The Fifties

by David Halberstam

called NRA”). He had been somewhat neutral during Franklin Roosevelt’s first run for the presidency; they had been, after all, at Groton at the same time, and for a time there were even Dear Frank/Dear Bertie letters. But he quickly turned on Roosevelt as the direction of the New Deal became constantly more clear. It was anathema to him. In time his hatred of Roosevelt and the New Deal became like a virus. He seemed to differentiate little between Roosevelt’s administration and those of Hitler and Stalin. His vendetta was finally far more poisonous to the colonel himself, given the essential popularity of most of Roosevelt’s reforms. Their feud became ever more bitter, ever more personal, and ever more obsessive on his part. (Roosevelt seemed almost amused by it, and when a Trib reporter would ask a question at a Roosevelt press conference, the President would tell him to tell Bertie to stop seeing things under the bed.) Late in his life, a decade after Roosevelt’s death, as McCormick himself lay dying, all he could do was talk about was Roosevelt. During the Roosevelt years, he liked to say—and he most definitely was not joking—that he had kept the Republican party alive. By th...

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 foug...

lost campaign, one more defeat within his own party. Taft’s defeat by Eisenhower in 1952 was the final straw: “I can see no benefit in changing ‘Me Too’ Dewey for ‘I, Too’ Ike, who was nominated and is entirely surrounded by men who know exactly what they want—which is not the good of th...

He and the other pros held on to the hard-core Democratic voters, who still voted their pocketbook and their ethnic alienation, while Stevenson, with his appeals for a higher civic virtue and his wariness about overemphasizing economic issues, was unusually successful in cutting into Republican and independent votes.

Rosser Reeves was not a politician and he had little use for politicians in general; he was an advertising man, and in 1952 he helped change the nature of American politics by introducing the television spot.

But if others were making a name in advertising with the elegance and sophistication of their work in the exciting new medium of television, then Reeves was a throwback to the more primitive days of advertising, when the main idea was to hit people over the head with the product as bluntly as possible. It was not to be beautiful; it was not to be artistic. It was not to amuse viewers, who might not even buy the product. It was to sell. Rosser Reeves had decided early in his career that the most effective advertising campaigns were not the ones with the biggest budgets but the ones that held relentlessly to a single theme. Advertising, he believed, particularly in the age

of television, was primal. Reeves liked to tell the story of the mule trainer, called in to deal with a recalcitrant mule, who had begun the treatment by first hitting the mule in the head with a two-by-four, explaining to the astonished owner, “Well, first I’ve got to get his attention.” One of his campaigns for Anacin was a classic example of this. It portrayed the inside of the head of a headache sufferer. Inside were a pounding hammer, a coiled spring, and a jagged electric bolt, but they were relieved by little bubbles making their way up the body from the stomach. The Anacin ads, he later admitted, “were the most hated commercials in the history of advertising.” But they increased Anacin sales from $18 million to $54 million a year in an eighteen-month period. “Not bad,” Reeves once said, “for something written between cocktails at lunch.” While his brother-in-law, David Ogilvy, was doing campaigns for Schweppes tonic, Rolls-Royce, and Hathaway shirts (the last of which featured the man wearing an eyepatch), Reeves was working with mass-consumer items: soap, toothpaste, and deodorants. As far as Reeves was concerned, the difference between him and Ogilvy was the difference between doing snobbish ads for the elite that ran in The New Yorker and running mass campaigns for America’s most important consumer merchandise. When Ogilvy once mentioned that he had learned much about advertising from Reeves but that it was a shame he had never been able to

teach Reeves anything, Reeves replied, “If we ever get out of packaged goods and into luxury items, I’ll be glad to go sit at David’s feet and listen.” When his friends complained about the crude quality of his commercials, Reeves would go into their bathrooms, open up their medicine chests, and take out several brand-name products as evidence that his campaigns worked, even with them. One of his more genteel competitors, Fairfax Cone, said that Reeves delivered advertising “without subtlety, and without concern for anyone’s gentler feelings. He also proves that advertising works.” Reeves had admired Ted Bates, whose agency he eventually took over, because Bates had, in his words, “the most unconfused mind” he had ever seen. What he had learned from Bates more than anything else, he would say, was that a commercial should be cut to the essentials: Most commercials were too long and too repetitious, wasting viewer time (and goodwill) and advertiser money. Years later he looked back on the early television commercials as colossally wasteful. Sponsors would pick up an entire program, to do one long commercial at the beginning, one long one in the middle, and one at the end. Far mor...

