play to the media, including television. But the mood was nasty. At one point John Wayne, who was a Taft man, jumped out of his cab to shout at an old mess sergeant running an Ike sound truck, “Why don’t you get a red flag?” The issue, as the Taft forces saw it, was what did the general stand for. “I like Ike,” said Eisenhower’s buttons, so the Taft people countered with buttons of their own that said, “But what does Ike like?” On the floor, during a struggle over rules, Senator Everett Dirksen announced that he was addressing himself to “all our good friends from the Eastern
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The leading voice of Midwestern isolationism was Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, a paper that modestly referred to itself as “The World’s Great Newspaper.” The Chicago Tribune shared and orchestrated those same isolationist feelings, even as technological change ended any remaining possibility of isolation.
In the years immediately after World War One, the Trib’s circulation and its influence in its region were seemingly limitless. It sold over 1 million copies daily and 1.5 million on Sunday. There was no comparable voice in the region. Within the folkways of the Midwest, the Trib was more than a mere newspaper; it was something larger, a critical part of the culture that unerringly reflected the attitudes and preferences and prejudices of the region.
The paper profoundly affected many who had never read it, particularly in the smaller cities within its greater circulation area, where it functioned as something of a bible for those members of the Rotary and Kiwanis clubs whose members made up the core of the Republican party. “Even if you don’t actually read it, you feel its permeating influence,” Gunther wrote. “Its potency is subcutaneous.” The Trib filtered the news carefully, passing on those items that confirmed its prejudices and omitting many of those that might have caused doubt among the faithful.
Later, as World War Two approached, and even more when it was over, a new dimension of internationalism began to surface among younger people in the region, particularly those who had returned from fighting in World War Two. The Trib still remained influential, but its influence was on the decline, and its editors were gradually losing touch with a changing region.
His xenophobia seemed on occasion like a caricature. He did not like Europe, which he regarded as a lesser continent, populated with people significantly greedier and more materialistic than Americans. It was a place, he noted, where everyone always seemed to want to go to war. But as much as he disliked Europe, he disliked England even more, not just merely because he thought it a snobbish and foppish place, but because he was sure that the entire American foreign service was filled with Anglophiles eager to serve England’s purpose rather than that of their own citizens. The British were not
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During the Roosevelt years, he liked to say—and he most definitely was not joking—that he had kept the Republican party alive. By the Republican party he did not mean the party of Dewey and Willkie and Cabot Lodge, he meant the old Republican party—one rooted in small Midwestern towns, one that was antilabor, conservative on all fiscal matters, wary of government intervention in any public matter, and one that did not see the world as becoming more dangerous. His opposition was expressed not only on the editorial page but in every aspect of the paper.
He was famous for having his editors take the copy of the Associated Press (which was never supposed to be rewritten) and rewrite it to suit his prejudices, inserting whatever they wanted; thereupon, the Trib would print the report, still under the AP logo. For this and other sins, there were periodic attempts to have him kicked out of the AP. That meant that the backing of the Trib, given all its prejudices, was something of a two-edged sword.
His last great political moment came when Everett Dirksen, one of his protégés, savaged Tom Dewey at the 1952 Republican convention for him. It was a last sweet moment in one more lost campaign, one more defeat within his own party. Taft’s defeat by Eisenhower in 1952 was the final straw: “I can see no benefit in changing ‘Me Too’ Dewey for ‘I, Too’ Ike, who was nominated and is entirely surrounded by men who know exactly what they want—which is not the good of this country,” he wrote. He called for a third party, but it was all too late.
The Democrats were nothing less than desperate. They had been in power for too long—twenty years—and while the record of the sitting President, Harry Truman, might one day provide fertile territory for revisionist historians to take a second look at a courageous man operating in an extremely difficult time, there was no escaping the fact that at the time he was an unpopular President in an unpopular party burdened by an unpopular war.
He gradually evolved the principle of USP, or the unique selling proposition. Reeves had an uncanny ability to determine the essence of a product and then make it seem dramatically different from its competitors (when in fact the difference was often negligible). At the heart of USP was finding one feature about the product that was allegedly unique and pummeling the public with it. “The prince of hard sell,” he was called. Advertising without illusion, his campaigns might have been called. They were simple and repetitive: If the claims were not always true, they were never exactly untrue,
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discovered that a group of wealthy California businessmen had created a fund designed to alleviate the financial pressures on Richard Nixon, a politician without financial resources of his own. The idea was that the money be used for the young senator’s travel, for his Christmas cards and other small expenses. “They are so poor that they haven’t a maid and we must see to it that they have a maid,” said Dana Smith, one of the chief organizers.
