The Fifties

by David Halberstam

The manner in which her right to free speech had been abridged shocked the city and the nation. According to the policemen involved, New York’s Roman Catholic archbishop had not even bothered to call the mayor or any other municipal figure to see what could be done. He had merely called the local precinct captain, who, on his own authority, had shut down the meeting.

She hated that many of her colleagues hid behind the title “Planned Parenthood.” That was a euphemism. “It irks my very soul and all that is Irish in me to acquiesce to the appeasement group that is so prevalent in our beloved organization,” she wrote.

If much of the rest of the nation was enthusiastically joining the great migration to the suburbs, they consciously rejected this new life of middle-class affluence and were creating a new, alternative life-style; they were the pioneers of what would eventually become the counterculture. If other young people of their generation gloried in getting married, having children, owning property and cars, and socializing with neighbors much like themselves, these young men and women saw suburbia as a prison. They wanted no future of guaranteed pensions but instead sought freedom—freedom to pick up and go across the country at a moment’s notice, if they so chose. They saw themselves as poets in a land of philistines, men seeking spiritual destinies rather than material ones.

One night during the mid-fifties, the writer Jack Kerouac and a friend got drunk and drafted a message to the President: “Dear Eisenhower, We love you—You’re the great white father. We’d like to fuck you.” The

That was just the beginning. A few months later, Ginsberg further aggravated the situation with a dumb prank. Suspecting that his maid was anti-Semitic, he wrote “Fuck the Jews” on his window and drew a skull and crossbones. The maid reported the graffiti to the dean, who went by Ginsberg’s room that night and found not just Ginsberg, but Kerouac (no

Kerouac was among the most prolix, writing his books in manic all-night sessions on reams of paper borrowed from a wire-service teletype machine. Truman Capote later said of him that he did not so much write as type.

ISOLATIONISM AS AN END in itself was finished. The Republican party had put on its international face and had chosen the man most identified with collective security and involvement with Europe as its leader. And yet internationalism—in the true sense of involvement in the world—was less the driving force than an international policy geared up to contain Communism.

There were many in the Republican party who had gone along with the decision to nominate Eisenhower only because victory, any victory, was preferable to the sixth Republican defeat in a row. But that did not mean they liked Ike. They regarded him, Ike himself sometimes felt, as a figurehead, a sort of pretty girl with no mind of her own.

Adams asked what was the matter. “All they talked about was how they would win with my popularity. Nobody said I had a brain in my head,” Eisenhower answered. It was, in fact, Eisenhower’s independence and the fact that he was new on the political scene that made him an ideal candidate: He served as healer to a badly divided and frightened nation. Richard Nixon was assigned the job of reconciling the irreconcilable within the Republican Party. Dewey had recognized in him the ability to balance the internationalism of the Eastern wing with the anti-Communism and conservatism of the old isolationist wing. His economic policies were essentially Republican centrist leaning toward liberal. If there were occasional doubts about him in some of the old isolationist circles—a belief that he had sold out to the Eastern wing or that he was too pragmatic—then he immediately set out to silence such criticism by being a party workhorse, by going out and making endless speeches at county Republican dinners, by collecting due bills, becoming the ultimate party loyalist.

If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew.

His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted.

A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.”

Bob Taft never forgave him for helping to tilt the nomination to Ike. But that personal grievance aside, Taft had not liked him anyway—for Nixon seemed to represent something new and raw in the Senate. To Taft, he was “a little man in a big hurry.” Goldwater later wrote that he was “the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.” Even J. Edgar Hoover, who was so helpful to Nixon during the Hiss case and whom Nixon worked hard courting, decided early on that Nixon tended to take too much credit for himself.

The phrase “creeping socialism” was about as close as they got to attacking the New Deal on its domestic reforms. Rather, the catchphrases were about a need to return to Americanism.

Nixon told the Chicago Tribune’s Seymour Korman during his harsh 1950 senatorial campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, “don’t like it when I smash into Truman for his attempted cover-up of the Hiss case ... but the more the commies yell, the surer I am that I’m waging an honest American campaign.” He was, he liked to say, the number one target of the Communists in America. In those early campaigns, he was, it seemed, a man who needed an enemy and who seemed almost to feel that he functioned best when the world was against him. Such men, almost surely, eventually do get the enemies they so desperately want.