dramatically different from its competitors (when in fact the difference was often negligible). At the heart of USP was finding one feature about the product that was allegedly unique and pummeling the public with it. “The prince of hard sell,” he was called. Advertising without illusion, his campaigns might have been called. They were simple and repetitive: If the claims were not always true, they were never exactly untrue, either. In an age in which advertising in general prospered from the growing affluence of the society, Reeves prospered more; he took Ted Bates from $16 million in billings in 1945, and no place among the top ten firms, to number five, with $130 million in billings in 1960. Reeves often depicted products the way heroes and villains were depicted in Hollywood in B movies: His product would be, in effect, in the white hat, and the other product, lesser medicinal strength or cleaning capacity, wore the black; on occasion it would be known to the entire nation only as brand X. Reeves’s commercials for over-the-counter medical items generally featured pseudomedical testimony delivered by someone wearing a white jacket, playing the role of the doctor. Some competi...

modern and a bit less of a prig, he might have been elected President that year. So in 1952, when a group of Texas oilmen (“I had some oil interests at the time,” Reeves once noted) who supported Eisenhower asked him to come up with a retaliatory slogan to the Democrats’ “You Never Had It So Good,” he told them that what they needed was not a slogan but a campaign of quick television spots, featuring the general speaking to the American people on a vast range of issues—in short, punchy, unanswerable takes. Some of Reeves’s people got together and came up with a plan called “How to Insure an Eisenhower Victory in November.” It recommended that $2 million be spent in the last three weeks on spots, “the quickest, most effective and cheapest means of getting across a message in the shortest possible time.” With that, American politics and American television advertising were about to be married by a man who did not believe in overestimating the intelligence and attention span of his audience. Reeves, who was relatively new to politics, went out and did his homework. He read a popular book by Samuel Lubell, one of the early analysts on ethnic voting in America, and came away with the...

the general had said. That, as far as Reeves was concerned, proved his point. In September, as he sat in the St. Regis Hotel reading Ike’s clips from newspapers across the country, he concluded Ike was as bad as MacArthur. He was doing a terrible job of packaging and selling himself. He had the advantage of a popular, recognizable name, but he was letting it all slip away, talking in all kinds of directions about too many different things. This was a disaster. “You don’t do that in advertising,” he said. “You lose penetration.” Reeves zeroed in on three essential themes: Ike cleaning up corruption; Ike the soldier who was, in truth, a man of peace; or Ike who would clean out the Communists in government. Then he went to the Reader’s Digest, which had what were considered the best mailing lists for middle-of-the-road, mainstream Americans. He did three mailings of ten thousand each, asking the subscribers to say which theme would be most effective. Most people responded to Ike as a man who knew war but who would now bring peace. Reeves also met with George Gallup and had him do some polling. The results were similar: The American people were worried about Korea above all. W...

slogan was made even simpler and better: “Eisenhower, man of peace.” Soon Reeves had worked out an entire strategy for the spots. He wanted them to air at critical times, between two highly popular regular shows (“You get the audience built up at huge costs by other people,” he wrote in a memo to the Eisenhower people). The announcer would say, “Eisenhower answers the nation!” Then an ordinary citizen would ask a question and Ike would answer it, in words crafted by Reeves from Eisenhower’s speeches. The candidate approved of the idea but was not entirely comfortable with it; it was something, he made clear, that the people who knew more about this ...

