The Fifties

by David Halberstam

The move to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance took place in the spring of 1954, at the same time as the Army-McCarthy hearings. With McCarthy’s censure looming, it seemed that McCarthyism was over; and yet, ironically,

the key players who moved against Oppenheimer (including, eventually, Eisenhower himself) prided themselves on being opposed to McCarthy and were moving to head him off. Obviously, they were still making significant accommodations to the norms he had established; a certain ugliness had entered America’s bloodstream.

Washington was a city, after all, where it was true that the more powerful the man, the greater his sense of entitlement. In a city of powerful men whose lives were filled with more than the normal indiscretions of the human species—sexual, alcoholic, and financial—the mere threat of the existence of files was enough. There was, Hoover believed, a certain amount of scandal to almost everyone. He might have fancied himself the guardian of the greatness, strength, and moral decency of the American system, but his true power came from the very human deviations from morality on the part of the men who governed the country.

THE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD WAS turning out to be a more difficult and complicated place than Eisenhower’s policymakers had ever imagined. In the 1952 campaign, the Republicans had criticized the Democrats for losing so much of the world to the Communists. But now that the Republicans were in office, they found they had inherited a world filled with trouble spots that might easily go Communist on their watch. In Indochina, the French were fighting a colonial war against an indigenous Communist-nationalist force, and despite optimism from French military headquarters, the war was obviously not going well. The French public was tiring of it, and French politicians were beginning to ask America for increasing amounts of aid. As the colonial order collapsed in other parts of the world, a process much accelerated by World War Two, which had significantly weakened the traditional colonial powers, Marxism found fertile new ground. The Republicans found themselves facing a real dilemma; they did not want to “lose” any countries to Communism, but there were obvious limits to American military and political power abroad. In addition, as the Korean War proved, there were certain domestic restraints on American military involvement in the third world. The Eisenhower administration quickly

found a solution in the Central Intelligence Agency, which had developed a covert-operations capability in addition to its mandated role of gathering intelligence. This willingness to use the CIA for paramilitary and other clandestine operations was a marked contrast from the policies of the Truman years, and the first break came in June 1953, just five months after Eisenhower took office.

By this time, all sides were becoming edgy. In Iran, Mossadegh’s popularity was slipping during the hard months of the economic boycott, and he was becoming increasingly dependent on the support of the Tudeh. The British were impatient and anxious to topple him. It was obvious from

the start, Roosevelt thought, that the two Western allies had very different interests in the region: The British were driven by their desire to get back on line with Iranian oil, but the Americans, with their own large domestic oil deposits and their tight connections to the Saudis, were primarily interested in keeping the country out of the Soviet orbit. Starting in early February 1953, meetings between intelligence agents from Britain and America began taking place regularly on the subject.

In fact, even as Roosevelt was briefing the top national security people about Iran, planning was going ahead on the next coup—one that they hoped would topple the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. In fact, soon after Roosevelt’s return, he was offered the job of running the new covert operation, which confirmed his earlier suspicions about Foster Dulles’s eagerness to proceed in this sphere. The success of the coup in Iran, Roosevelt sensed, had provided an irresistible inducement for the Eisenhower administration: It had been quick, painless, and inexpensive. A potential adversary had been taken out with almost ridiculous ease. American newspapers had all carried the cover story, although the press elsewhere and the Iranian people talked openly about the CIA role.

Administration officials had few moral qualms either about their role or about deceiving the American press and people. They saw themselves in an apocalyptic struggle with Communism in which normal rules of fair play did not apply. The Soviet Union was run by a dictator, and its newspapers were controlled by the government; there was no free speech or public debate as it existed in the West. To allow such democratic scrutiny of clandestine operations in America could put the country at a considerable disadvantage. The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open. This was not just an isolated phenomenon but part of something larger going on in Washington—the transition from an isolationist America to America the international superpower; from Jeffersonian democracy

to imperial colossus. A true democracy had no need for a vast, secret security apparatus, but an imperial country did. As America’s international reach and sense of obligation increased, so decreased the instinct to adhere to traditional democratic procedures among the inner circle of Washington policymakers. Our new role in the world had put us in conflict not only with the...

