The Fifties

by David Halberstam

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 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. It brought a daily re...