In order to film the spots, Ike and his closest aides decided to give Reeves only one day, in early September, which was a reflection of how seriously the candidate took it all. Reeves knew he was working with a reluctant candidate and that he would have to accept the limitations imposed on him. He had wanted to do fifty spots, each twenty seconds long; but given his limited time frame, he decided to do only twenty-two.

The spots were typical of Rosser Reeves’s style—primitive and effective. They showed Ike as a good, ordinary heartland American. Stevenson (brand X in this case) was never mentioned at all.

One day Reeves asked Cleveland what his magazine’s objection was. “It was selling the President like toothpaste,” Cleveland answered. Reeves answered that the essence of democracy was an informed public. “Is there anything wrong with a twenty-minute speech?

Or a ten-minute speech? Or a five-minute speech?” “No.” “Then what’s wrong with a one-minute speech or a fifteen-second speech?” Reeves replied. “‘You can’t say anything in a fifteen-second speech,’” Reeves quoted Cleveland as saying. Then Reeves dissented: “As a man who had been responsible for five hundred million dollars’ worth of advertising I know more about this than you do.” There was a pause in their conversation; Reeves was sure he had his man now. “Harlan,” he asked. “Do you remember that old radio speech of Franklin Roosevelt—his first acceptance speech?” Cleveland said he remembered it. “And the phrase about the only thing we have to fear is fear itself?” Again Cleveland assented. “Harlan,” Reeves said, locking the trap. “That’s a fifteen-second spot.” Now he pushed forward. “Do you remember the speech that Churchill gave at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri? What did he say there?” “That an Iron Curtain had descended on Europe,” Cleveland said. What else did he say? Reeves pushed. Cleveland could not remember. “That was a fifteen-second spot from Churchill,” Reeves said, “just like the one during the war about ‘never have so many owed so much to so few.’ That was a Churchill spot, too. He was very good at spots.” Reeves remembered Cleveland as being very uncomfortable. “This can lead to demagoguery,” Cleveland said. “An uninformed electorate can lead to demagoguery faster,” Reeves said, confident that what he was doing was helping to inform the electorate.

If Stevenson was the candidate of the readers of The New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Atlantic, then, as Arlen added, Ike was the candidate of the Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest.

Thus Stevenson became the candidate of the eggheads.

Among some who thought Stevenson the superior candidate there was a feeling that the country needed to elect Eisenhower in order to make the Republican party accept responsibility for McCarthy. Others feared that if the Republicans remained out of power very much longer, the two-party system would be in jeopardy. No one articulated it better than the columnist Joe Alsop in a letter to Isaiah Berlin. The campaign had convinced him that Stevenson was admirably qualified to be President and Eisenhower was not, and yet, Alsop added: “I find myself constantly blackmailed by the virtual certainty that we shall have a first-class fascist party in the United States if the Republicans don’t win. The real need for a change in this country arises, not from the decay of the Democrats, but from the need to give the Republicans the sobering experience of responsibility.” If Stevenson had thought he had even the smallest chance of winning, he might have been more tempted to compromise. Right after he gained the nomination, he was told by his advisers to make some kind of accommodation with Texas conservatives on the issue of offshore oil rights; otherwise, he was warned, he would probably lose Texas and the election. “But I don’t have to win,” he answered. Instead, he went

before the American Legion, a citadel of jingoism and political reaction, and told the audience that McCarthy’s kind of patriotism was a disgrace. Besides his own inevitable defeat, the result was that at a moment when the Democratic party, having been in power for more than twenty years, should have been in complete disrepute, Stevenson reinvigorated it and made it seem an open and exciting place for a generation of younger Americans who might otherwise never have thought of working for a political candidate.

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.

Dwight Eisenhower was the last American President born in the nineteenth century. The fifties had not shaped him; rather, he was the product of small-town life in America at the turn of the century.

Taxes were almost nonexistent. People took care of their own, as the saying went. Almost everyone voted Republican. The Midwest was isolated from the rest of America, as in a subsequent age of radio, television, automobiles, and highway systems it was not.

