The Fifties

by David Halberstam

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 MAN WON’T DO”), but it was nothing like the feeling he soon came to have for Franklin Roosevelt. That feeling was hatred, pure and simple. He despised Roosevelt personally, the New Deal politically (all New Deal institutions were to be referred to as “so-called”; thus the NRA was, in the Trib columns...