What was happening at this moment, as the coup against Arbenz gradually took shape, was that American foreign policy was changing. It was doing so very quietly, with very little debate taking place—in fact almost no public debate, for that was seen as something that aided the enemy. The President himself, and many of the men around him, like those who had served Truman earlier, believed they were operating in a period that was, in any true sense, a continuation of the wartime period, when America had struggled against totalitarian governments in both Germany and Japan; now, they believed, the same struggle continued against Soviet expansionism.

Because the enemy was cruel and totalitarian, we were justified in responding in kind. Our survival demanded it. There were no restraints on the other side; therefore there should be no restraints on us. The men who were the driving forces of this new philosophy, the Dulles brothers, Beetle Smith, and their various deputies, as well as the President himself, were from a generation profoundly affected by the vulnerability of an isolationist America to attack by foreign powers—as Pearl Harbor had proved. They worried endlessly that the very nature of a democracy, the need for the consent of the governed, made this nation vulnerable to a totalitarian adversary. Therefore, in order to combat the enemy, the leaders of the democracies would have to sacrifice some of their nation’s freedoms and emulate their adversary. The national security apparatus in Washington was, in effect, created so America could compete with the Communist world and do so without the unwanted clumsy scrutiny of the Congress and the press. Given the nature of the Cold War and domestic political anxieties, the national security apparatus gradually grew richer and more powerful, operating under a separate set of laws (on occasion, it would become clear, under no laws at all). In any crisis, if there was an element of doubt about legality, it was best to press ahead because that was what the other side would do. The laws for the secret regime were being set

by our sworn adversaries, who, we were sure, followed no laws at all. The key men of this world, the real insiders from the CIA and the other semicovert parts of the government, soon developed their own culture and customs: They might be more or less invisible in terms of the ongoing public debate about foreign policy, but that simply made them all the more powerful. They were the real players in a real world as opposed to the world that newspapers wrote about and Congress debated. They might be pleasant and affable and did...

Nor, in those earlier years, did the Congress or the press push the secret government very hard to know what was going on; they accepted the governing rationale that there were things one should know and things best kept secret. “I’ll tell the truth to Dick [Russell]. I always do,” Dulles once said

before an appearance before Russell’s Senate Armed Services Committee. “That is, if Dick wants to know!” So the temptation to do things covertly grew; it was easier, less messy. In this netherworld of power and secrecy it was particularly comforting to the more established figures of Washington to have a man like Allen Dulles as head of the CIA.

Guatemala was one of the poorest places in the Western Hemisphere. No wonder American policymakers feared that it was a fertile place for Communism to take hold. A small oligarchy owned most of the land, wages were desperately low (in recent months there had been strikes by workers on United Fruit’s banana plantations seeking wages of $1.50 a day), and United Fruit, with the help of bribes and payoffs, controlled the political process of the country. It also controlled, either directly or indirectly, as Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer note in their book Bitter Fruit, some 40,000 jobs in Guatemala, and its investment there was valued at $60 million. Almost all of Guatemala’s railroad tracks belonged to a subsidiary of United Fruit; and in addition, United Fruit owned the telephone and telegraph facilities and ran the most important Atlantic port. Virtually anything that was modern belonged to La Frutera; what was old and broken-down belonged to the nation. Of La Frutera’s vast acreage of land, a relatively small percentage was kept under cultivation, in order not to flood the market with bananas and bring the price down. By 1950 the company reported an annual profit of $65 million, a figure that represented twice the total revenue of the Guatemalan government. No one important in the Guatemalan government existed without the approval of United Fruit. As such the country was traditionally run by anti-Communist dictators, plucked out of the military, who liked to use t...