Dwight Eisenhower was known as Little Ike, a mutation of his last name.

If a counterculture existed anywhere in America in the forties and early fifties, it was in Greenwich Village. Here were Italian restaurants with candles stuck in old Chianti bottles, coffeehouses with poets and artists, small theaters and clubs that featured modern jazz; here were interracial couples and homosexual and lesbian couples living rather openly. The battle cry was the rejection of commercialism and materialism.

He scorned authority not so much because he wanted to replace it with something else, but because he instinctively disliked authority.

The ambivalence came from both fear of failure and fear of success, which might force him toward a place in a world he was already rejecting and present him with too many choices. Success led inevitably to materialism, he was sure, and that was not something he sought. Thus he was the first in a tradition of new American rebels that would include James Dean and Jack Kerouac. Essentially, the dissidence of Brando and the other rebels was social rather than political. By staying outside traditional straight society, they projected how much they were misunderstood.

Streetcar opened in December 1947. The confluence of these three outsiders reflected a changing America and changing sensibilities. It represented a new and more tolerant social order, where words and images once banned were now permitted. Ten years earlier America might not have been ready for Williams’s plays, an immigrant like Kazan might not have been able to have gone to the best colleges and then found his way to Broadway, and Brando might have been rejected by those running the theater. But now they had all arrived at the same place at the same time. The synergy of talents was extraordinary. Each strengthened and amplified the others’ talent: Williams without Kazan might have been too poetic and not sufficiently dramatic; Kazan without Williams might have been too political and raw; and both without Brando might have lacked the star who brought their work to the very center of American cultural life, first in the theater and even more remarkably in Hollywood, which reached far beyond a narrow cultural elite. Each of the three was in his own way rebelling against the puritanism of American life and the conventional quality of the American dream. Thanks to Hollywood, they could now bring it to an audience of millions.

As a result of his work, Kinsey was both fascinated and troubled by the vast difference between American sexual behavior the society wanted to believe existed and American sexual practices as they actually existed; in other words it was one thing to do it, but it was quite another thing to admit doing it. For example, at least 80 percent of successful businessmen, his interviews had shown, had had extramarital affairs. “God,” he noted. “What a gap between social front and reality!”

He was immensely tolerant of all sexual variations, but he was prudish enough to keep the interviews that his staff did on homosexuality under a file that was known as the H-histories, and he could not bring himself to actually write the word homosexual.

The study of American sexual habits was a delicate business. Kinsey wanted a certain bland neutrality to his researchers. He did not want them to wear beards and mustaches, and he worried when one of them looked too young and therefore might not inspire the proper amount of confidence. Though he was a generous, abidingly tolerant man, he did not hire Jews or blacks or those with names that were not distinctly Anglo-Saxon. He was sensitive to the prejudices of the time and wanted his interviewers to cause no distractions among the subjects from whom they were eliciting such sensitive information.

His conclusions do not seem startling today: that healthy sex led to a healthy marriage; that there was more extramarital sex on the part of both men and women than they wanted to admit; that petting and premarital sex tended to produce better marriages; that masturbation did not cause mental problems as superstition held; that there was more homosexuality than people wanted to admit.

Though he continued to sign himself on letters “Alfred Kinsey, professor of zoology,” his days as a mere professor were behind him. His name was suddenly a household word; everyone knew of him as the sex doctor. There was a famous Peter Arno cartoon in The New Yorker showing a woman reading the report and asking her husband with a horrified expression, “Is there a Mrs. Kinsey?” Within ten days of the book’s release, the publisher had to order a sixth printing, making a phenomenal 185,000 copies in print. To the astonishment of everyone, particularly Kinsey, the book roared up the best-seller lists, a fact somewhat embarrassing to The New York Times, which at first neither accepted advertising for Kinsey’s book nor reviewed it. The early critical response was good. The first reviews saw his samples adequate, his scientific judgments modest, his tone serious. Polls taken of ordinary Americans showed that not only did they agree with his evidence, but they believed such studies were helpful.