Nixon was always the outsider; his television adviser in his successful 1968 presidential campaign, Roger Ailes, once said of him that he had the least control of atmosphere of any politician that Ailes had ever met. By that Ailes meant charisma, the capacity to walk into a room and hold the attention of those assembled there.

Nixon, recently nominated for the vice-presidency, had visited Eisenhower at a fishing camp in Colorado. There was Ike in his fishing gear, glowing and looking very much at home; and there was Nixon, who had shown up without any informal clothes, looking absurdly stiff in jacket, suit, and tie. The curriculum vitae for success had never included a list of items to wear for fishing photo opportunities. Years later when he was President, there was a comparable photo of him self-consciously walking on the beach at San Clemente, much as Kennedy had done at Hyannisport—Kennedy had walked barefoot, Nixon was still in streetclothes and shoes.

Typically, when a teacher was hired by the local public school, she had to promise that she did not smoke, and there was a major struggle in town when the first cocktail lounge opened at the Hoover Hotel. Because the town’s population came mostly from one ethnic group, it was an extremely hierarchical society, with explicit standards of success and failure.

Frank Nixon remained combative and suspicious throughout his life. (At his son’s inauguration as Vice-President of the United States, he complained that he would not wear the requisite white tails: “I am not going to wear these blasted things.”)

She never raised her voice, but it was she who set the norms and the goals for the children. Two of her children died from tuberculosis, which created an aura of even greater sadness in the house. Richard Nixon, the eldest of the three surviving children and self-evidently the most intelligent and talented, felt a great burden to succeed and validate the family’s sacrifices.

In high school, he had none of the qualities that make boys popular—charm, looks, athletic prowess—so he worked harder, earning if not the liking of his peers, at least their respect. In elections for class offices, he almost always won, because he seemed to have given so much of himself. That was to set a pattern: In both college and law school, he was largely regarded as a lonely, immensely competent striver; yet at both Whittier, the local college, and Duke Law School, he was nonetheless elected student-body president.

They met in February 1938, at a try-out for the Whittier Community Players. (The play called for someone to play the district attorney, and a friend suggested to Nixon that if he played an attorney convincingly onstage, it might help bring in some business.) He was immediately smitten; she was not. When the play opened, he invited his parents to come and take a look at the young woman he hoped to marry. When her son asked what she thought of her, Hannah, a formidable mother who knew a rival when she saw one, could comment only that “she did her part nicely.”

At one point he wrote her a letter full of schoolboy gush, which ended, “Yes—I know I’m crazy and that this is old stuff and that I don’t take hints, but you see, Miss Pat, I like you!”

His letter to her at the time of their engagement was filled with their mutual plans: “It is our job to go forth together and accomplish great ends and we shall do it too.” Just before they were married, they decided to buy a car; Nixon found that the least expensive way was for him to take a bus to Detroit, buy the car there, and drive it back. He did, buying the car with money from her savings (because she was making four times as much money as he was then). Their wedding ring cost $324.75, which was most of the rest of their combined savings. Their honeymoon was in Mexico, and they carried a suitcase full of canned food to eat for breakfast and lunch, to save money. But while they were dressing to go on their honeymoon, friends opened the luggage and took all the labels off the cans—so when they opened them, they never knew quite what they were going to eat.

As he prepared to return from the Navy, he wrote her: “Whether it’s the lobby of the Grand Central or the St. Francis bar—I’m going to walk right up to you and kiss you—but good. Will you mind such a public demonstration?”

She did not make a good impression; to their eyes she was poorly dressed and did not, one of the women complained, even know what color nail polish to use. But wearing his naval uniform, he made a good impression.

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.

but when Ms. Steinem asked Mrs. Nixon about her own youth, her role models and life-style, Pat Nixon, always so cool, blew: “I never had time to think about things like that, who I wanted to be, or who I admired, or to have ideas. I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I had to work. I haven’t just sat back and thought of myself or my ideas or what I wanted to do ... I’ve kept working. I don’t have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I never had it easy. I’m not at all like you ... all those people who had it easy.” It would be difficult, in that rather comfortable period in America in the fifties and sixties, to imagine a harder childhood than Pat Nixon’s. She was born on March 16, 1912, in a miner’s shack in Ely, Nevada.

The family lived on the very margin of poverty. He grew peppers, beets, cauliflowers, cabbage, corn, and tomatoes. His cabbages were so big he was known as the “cabbage king.” Sometimes when her father went into town to sell them, Pat went with him. There he would joke with his friends, pretending that he was going to sell her to the highest bidder. To a small child already in a vulnerable situation, this was truly frightening. She was absolutely terrified that he would actually sell her.