The speech was thereafter known as the Checkers speech, after a reference to his dog, Checkers—although Nixon himself, who loved the speech and thought of it as one of the high-water marks of his career, much preferred to refer to it as the Fund speech. Still, Nixon was proud of the reference to his girls’ dog because it was a version of a famous Roosevelt speech that featured Roosevelt’s little dog, Fala.
“He may aspire to the grace and nobility of Quakerism but if so he has yet to comprehend the core of the faith,” Richard Rovere wrote. “It would be hard to think of anything more wildly at variance with the spirit of the Society of Friends than his appeal for the pity and sympathy of his countrymen ... on the ground that his wife did not own a mink coat.”
THOSE YEARS ARE SOMETIMES called the Eisenhower era, and his presidency spanned much of the decade. When used by critics, the label is pejorative, implying a complacent, self-satisfied time (“looking down the long green fairways of indifference,” Frank Clement, the governor of Tennessee, sneered when he keynoted the Democratic convention in 1956—a reference to the fact that the President played golf primarily, it seemed, in the company of America’s wealthiest corporate figures).
Still, it was Dwight Eisenhower and the men of his generation who were actually running the country, and the America they governed was the one they remembered from their childhoods, during the turn of the century. Thus, while the country was exploding in terms of science, technology, and business, and had assumed a new international role as the most powerful nation on earth, the minds of the governing class were rooted in a simpler day. Many of the tensions of the era stemmed from this contradiction. Dwight Eisenhower was the last American President born in the nineteenth century.
At a moment when feelings in both countries were raw (reflected most notably in Eisenhower’s constant problems with General Montgomery, who was not only unbearably egocentric but also openly insulting), Ike always managed to control his temper. After one particularly egregious offense, Ike had put his hand on Monty’s knee and said, “Steady, Monty. You can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.” Eisenhower never lost sight of the fact that he had to hold the alliance together, a job that was greater than one man’s ego. To ordinary British citizens he came to represent the embodiment of the new
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As a boy, Eisenhower had seen a tennis court, but he had never seen anyone play on it. He had never even heard of golf. Taxes were almost nonexistent. People took care of their own, as the saying went. Almost everyone voted Republican. The Midwest was isolated from the rest of America, as in a subsequent age of radio, television, automobiles, and highway systems it was not. “The isolation,” Milton Eisenhower once said “was political and economic as well as a prevailing state of mind.
Religion, not entertainment, was the focal point of the town’s life. “Everyone I knew went to church,” Eisenhower wrote years later. “The only exception were people we thought of as the toughs—pool room sharks, we called them.” The Eisenhowers were Mennonites from the Rhineland who had been persecuted for their faith and had come to America in the middle of the eighteenth century.
There, David met and married Ida Stover, who came from a similar background. She was even more religious than he and had once won a prize for memorizing 1,325 biblical verses.
There was no discussion of the meaning of these biblical stories; the word of God was sufficient unto itself, David thought. Were it not for Ida Eisenhower’s ebullience and generosity of spirit, it might have been a grim boyhood. But she was both religious and gay, softening the family’s harsh circumstances for her children.
Later that night Ida Eisenhower took him to his room and bandaged his hands while she quoted to him from the Bible: “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who takes a city.” It was an important lesson for the man who would lead the mightiest army in the history of mankind.
When Ike called Mamie for a date, the maid told her, “Mister I-something called all day.” Mamie had already noticed how striking he looked in his uniform.
From then on, Eisenhower was never the same officer. He entered the command and general-staff school at Fort Leavenworth, the Army’s most important school for mid-level officers, and finished first in his class.
For McCarthy, Eisenhower’s election was the beginning of the end. On election night, as the returns came in, Phil Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, turned to Murrey Marder, the Post reporter who had distinguished himself with his intelligent and thorough coverage of the senator, and told him he was going to lose his beat. Graham was sure that Ike’s presidency would eventually mean McCarthy’s isolation; now that the Republicans had the White House, they would not need McCarthy any longer. But Marder knew McCarthy’s recklessness and his hatred of authority. Party loyalty was not even
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Kramer was the rare producer whom Brando respected, and the theme intrigued him. Somewhat reluctantly, he accepted. He installed himself in a ward at a real veterans’ hospital for six weeks, to get some firsthand experience of these men’s lives. He was on his best behavior, and the movie was excellent, but he did manage to offend the Hollywood press, particularly the two powerful gossip columnists of that era, both of them right-wingers, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Hopper, he liked to say, was the one in the hat, and Parsons was the fat one. They reciprocated his contempt.