By trying to study our sexual patterns, he was accused instead of trying to lower our moral standards.

But even within Catholic middle-class circles, the questions of how to limit the size of a family, how to have a normal sex life, and how to remain a good Catholic were ever more troubling.

A new urban young middle class was evolving, one that was independent of the ways of their parents and increasingly sympathetic to social and scientific advances.

But that was nothing compared to an article in Colliers entitled “No Father to Guide Them.” The article managed, as Reed noted, to combine antifeminism, anti-Semitism, and a phobia of science. Pincus was depicted as a kind of Rasputin of the science lab, bent on evil deeds. A photo showed him, with a cigarette dangling from his lip, holding up a rabbit that was clearly soon to be sacrificed. In Pincus’s world, the author, J. D. Ratcliff, wrote, “man’s value would shrink. It is conceivable that the process would not even produce males. The mythical land of the Amazons would then come to life. A world where women would be self-sufficient; man’s value precisely zero.” In reality, Pincus was the gentlest and most orthodox of men, a devoted husband and father, who left little poems behind on the pillow for his wife when he went to the lab in the morning. Still, the publicity did not sit well at Harvard. Pincus was already something of a controversial figure: He was Jewish in an age when American academia was still largely anti-Semitic; and his critics claimed he was too ambitious for his own good (and theirs).

THEY WERE THE FIRST to protest what they considered to be the blandness, conformity, and lack of serious social and cultural purpose in middle-class life in America. If much of the rest of the nation was enthusiastically joining the great migration to the suburbs, they consciously rejected this new life of middle-class affluence and were creating a new, alternative life-style; they were the pioneers of what would eventually become the counterculture. If other young people of their generation gloried in getting married, having children, owning property and cars, and socializing with neighbors much like themselves, these young men and women saw suburbia as a prison. They wanted no future of guaranteed pensions but instead sought freedom—freedom to pick up and go across the country at a moment’s notice, if they so chose. They saw themselves as poets in a land of philistines, men seeking spiritual destinies rather than material ones. Their protest would have significant political implications, but its content was essentially social and cultural. The politics of the era had little meaning for them, and they saw little difference between the two main parties. If there was one figure who symbolized their discontent, though, it was Dwight Eisenhower. One night during the mid-fifties, the

writer Jack Kerouac and a friend got drunk and drafted a message to the President: “Dear Eisenhower, We love you—You’re the great white father. We’d like to fuck you.” The original group had come together at Columbia University in upper Manhattan. The most successful students at Columbia—those who fit in easily at an elite Ivy League school—regarded them as outcasts. Everything about them was wrong: their clothes, their manners, their backgrounds. In truth, they were a rather unlikely amalgam of friends. Allen Ginsberg was an awkward, shy but enthusiastic seventeen-year-old from New Jersey who couldn’t quite decide whether to be impressed by Columbia or to make fun of it. In December 1943 he met Lucien Carr, who had recently transferred from the University of Chicago. Carr was playing Brahms on a player in his room, and Ginsberg, lonesome and bored, knocked on Carr’s door. “I heard music,” Ginsberg began. “Did you like it?” asked Carr. “I thought it might be the Brahms Clarinet Quartet,” Ginsberg said. “Well, well!” Carr said. “A little oasis in this wasteland.” Carr opened a bottle of wine. Ginsberg was dazzled, not least by Carr’s blond good looks.

These young rebels did not so much want to learn, thought Hal Chase, a member of the group, as “they wanted to emote, to soak up the world.” They aspired to become, as Allen Ginsberg put it, “intelligent, Melvillean street wanderers of the night.” Several of them were to become writers: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes, whose first book, Go, is often called the first Beat novel. The initial response from straight society was to try to send them to psychiatrists: Burroughs believed that the healthier you were, the more the straight world, which he considered inherently sick, wanted to see you as sick.