Richard Nixon’s rise in politics was in a way meteoric, but it was not without a terrible price. There was in the Voorhis and Douglas races a savagery, a willingness to blur the truth in charges against opponents.

Once in office as Vice-President, he became a prisoner of his own past—handling the Republican right, keeping McCarthy on a short leash, and playing the partisan role for a President who had little taste for partisan politics. All in all, Ike got the high ground, Nixon the low.

fact, the more Nixon did for Ike, the more he became, in the President’s eyes, a politician, a breed not to be greatly respected. The White House staff, led by Sherman Adams, exacerbated his usual resentments; as far as Nixon was concerned, the staff wanted to keep him as far from policy as possible and to summon him only when it had some odious task to be attended to. In the early years that meant trying to baby-sit McCarthy, and then eventually filling the vacuum created as McCarthy self-destructed.

Eisenhower never could really understand Nixon. He couldn’t fathom how a grown man could have so few friends. In that way, as in so many others, the two men could not have been more different. Friendship came easily to Ike; by contrast, Nixon was wary and distrustful of most of his peers. He sought alliances, most of them temporary, rather than friendships.

Still, some of the security men there had believed him to be a security risk; they kept him under constant surveillance, bugged meetings he attended, and tapped his phone. Indeed, Oppenheimer later joked that the government had spent more money watching him for security violations than it had paid him in salary—and he was almost surely right.

By 1954, Robert Oppenheimer had become a target of various conservative groups, not merely because of his security lapses in the thirties and forties, but because of his virtually unchallenged position in the political scientific world and because he was emerging as a powerful opponent to administration policy on the hydrogen bomb. He was not, in the vernacular of the time, on the team. He offended not just the political conservatives but also, increasingly, the Air Force, which saw itself as the nuclear delivery arm of the military.

Oppenheimer’s own politics had come a long way since his days as a vaguely radical student and young academic. He had come to recognize the cruelty and brutality of Stalin, and he had little confidence left in Russian intentions. If anything, in the years after the war, he had become something of an establishment figure. He had even apologized lightly for his left-wing days in a 1948 Time magazine cover piece celebrating him as America’s scientist laureate: “Most of what I believed then now seems complete nonsense, but it was an essential part of becoming a whole man. If it hadn’t been for this late but indispensable education I couldn’t have done the job at Los Alamos.” His opposition to the H bomb was a curious blend of moral and pragmatic concerns. On the moral side, he was exhausted and spiritually depleted by the making of the atomic bomb; on the pragmatic side, he, like Conant and Kennan, wondered if the Super might divert energy from more usable weaponry and whether we were devoting too much of our resources to a weapon that might, in the end, turn out to be unusable. It was easier for opponents to challenge his past than his logic.

It made a profound impression on Borden, who saw the coming of modern rocketry as an end to the security America had previously enjoyed. The oceans no longer offered protection, as they had in the past. A Soviet bomber would require two and a half hours to hit targets in Europe; a rocket might cover the same distance in five or six minutes. He wrote a book on the subject, There Will Be No Time: The Revolution in Strategy, and believed as a matter of faith that we should move ahead as quickly as possible on the hydrogen bomb.

Obsessed himself, he could not comprehend how a man of Oppenheimer’s intelligence could come to different conclusions. He soon concluded it was not simply a simple disagreement between two men of goodwill. Instead, he decided that there was something sinister to Oppenheimer’s behavior and his opposition to the Super. In 1950 Borden began to study Oppenheimer’s security file. At that point, his attitude hardened from suspicion to conviction. Borden had always believed that there was someone in a high place in the American nuclear program who had allowed Fuchs to operate. For Borden, Oppenheimer now became that man.

Herbert Marks, a former AEC attorney and a close friend of Oppenheimer’s, received a call from an old friend on the AEC staff: “You’d better tell your friend Oppie to batten down the hatches and prepare for some stormy weather,” he said.

Green saw his role as helping to preserve a free and decent society, in which the essential rights of the individual were balanced against the interests of the state. At one point he was summoned to argue before the Supreme Court in the Rosenberg case, and he had no doubts, having studied the private files and secret reports from the cryptographers, of their guilt. Later he came to believe that he had played a significant role in sending the Rosenbergs to their death; it was a role for which he felt little remorse.

