The Fifties

by David Halberstam

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 just beginning to become an alternative source of information, the Trib’s voice was a dominating one. For a time its publisher expressed the region’s prejudices and fears with singular accuracy. Later, as World War Two approached, and even more when it was over, a new dimension of internationalism be...