The Fifties

by David Halberstam

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.

Some social critics, irritated by the generally quiescent attitude and the boundless appetite for consumerism, described a “silent” generation.

Exciting new technologies were being developed that would soon enable a vast and surprisingly broad degree of dissidence, and many people were already beginning to question the purpose of their lives and whether that purpose had indeed become, almost involuntarily, too much about material things.

For the Republicans there was only the taste of ashes. They had been out of office since 1932. The shadow of the Depression still hung over them, and the Democrats were still running against Herbert Hoover, portraying the Republicans as the party of cold, uncaring bankers.

Of the divisions within the Republican party, the most obvious was a historic, regional one. On one side were the lawyers and bankers of Wall Street and State Street, their colleagues through the great 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 Anglophobic, they were wary of our growing involvement in Western Europe and our close

alliance with the British. If they had a bible other than the Bible, it was the conservative, isolationist Chicago Tribune of Colonel Robert R. McCormick. They were anxious to go back to the simple, comfortable world of the twenties, before the New Deal had empowered labor unions, before air travel had shrunk the Atlantic Ocean into a pond, and before scientists had ever thought about developing intercontinental ballistic missiles to catapult atomic warheads into their midst.

Carving out a policy that drew a line and limited Soviet expansion, creating a consensus for that policy and at the same time contending with but not overreacting to Soviet moves, demanded skill and resolve and vision. Americans might have dreamed of a Europe which much resembled that of the pre–World War Two map, but the Russians were already in place in the East. In 1946 George Kennan was asked about denying Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe. “Sorry,” he answered, “but the fact of the matter is that we do not have the power in Eastern Europe really to do anything but talk.” For many Americans, that reality was almost impossible to accept. Acheson himself despaired of America’s difficult new role of international leadership. “We have got to understand that all our lives the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness, for effort, for discipline, will be with us. This is new for us. It will be hard for

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.

Within the world of Kansas City politics he 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 his language when he was young was that of a rural Missouri boy, filled with crude references to African-Americans as “niggers,” he went far beyond his predecessor in terms of activism for civil rights; if his letters had once been filled with unkind references to Jews and to New York as a “kike town,”

he, more than any other politician in the world, was responsible for the creation of Israel.

They had all been on the same team then. But the new tensions between politicians and scientists were to become apparent at President Truman’s very first meeting with Oppenheimer. Truman had been looking forward to it, but the meeting had not gone well. “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands,” Oppenheimer told Truman. “Never mind,” Truman was supposed to have 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.”

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.

McCarthy’s carnival-like four-year spree of accusations, charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness, and boozing ended his career in shame. McCarthyism crystallized and politicized the anxieties of a nation living in a dangerous new era. He took people

who were at the worst guilty of political naïveté and accused them of treason. He set out to do the unthinkable, and it turned out to be surprisingly thinkable. The problem with America, he was saying, was domestic subversion, as tolerated and encouraged by the Democratic party. China had fallen, not because the forces of history were against the old feudal regime, which was collapsing of its own weight. Rather, it was because of Soviet military and political hegemony. If events in the world were not as we wanted them, then something conspiratorial had happened. No matter that most of his closest colleagues, isolationists all, had voted against varying foreign-aid bills, had rushed to cut back American standing-troop levels, and under no circumstance wanted to send troops to fight in Asia. It was a rare free shot in politics. His message was simple: The Democrats were soft on Communism. With that, he changed the nature of American politics. Our control of events was limited because sinister forces were at work against us.

In fact, anti-Communism was peripheral. He had few names of his own: Essentially, he was being fed covertly by Hoover and the FBI. The names, by and large, tended to be fellow travelers from the thirties.

Even a genuine conservative intellectual was viewed as an evil cartoon figure by the left, while the right saw the New Deal merely as a front for Communism.

South Korea became important only after the North Korean Communists struck in the night; its value was psychological rather than strategic—the enemy had crossed a border.

We wanted to be the policemen of the world, particularly in Asia, but we certainly did not want to get involved in messy, costly foreign wars.