suggested that Guatemala’s truck drivers, who were often on the road for three days at a time, receive some traveling expenses, Ubico screamed at him, “So! You too are a Communist!” On another occasion he accused Ydigoras of reading Communist literature: When the latter protested that he had been reading a papal encyclical and showed it to Ubico, Ubico skimmed it and said, “Then it’s true! There was a Communist Pope!” When conservative American political advisers suggested to Sam Zemurray, United Fruit’s head (Sam the Banana Man was the nickname he had gotten as a poor boy working the New Orleans port when he had managed to corner the banana market), that the company’s repressive policies put it on some sort of political collision course with its poorest workers, he waved them aside. Political revolution was no problem, he liked to say; the peasants were too ignorant. In 1944 the country’s fledgling middle class had revolted and brought back from exile the popular Juan Jose Arevalo Bermejo, a schoolteacher and writer who had been living in self-imposed exile for almost a decade because of his open opposition to Ubico. He was a true democrat, with a passionate belief that economic progress came through the political participation of ordinary people; his heroes were Bolivar, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Arevalo was, as Richard Immerman, the historian, noted, almost too idealistic, a kind of latter-day Don Quixote, yet

“his idealism coincided with the revolutionary fervor so prevalent in his country.” If his orientation was essentially liberal, the results of his administration were somewhat mixed. There was so far to go: 70 percent of the country (and 90 percent of the Indians) was illiterate when he took office. Yet every move he had made on behalf of ending ignorance and injustice was viewed with growing uneasiness by powerful interests by United Fruit. Particularly suspect were the labor laws borrowed from the New Deal, which sought to improve working conditions and provide some kind of compensation for work-related injuries. Even worse, the new laws gave workers the right to form unions and, if necessary, to strike. To the top executives of United Fruit, accustomed to having their every whim turned into law in Guatemala (and unhappy with Roosevelt’s domestic reforms anyway), the idea of sharing economic power in Central America was unthinkable. Their resistance to reforms, and their belief that the people of Guatemala were not entitled to the same freedoms as the citizens of the United States, eventually embittered Arevalo. In his valedictory speech in March 19...

IN YEARS TO COME, students of American foreign policy would have considerable difficulty deciding which secretary of state had been more militantly anti-Communist—Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles. But in the era of Dulles’s reign at the State Department, anyone could have told who was more self-righteous and who more prone to bombastic rhetoric about the justness of the American cause. As Reinhold Niebuhr said of him, “Mr. Dulles’s moral universe makes everything quite clear, too clear.... Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.”

After all, there was an inherent political contradiction at work, for underneath all the rhetoric Ike was, in essence, merely continuing the same Democratic policies of containment that the Republicans had been so bitterly attacking.

By the fall of 1953, the Eisenhower administration was formulating what it would later call “the New Look,” a reformulation of American foreign policy and military posture. It reflected the President’s belief that the true strength of America came from a healthy economy and that a heavy defense budget would diminish that strength. Cutting defense spending inevitably meant a greater dependence on atomic

weapons. Ike had arrived in office with the Korean War inflating the military budget to $42 billion. As they stepped down, Acheson, Lovett, and Harriman had recommended an additional $7 to $9 billion for air defense against the Soviets. One of the first things George Humphrey, the secretary of the treasury, did—with the help of Taft—was to help pare the defense budget down to $34.5 billion.

The adjunct to the New Look, first identified by Dulles in January 1954, was the doctrine of “massive retaliation.” (What Dulles actually said was that local defense measures would now be replaced throughout the world “by the further deterrence of massive retaliatory power.”) That meant we would react instantaneously, to even the smallest provocation, with nuclear weapons; therefore, an enemy would most assuredly not dare provoke us. The policy seemed to guarantee that all future wars would be short and inexpensive. But such military critics as Matt Ridgway were hardly impressed. He saw the world as far more disorderly, with all kinds of threats and enemies, requiring flexibility in the ways we might respond. Nor did he see nuclear weapons as a practical option in the many messy situations that were already developing around the world. The great powers were already locked in what was a de facto atomic stalemate, Ridgway and others argued. But what about insurgencies and brushfire wars that did not necessarily fit into the superpower nuclear equation? Was the New Look a viable strategy there, or was it primarily a bluff? Dulles’s speech about massive retaliation was not a great success abroad. Our allies were terrified by it. We seemed to them to threaten turning small wars into much larger ones.

