The Fifties

by David Halberstam

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). The truth was the country was changing at a remarkable rate, and a generation would soon come to power whose confidence and ambition had been intensified by both World War Two and the dynamism of the postwar economy. 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.