Truman made up his mind from the start: He would contest the Communists in Korea. “We are going to fight,” he told his daughter, Margaret. “By God I am not going to let them have it,” he told another aide. Almost all his top aides felt the same way: This was the first chance to show that they had learned the lessons of Munich. Probably no one reflected the mood of the national security-military complex better than Omar Bradley, a man not given to hasty rhetoric. Bradley termed the invasion a “moral outrage.” If we gave in, he said, it would be appeasement. We had to draw the line somewhere, and Korea “offered as good an occasion for drawing the line as anywhere else.”

Unlike Vietnam in the next decade, it did not come back to America live and in color on television. The nation was not yet wired, and Korea, so distant, the names of its towns so alien, did not lend itself to radio coverage, as did the great war that had preceded it.

Its most famous contribution to American mass culture was the movie and television series M*A*S*H, and even that was often associated in the public mind with Vietnam rather than Korea.

Ironically, the success of bombers in this particular theater—used, as they were, against fixed Japanese installations and massive Japanese convoys, marvelous targets all—left him with an exaggerated sense of what air power could do strategically. He was to pay the price for this in Korea.

It was a fateful moment. By dint of his arrogance, foolishness, and vainglory MacArthur was about to take a smaller war that was already winding down and expand it to include as an adversary a Communist superpower thereby adding more than two years to its life; he was to damage profoundly America’s relations with China; and he was to help start a chain of events that was poisonous in terms of domestic politics—feeding political paranoia, giving the paranoics what they needed most: a tangible enemy.

He was the prototype

of all the managerial men to come later, and his rise at GM symbolized the rise of the new managerial class in America, leading some to bemoan the effect upon American entrepreneurship. Fearing that talented mavericks and tinkerers were being replaced by bookkeepers and bankers, Russell Leffingwell, a partner in J. P. Morgan, warned the Senate Finance Committee in 1935 that “the growth of corporate enterprise in America has been drying up individual independence and initiative. We are becoming a nation of hired men, hired by great aggregates of capital.”

But he liked to say that Thomas Jefferson made the greatest mistake in history by implying that all men were equal. They might be created equal, he would say, but they were not equal: Some were more talented, some compensated for lack of talent by working harder, and some were neither talented nor hardworking and that was where the union came in. The job of the union, he insisted, could be reduced to a simple idea: the protection of the slowest and least efficient worker.

They were young and hungry to buy, because they owned virtually nothing. They were prosperous but not rich. Above all they were confident in themselves and their futures in a way that Ferkauf, growing up in harder times and poorer neighborhoods, found striking. They did not fear debt, as their parents had. Their grandparents—Italian, Irish, Jewish—had been immigrants who lived in tenements on the Lower East Side, and their parents had eventually moved to better apartments in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Now they were striking out on their own, going after their share of the American dream by moving to the suburbs. They differed from their parents not just in how much they made and what they owned but in their belief

that the future had already arrived.

As his business expanded, Ferkauf kept hiring his old buddies from Brooklyn. They were mostly from Samuel Tilden High School and retained their street nicknames: Ferkauf

If Gene Ferkauf seemed to have broken with his father almost overnight and then surpassed him with his vision and fearlessness, there was nothing unusual about that; it was

typical of this postwar generation of Americans, who were more flexible and more ambitious than their parents. They were willing to try different, less traditional careers and go after greater rewards, to marry people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, to pull up stakes and move across the nation if necessary. America was becoming ever more the land of the new, a nation that revered the young, forgot the past: People routinely changed careers and moved to different parts of the country.

Without even knowing it, he had become the prototype for a new kind of politician, who ran not against his opponents but against the political system itself.

Nothing showed the power of this new medium to soften the edge between real life and fantasy better than the coming of Lucille Ball. In 1951 she was forty years old, in the middle of a less than dazzling show-business career. In films she was seen more as a comedienne than as an actress, and she tended to draw what one executive termed “second-banana roles”—generally low-budget that did not go to the top stars. “The Queen of the B movies,” she was sometimes called. Often, it seemed, she was hired because someone else did not want the role. In the opinion of casting agents and directors, she was a little rough, a little obvious for the more sophisticated roles that might go to Katharine Hepburn. She had enjoyed some measure of success in radio, and in 1948, hoping to save her shaky eight-year marriage to Cuban band leader Desi Arnaz, she opted to do a radio comedy show called My Favorite Husband so that she would not have to travel away from home so much. Her radio husband was a pleasant Midwestern banker from Minneapolis, as Lucy herself later said, “certainly not—great heavens—Desi Arnaz from Cuba.”