Then Breen demanded the rape scene be cut. On this Kazan stood his ground. He would not do the film unless the rape scene, in some form, was left in. The Breen office relented, but only if Stanley was punished by losing his wife’s love at the end. It was an appalling process, repugnant to Kazan and to Williams. As for Brando, it merely confirmed his worst fears about Hollywood.
But when it was finished Kazan was stunned to find that Warner Bros., in order to win approval from the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, had made additional, serious cuts without telling him. It was a done deal and he had not even been consulted. Kazan was enraged. He was also powerless.
A Streetcar Named Desire was not just a play—it was an event. Its frank treatment of sophisticated sexual themes marked it as part of a powerful new current in American society and cultural life. Even
Tennessee Williams, perhaps the greatest American playwright; Marlon Brando, the most original American actor of his time; and finally Elia Kazan, the great director. The cumulative force of these three men caused an explosion that shattered the pleasant conventions of American life. Different though they were in many ways, all three were outsiders, liberated by the changing times and eager to assault existing conventions.
Williams was gay, his private life an open secret. Kazan was a Greek-American, driven by the feverish energy of the outsider looking in. Brando was a self-invented outsider, a middle-class American who scorned the conventions of middle-class
The Great Crash of 1929 had almost prevented him from going off to college, but with a thousand dollars borrowed from his grandparents he enrolled at the University of Missouri in Columbia, a place he quickly came to loathe.
If a counterculture existed anywhere in America in the forties and early fifties, it was in Greenwich Village.
AMONG THOSE DEEPLY MOVED by A Streetcar Named Desire was a college professor from Bloomington, Indiana. His name was Alfred Kinsey, and in 1950, when he first saw it on Broadway, he had already published the first of his two pioneering works, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in fact popularly known as the Kinsey Report. Kinsey knew immediately that he and Williams were, in different ways, doing something very similar—they were tearing away the facade that Americans used to hide their sexual selves.
For example, at least 80 percent of successful businessmen, his interviews had shown, had had extramarital affairs. “God,” he noted. “What a gap between social front and reality!”
begun in 1950, when Margaret Sanger, the great warrior for that cause, renewed an old friendship with a formidable dowager named Katharine McCormick. Much of both women’s lives had been about fighting to advance the cause of sex education and birth control and fighting against the Catholic Church, which sought to stop such efforts. For most of her life Sanger had been on the radical fringe, constantly living with harassment and the threat of jail. But after forty years of leading the struggle, her ideas on sexual hygiene and population control had moved so much into the mainstream of social
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There was nothing conventional about Sanger’s life. As a mother she was, at best, erratic and distant—when her son Grant was ten he wrote from boarding school, asking what to do at Thanksgiving, since all the other boys were going home. He should, she answered, come home to Greenwich Village and Daisy, the maid, would cook him a fine dinner.
such minor intrusions as children and holiday dinners. She was an American samurai, and she had spent her life on a wartime footing.
She was the first person I ever knew who was openly an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh. This, in those days, was radical indeed ... Margaret Sanger personally set out to rehabilitate sex.” By 1913, her marriage was beginning to break up. She wanted to put theory into practice regarding greater sexual freedom, but Bill Sanger did not. She increasingly began to regard him as a bore and even suggested that he take a mistress. He was appalled. “I am an anarchist, true, but I am also a monogamist. And if that makes me a conservative, then I am a conservative.”
Their only method of family planning was to line up on Saturdays with five dollars and submit to hack abortionists. She was amazed to find they knew virtually nothing about contraception and basic sanitation. They were strangers to their own bodies. She started writing for a radical paper, The Call, and announced a series of articles about venereal disease, and other reproductive issues to be called “What Every Girl Should Know.” She was promptly told by postal authorities that the entire issue would be suppressed for violating the Comstock laws.
By 1914, Sanger started her own newspaper, The Woman Rebel. “No Gods, No Masters,” announced the masthead. Women, she wrote in the first issue, should “look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an ideal; to speak and act in defiance of convention.” The paper would primarily contain articles on birth control, and Sanger spent a considerable amount of time in the library studying all the information available on the subject. From the start, Comstock himself went after her paper and
In Boston, where authorities had threatened to close any meeting at which she spoke, she stood on the stage with a gag around her mouth while Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., read her speech.