There was one additional critical change in the American military establishment that had occurred the previous summer, and it reflected no small accommodation to the Republican right: Admiral Arthur Radford had replaced Omar Bradley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Bradley was, ostensibly, a mild-mannered man who seemed more a schoolteacher than a warrior (but who sacked more battalion commanders than any general in modern American history). One of the great generals of World War Two, he was closely associated in the public mind with Eisenhower, but he was also, as far as the Republican right was concerned, a man of Europe and containment. Worse for them, he had dissented from MacArthur more than anyone else. The final straw, though, turned out to be his refusal to support Eisenhower as he cut back traditional military forces and bet everything on a nuclear response.

Eisenhower, in all this, remained ambivalent. At one point in early April, he wrote Churchill a surprisingly passionate letter asking him to join in united action: “If I may refer again to history; we failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?” A few days later, at a press conference, he outlined for the first

time what became known as the domino theory. In response to a question about Indochina he answered: “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have the beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound consequences.” The loss of Dien Bien Phu, he said, would have dire consequences for Australia, New Zealand, and even Japan.

In Indochina (one of the three places where Dulles had apparently rescued the peace—the other two were in Korea and the island of Quemoy), he had succeeded by sending two aircraft carriers steaming into the South China Sea. It was, he noted, “a modern version of the classical show of force designed to deter any Red Chinese attack against Indochina, and to provide weapons for instant retaliation ...” In fact, the aircraft carriers had been a bluff that did not work and had absolutely no effect on the Vietminh. “You have to take chances for peace,” Dulles told Shepley, “just as you must take chances in war. Some say we were brought to the verge of war. Of course, we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try and run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you

are lost.... We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action.” From the article came the famous term for Dulles’s foreign policy, brinkmanship. Hearing later of Dulles’s boasts about his trips to the brink and the calculated risk involved, Georges Bidault, the former French foreign minister, noted with no small degree of bitterness that “It involved a great deal of calculation but no risks.” How wrong Dulles was to claim that we had escaped the taint of colonialism, the next generation of American policymakers would find out. For in the minds of Ho and General Giap, only half the battle had been won. Of what eight years of revolutionary war had done to Vietnam, of the fateful future political alignments it had produced, Americans had no comprehension. We had given nearly $3 billion in aid to the French, yet it might as well have gone into a black hole. The Vietminh had emerged with a modern, confident army, in which young men had risen through the ranks, despite peasant origins, by ability alone; the army in the South, soon to be created by the Americans, was an extension of the colonial age, reflecting class and privilege. It was virtually impossible for a peasant to rise to any kind of command in it. Our side reflected the old feudal order; their side released the nationalism so powerful in an anticolonial war. Our side was nationalist because the Americans said that Diem was a nationalist; we even hired public relations experts to sell the Ame...

nationalism; it had earned the title by dint of hard and long fighting. We could not see the affairs of Vietnam as they really were, mired as we were in prejudices generated by our own domestic politics. Rhetoric, repeated by Foster Dulles, emphasized that Vietnam was part of the larger struggle with China. We did not pause to understand why a peasant army had defeated a powerful Western army. Anyone who tried to talk about why the other side had won was vulnerable to charges of being soft on Communism. We had to see the struggle in Vietnam through the prism of the Cold War and had, in effect, already begun the process of making a commitment t...

That a record otherwise so admirable had a blot so serious was a reminder, the California writer and professor A. J. Langguth once said, that even in the very best politicians there is always some fatal imperfection.