In 1950, when CBS executives asked her to do a weekly situation comedy on television, no one was unduly excited. That was their mistake, for Lucille Ball was destined for television, where her slapstick talents could be properly appreciated. Lucy had a marvelous comic voice but, like Berle, she was primarily a visual comedienne. She had a perfect sense of timing, a wonderfully expressive face, and was just wacky and naive enough to generate sympathy rather than irritation. In this early sitcom she would encounter weekly dilemmas of her own creation, but she always managed to stay just this side of the brink of disaster, remaining lovable to her husband and her friends, Fred and Ethel Mertz. Lucy and Desi Arnaz were an unlikely couple, not merely on television but in real life as well. If Lucy was to be a dizzy housewife, she deserved at the very least, in the minds of the CBS executives, a straight-arrow husband to put up patiently with her foibles, but no, she insisted that Arnaz be cast as her husband. The people at CBS, from Bill Paley on down, were appalled. So were the advertising people, who had a big say in the casting. Desi Arnaz was not exactly a household name; his English was poor. No one, a CBS executive told her, would believe a show in which she was married to a Cuban bandleader. “What do you mean nobody’ll believe it?” she answered. “We are married.” She remained adamant, and finally a reluctant Paley gave in. After the pilot was shot and shown to a high-lev...

resoundingly against Arnaz. “Keep the redhead but ditch the Cuban,” said the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. He was told it was a package deal. “Well, for God’s sake, don’t let him sing. No one will understand him,” Hammerstein said. But Lucy understood something that the producers initially did not: Viewers certainly knew that Desi was her real husband, and that made the show itself all the more believable. Since Desi played a Cuban bandleader on the show, his profession in real life, who could tell where reality ended and the show began? At first Lucy, the producer, and the writers grappled with the story line. There was talk that Lucy should be a Hollywood star, but she vetoed that—she knew that the heroine should not be a star, because ordinary Americans believed that movie stars had no problems. Who would identify with an actress? But an ordinary housewife who longs to be a star, she suggested—that was another thing entirely. “Everybody wants to be in show business like Lucy did and they could relate to that,” she later said of the program’s main theme. Slowly, the concept evolved: They were Ricky and Lucy Ricardo; he was a musician who longed for an ordinary life and an ...

on Monday, October 15, 1951. The first episode was called “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub.” An announcer named John Stevenson introduced the show by speaking from the Ricardos’ living room. “Good evening and welcome. In a moment we’ll look in on Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. But before we do, may I ask you a very personal question? The question is simply this—do you inhale? Well, I do. And chances are you do too. And because you inhale you’re better off—much better off—smoking Philip Morris and for good reason. You see, Philip Morris is the one cigarette proved definitely less irritating, definitely milder than any other leading brand. That’s why when you inhale you’re better off smoking Philip Morris.... And now Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in I Love Lucy.” The first episode was characteristic of what was to come. Ricky and his sidekick, Fred, want to go to the fights even though it is Fred and Ethel’s wedding anniversary; Lucy and Ethel want to go to a nightclub. The men arrange for blind dates. Lucy and Ethel find out, dress up in outrageous costumes, and pose as the dates. The reviews were generally good, although The New York Times critic was dubious—he thought i...

In fact, the show had perfect pitch. Broad in its humor yet able to appeal to a wide variety of tastes, it was number one in New York within four months. Soon, as many as two out of three television sets were tuned to her. Marshall Field, the prominent Chicago department store, which had used Monday as its clearance sale night, surrendered and switched to Thursday by putting a sign in its window: “We love Lucy too so we’re closing on Monday nights.” Lucy insisted the show be shot before a live audience—her experience in film and radio had taught her that she performed better when there was an audience she could see and reach out to. Opposite her, on NBC, there was a program called Lights Out, a mystery anthology that was a top-rated show. As Mike Dann, the NBC programmer who had so proudly made it so, remembered, “We were wiped out very quickly. We never knew what had happened, but it happened and it happened fast. And it happened without promotion—it wasn’t because CBS went in and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting this new show with a wacky redhead. It happened because it happened.” It did not matter what show Lucy went against: She triumphed. As such, she began ...

