The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Germans are not so tough. I have been up against them and there is no use in being scared of them.” He seemed more and more, with the approach of the war—and even more after it—a man out of touch with reality. “One of the finest minds of the fourteenth century,” a former Trib foreign correspondent called Jay Cooke Allen called him. The America that had entered the war was different from the America that emerged from it. His isolationism during so critical and patriotic a time had hurt him. His ego had become more and more of a joke. Colonel McCosmic, the rival Chicago Daily News called him and had made fun of all of his boasts about how much he had done to modernize the American military, bringing ROTC to college campuses and making available machine guns for the Army. A Daily News cartoon showed him on a horse being pulled by a van and saying, “I was the first to mechanize the cavalry.” Another cartoon showed him kicking Uncle Sam in the pants and saying, “A powerful man like you can be of considerable assistance to me in winning the war.” Landlocked the region might be, and conservative it might be, but there were generational changes taking place; the younger men who had fought in the war believed in their cause and did not accept McCormick’s isolationism. He was, in the years after the war, a man overtaken by events. His last great political moment came when Everett Dirksen, one of his protégés, savaged Tom Dewey at the 1952 Republican convention for him. It was a last...