There was a great intensity to their lives in those days; they talked endlessly about what life should be, of how they would escape the mundane. They were, even by the usual standard of restless young men, exceptionally self-absorbed: They recorded their thoughts, dreams, and emotions meticulously, as if they were the first who had ever had them.

Writers they might have been, but in the end their lives tended to be more important than their books.

The Beats, as they came to be known, revered those who were different, those who lived outside the system, and particularly those who lived outside the law. They were fascinated by the criminal life and believed that men who had been to prison had experienced the essence of freedom from the system. In Go, Holmes described their world as “one of dingy backstairs ‘pads,’ Times Square cafeterias, bebop joints, nightlong wanderings, meetings on street corners, hitchhiking, a myriad of ‘hip’ bars all over the city, and the streets themselves. It was inhabited by people ‘hung up’ with drugs and other habits, searching out a new degree of craziness; and connected by the invisible threads of need, petty crimes of long ago, or the strange recognition of affinity. They were going all the time, living by night, rushing around to ‘make contact,’ suddenly disappearing into jail or on the road, only to turn up again and search one another out. They had a view that life was underground, mysterious, and they seemed unaware of anything outside the realities of deals, a pad to stay in, ‘digging the frantic jazz,’ and keeping everything going.” They were fascinated also by urban black culture, and they appropriated phrases from it: dig and cool and man and split. They saw themselves as white bopsters. They believed that blacks were somehow freer, less burdened by the restraints of straight America, and they sought to emulate this aspect of the black condition. An interest in African-American...

Drugs were also important. They were viewed as the key to the spiritual world. The cheapest and easiest (although often trickiest) high was benzedrine, imperfect but available from the local drugstore. Marijuana, then known as tea, was preferable to a benny.

Their name, the Beats, was borrowed from Herbert Huncke, a Times Square thief and male prostitute, who had used the word beat in regular conversation. As Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee note in Jack’s Book, an oral biography of Kerouac, the word came from the drug culture and has special meaning: “cheated, robbed or emotionally or physically exhausted.” Later, the definition was reinvented by Kerouac to mean “beatific,” to describe those who went against the prevailing tide of materialism and personal ambition. Malcolm Cowley, the distinguished editor and critic, more sympathetic to them than critics at the time, wrote that they were “looking for something to believe, an essentially religious faith that would permit them to live at peace with their world.” It was no small irony that the magic ingredient that allowed them to forgo regular jobs and still manage reasonably comfortable lives was the sheer affluence of the mainstream culture that they so disdained; the country was so rich that even those who chose not to play by its rules were protected.

ISOLATIONISM AS AN END in itself was finished. The Republican party had put on its international face and had chosen the man most identified with collective security and involvement with Europe as its leader. And yet internationalism—in the true sense of involvement in the world—was less the driving force than an international policy geared up to contain Communism.

Richard Nixon was assigned the job of reconciling the irreconcilable within the Republican Party. Dewey had recognized in him the ability to balance the internationalism of the Eastern wing with the anti-Communism and conservatism of the old isolationist wing. His economic policies were essentially Republican centrist leaning toward liberal. If there were occasional doubts about him in some of the old isolationist circles—a belief that he had sold out to the Eastern wing or that he was too pragmatic—then he immediately set out to silence such criticism by being a party workhorse, by going out and making endless speeches at county Republican dinners, by collecting due bills, becoming the ultimate party loyalist. In that he was successful, but the end result was that the contradictions of the Grand Old Party became his own. If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country.

His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party.

If Nixon set out to be the man who redefined the Republican political center in the post–New Deal, post–Fair Deal age, he did not, nor did any other young Republican politician, dare campaign by suggesting a return to the America that had existed before the New Deal. The phrase “creeping socialism” was about as close as they got to attacking the New Deal on its domestic reforms. Rather, the catchphrases were about a need to return to Americanism. It was better to attack

Communism and speak of domestic treason than it was to be specific about reversing the economic redistribution of the New Deal.