America: “Not a regular mirror that reflects the truth, nor a magic mirror that portrays fantasy. But a Coney Island kind of mirror that distorts, exaggerates and makes vastly amusing every little incident, foible, and idiosyncrasy of married life.” Lucy cut across all age groups. Children loved her, could readily understand her routines, and seemed to like the idea of an adult who seemed so childlike. In later years her shows would probably have been deemed sexist, and actually they were. In one way or another they were all a takeoff on women-driver jokes. Lucy could not really do anything right; she had a God-given instinct to get into trouble. There was Lucy trying to make wine by crushing grapes with her feet, Lucy shoving too many marshmallows in her mouth, Lucy trying on the wrong size slippers, Lucy being crunched in the face with a pie. No one was ever better at such stunts, and no one sacrificed her body and her face more readily to them. Onstage she became the dippy person she was playing, and yet it was a show starring not just one wacko but two. To everybody’s surprise, Desi was just as good, the straight man who was anything but straight. He knew ...

show; it was not just Lucy who was screwy, it was the two of them—and their neighbors, too. At the end, though, there was Desi embracing her, understanding her. All was forgiven, and everything came out all right. By April 7, 1952, 10.6 million households were tuning in, the first time in history that a television show had reached so many people. By 1954, as many as 50 million people watched certain segments. The show was so popular that it lifted not just its advertisers but CBS and the entire industry; in 1953 CBS-TV showed a net profit for the first time, in no small part because of her, and a year later television became the largest advertising medium in the world. Reality and show business continued to intersect when Lucy got pregnant in real life in the spring of 1952. The producers and writers were delighted and immediately decided to incorporate the pregnancy into the story line. But CBS, the Milton Biow advertising agency, and Philip Morris were not so sure. These were more puritanical times. Previously, pregnant women had just not been seen in films or on television. A pregnant comedienne seemed in especially bad taste. The network and Philip Morris thought it might be...

One scene shows them arriving at the hospital with Lucy pushing Desi in a wheelchair. Desi Arnaz, Jr., was born on January 19, 1953—right on schedule. By some estimates, 68 percent of the television sets in the country were tuned to the show, which meant that 44 million people saw it. That was twice the number who watched the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower the next day, a President who was uneasy with television but who presided over the years in which it became an ever more dominant force in American life. During its first years the I Love Lucy show, like most of the early shows, had an urban setting; but a few years down the line, as their ratings slipped a bit, 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. Their real lives were not quite so idyllic as their television existence. It was always a difficult relationship: Desi was a drinker and a womanizer. “If I stayed mad at every woman that Desi had an affair with, I’d have been angry with half of the nicest girls in Hollywood,” Lucy once said. As Desi Arna...

happening on television each week to people who looked like my parents, then the same people agonizing through some terrible, unhappy times at home, and each of them trying to convince my siste...

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.

Truman’s firing of MacArthur had a profound effect on the 1952 presidential race, wounding the President even more than it had the general. It also advanced the political chances of Dwight Eisenhower. The country was not in the mood to return to isolationism. It wanted to be reassured, not threatened. Who better to do that than a general who was a hero and an internationalist and who had successfully made the transition to being a civilian. Eisenhower was MacArthur’s sworn enemy. As William Manchester wrote, MacArthur’s feelings toward Ike were very much like those of Cain toward Abel. Eisenhower had made the supreme mistake of being a MacArthur aide who had gone on to surpass his boss. 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.

The Robert Taft who finally showed up as a senator in Washington in 1938 was quite possibly the most cerebral politician of his era. His views were not likely to be influenced by the results of polls and were, by contemporary standards, libertarian. He hated the draft, not merely because he saw it as an escalating step toward militarism but because he believed it limited a young man’s freedom of choice. He opposed federal aid to education, not because he did not value education but because he thought it yet another intrusion of the federal government into the rights of the states. As the shadows of war in Europe began to fall on American politics, his reservations grew. “Modern war,” he said, opposing any escalation which would bring us into the Second World War, “has none of the glamour which we were taught to associate with war in our childhood. It is nothing but horror and mechanical destruction. It leaves the victor as exhausted as the vanquished.” He even opposed Lend Lease aid to England during England’s darkest hour. His lack of concern for traditional allies in Europe shocked even his family. “One of the best fellows in the world,” Uncle Horace Taft said of him, “but dead wrong on our foreign policy.” The pressure on him to change, to become more internationalist, was immense. One of his few friends in the press corps, Turner Catledge of The New York Times, saw him on a train in 1940, his glasses slipped halfway down his face, repeating to himself, “I’m just not go...