Early in the Strauss years, there was a case in which the local people recommended clearance, and Green passed their recommendation on without comment. His superior, Harry Trainer, who, Green thought, cared considerably less about individual liberties than his predecessor, was enraged. He charged into Green’s office, shouting: “How can you clear him? Look who his lawyer is—he’s got a Communist lawyer.” The lawyer was from the American Civil Liberties Union. “Harry,” Green said. “The American Civil Liberties Union is anti-Communist.” From

There was such an assumption of collegiality that to his astonishment, Green found himself looking at FBI transcripts of illegal wiretaps of Oppenheimer. Normally, Hoover took great care that no one outside his inner circle ever saw such illegal evidence, which was far more damning to the FBI than the subjects.

The notable exception, Green noted, came to be Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had shown himself as one not lightly bought off. But J. Edgar Hoover wanted him out. The FBI director liked to judge people by what he defined as their Americanism—i.e. the more conventional they were, the more they thought like him and shared his prejudices, the better Americans they were. It would have been hard to find anyone less like Hoover than Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer offended Hoover professionally and personally; everything about him jarred Hoover’s nerves: his fellow traveling, his intellectual and moral arrogance, his left-wing Jewish background, the elegant schools he had attended, the pretentiousness of his life as Hoover saw it, the fact that he was willing to lie to protect old, left-wing friends.

He could also, on the occasions that civil rights groups protested the lily-white nature of the FBI, be dressed up in a suit, posted at a desk outside Hoover’s office, and described to innocent visitors as one of the Bureau’s premier black agents. Already in the car by the time it reached Hoover’s house was Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s number-two man, as well as his closest friend. It was Tolson’s job to flatter the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and to make sure that others flattered him as well; he did this without subtlety, for the job did not require any.

The two men lunched together every day at the same restaurant—Harvey’s. No one else was asked to join them. (Once, a man named Lee Boardman was moved into the number-three slot at the Bureau, and he had the effrontery to suggest that he join them at Harvey’s. His job was soon dissolved.) Hoover and Tolson sat at the same table, surrounded by empty tables to fend off well-wishers and gawkers, and for additional protection, the owner strategically placed a large serving cart to block access. His lunch rarely varied: grapefruit, cottage cheese, and black coffee; at dinner he and Tolson usually ate again at Harvey’s: prime ribs and whiskey from miniature bottles that could be hidden from view by large napkins. Hoover was comped every day by the owner, a considerable favor, which he did not refuse. He did, however, faithfully leave a tip each day of 10 percent of the tab.

Americans who were frightened by the loss of their community saw in Hoover a man who understood their concerns and shared their anger, a powerful defender who would guard their America of memory against a world of alien forces, strange people and dangerous ideas.”

All announcements came from him. All publicity releases from the Bureau began by using his name—and had to mention his name at least twice more. When William Sullivan joined the Bureau as a young man, he was paired with a veteran agent named Charlie Winstead, who advised him: “Never initiate a meeting with Hoover for any reason [because if the director was less than impressed for any reason], your career would end on that very day. If Hoover ever calls you in, dress like a dandy, carry a notebook, and write in it furiously whenever Hoover opens his mouth. You can throw the notes away afterwards if you like. And flatter him, everyone at headquarters knows Hoover’s an egomaniac, and they all flatter him constantly. If you don’t, you’ll be noticed.”

Still, he never entirely trusted Roosevelt, whom he regarded as too liberal and manipulative, and he hated Eleanor Roosevelt and her associations with black people and other left-wingers. When Hoover was asked in later years why he never married, he would answer, “Because God had made a woman like Eleanor Roosevelt.” When Roosevelt died, Hoover, for once, was caught unprepared, for he had no link to the Vice-President. He searched his staff until he found a man named Morris Chiles III, the son of an old friend of Truman’s. Hoover dispatched him to see the new President.

the Bureau’s cooperation, Chiles answered. “Anytime I need the services of the FBI,” said Truman, “I will ask for it through my attorney general.” From that moment on, wrote William C. Sullivan, who eventually rose to be the number-three man under Hoover, the director’s hatred of Truman knew no bounds. He became the one President Hoover did not have a special line to, and Truman’s personal life was spotless.

By the time Eisenhower was elected, Hoover was untouchable, based on his length of office, the lack of constitutional limits on his authority, and the fear of the average congressman of what was in his files.