It was not by chance that so much of the resistance to America’s new internationalism came from the great center of the country. In some ways the heartland was still apart, instinctively resistant to any greater American involvement in Europe and wary of those Eastern leaders who would tie us closer to any nation in Europe, traditional ally or not. Part of the reason for the resistance was geographic, for the American Midwest remained a vast insular landmass that bordered on no ocean and still felt confident and protected by its own

size. As a region it was, wrote Graham Hulton, “surrounded, shielded, [and] insulated” by the rest of the country. The Midwesterners were supremely confident that theirs was the more American culture, one less imitative of the English and less sullied by foreign entanglements and obligations than those in the East. To them the Midwest was “the center of the American spirit,” in Colonel Robert McCormick’s phrase. The people back East, they believed, were essentially parasitic—they went around making money, while the good Midwesterners, purer of spirit but dirtier of hand, went around making products for the Midwest. Those resentments were deep and bitter and they were not unlike the resentments of people in a distant colony toward the leaders back in the colonial power. Some of it was the region’s ethnicity, and a wariness of events in Europe on the part of the people who had settled the Midwest and were glad to leave Europe behind them; some of it came from Scandinavians who were essentially pacifist; some of it came from German-Americans sympathetic to Germany; some of the region’s Irish were anti-British and some were Germans who did not want to fight on the side of the British, and some were Poles did not want to fight alongside Russia. 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. When John Gunther, one of the great foreign correspondents of his generation, had come back to America after the war to write on changes wrought in his native land, he believed that the issue of isolation had been settled once and for all. Nobody, he had thought, “can easily be an isolationist in an era when you can cross the Atlantic between lunch and dinner and when the atomic bomb can make mincemeat of an ideology. Chicago is as near Moscow as New York. Foreign policy is, or at least should be, as much a matter or survival in the Middle West as the price of corn.” Gunther was soon to learn that he was wrong, that the forces of reaction were still powerful and that there were deeper roots to the regional isolation than he had expected, in no small part because of the intransigence of its foremost propagandist and publisher, Colonel McCormick. 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 mill...

what they believed, who were their friends and, most important, who were their enemies. The singular power of Colonel McCormick and his paper within the region reminded Gunther of nothing so much as Stalin’s Russia. Not only was there, as in the Soviet Union, “a fixed dogma,” but it was, Gunther wrote, “big, totalitarian, successful, dominated by one man as of the moment, suspicious of outsiders, cranky, and with great natural resources not fully developed ...” As Gunther noted, McCormick’s power went far beyond the sheer numbers of his paper’s circulation. 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. During World War One, when television did not exist and radio was j...

more patriotic America, uncontaminated by foreign influence as so many others back East were. Near the end of his life, the colonel was interviewed by a British journalist: “Isolationist? Anglophobe?” he said, “No, I’m just a patriot.” His, wrote John Gunther, was “a furious Americanism and patriotism.” Anglophobe he might be, but he fancied English clothes made by English tailors, English hatters, and English shoemakers; he affected a slight British accent; he drove a Rolls-Royce and lived in a British country house outside Chicago. His father had been a diplomat, serving for a time in London, and the young McCormick had not only attended British schools, but when he returned to America he had gone to the schools of the Eastern elite: Groton, which he found provincial, and Yale. At Groton, McCormick noted with disgust, with the exception of Washington and Lincoln, “all the rest of their heroes were New Englanders. Their sectional patriotism,” he noted, “was also evidenced by the reading of mediocre New England poets.” He had disliked Hoover (on the occasion of Hoover’s inaugural in 1929, the colonel had listened to his speech and immediately cabled his Washington bureau “THIS M...