So it was that on May 17, 1954, Earl Warren read the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court on an issue that had haunted America for almost a century: “We conclude that in the field of public opinion the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Not all black leaders were satisfied, although almost everyone was stunned that it was a unanimous decision. The question of compliance still existed, and a year later in a second

case, largely known as Brown II, the Court outlined what it expected. The Brown v. Board of Education decision not only legally ended segregation, it deprived segregationist practices of their moral legitimacy as well. It was therefore perhaps the single most important moment in the decade, the moment that separated the old order from the new and helped create the tumultuous era just arriving. It instantaneously broadened the concept of freedom, and by and large it placed the Court on a path that tilted it to establish rights to outsiders; it granted them not only greater rights and freedoms but moral legitimacy, which they had previously lacked. This had a profound effect on the growing and increasingly powerful communications industry in the United States. Because of Brown, reporters for the national press, print and now television, felt emboldened to cover stories of racial prejudice. Those blacks who went into the streets in search of greater freedom found that in this new era, they were not only covered but treated with respect and courtesy by journalists. Brown v. Board of Education was just the beginning of a startling new period of change, not just in the area of civil rights, but in all aspects of social behavior. One era was ending and another beginning.

This mass journey, which had begun at the time of World War One, marked the beginning of the end of a kind of domestic American colonialism. The other great industrial powers, like Britain and France and Holland, had established their exploitive economic system in distant places inhabited by people of color. America prided itself that it was not a colonial power, but, in fact, our colonialism was unofficial, practiced upon powerless black people who lived within our borders. When Britain and France ended their colonial rules in the middle of this century, they merely cut all ties to the regions they had exploited. In America, the exploited were American citizens living on American soil, mostly in the South. Thus a great migration began from the rural South—the colonial region—to the great metropolitan centers of the North, which they saw as a new homeland. But they came north with terrible disadvantages; most particularly, they had been denied the education that would allow them to make an easy transition to a more prosperous life.

He had been sent there by another talent scout, who had not wanted anything to do with him—and those awful pegged pants, the pink and black clothes. He was an odd mixture of a hood—the haircut, the clothes, the sullen, alienated look; and a sweet little boy—curiously gentle and respectful, indeed willing and anxious to try whatever anyone wanted. Everyone was sir or ma’am. Few young Americans, before or after, have looked so rebellious and been so polite.

Country blended with black blues was a strain that some would come to call rock-a-billy, something so powerful that it would go right to the center of American popular culture.

A new young generation of Americans was breaking away from the habits of its parents and defining itself by its music. There was nothing the parents could do: This new generation was armed with both money and the new inexpensive appliances with which to listen to it. This was the new, wealthier America. Elvis Presley began to make it in 1955, after ten years of rare broad-based middle-class prosperity. Among the principal beneficiaries of that prosperity were the teenagers. They had almost no memory of a Depression and the great war that followed it. There was no instinct on their part to save money. In the past when American teenagers had made money, their earnings, more often than not, had gone to help support their parents or had been saved for one treasured and long-desired purchase, like a baseball glove or a bike, or it had been set aside for college.

In this new subculture of rock and roll the important figures of authority were no longer mayors and selectmen or parents; they were disc jockeys, who reaffirmed the right to youthful independence and guided teenagers to their new rock heroes. The young formed their own community. For the first time in American life they were becoming a separate, defined part of the culture: As they had money, they were a market, and as they were a market they were listened to and catered to. Elvis was the first beneficiary. In effect, he was entering millions of American homes on the sly; if the parents had had their way, he would most assuredly have been barred.

Market economics had won. It augured a profound change in American taste: In the past, whites had picked up on black jazz, but that had largely been done by the elite. This was different; this was a visceral, democratic response by the masses. It was also a critical moment for the whole society: The old order had been challenged and had not held. New forces were at work, driven by technology. The young did not have to listen to their parents anymore. Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley were only the first of the new rebels from the world of entertainment and art. Soon to come were many others. If there was a common thread, it was that they all projected the image of being misunderstood, more often than not by their parents’ generation, if not their own parents themselves. There was little overt political content in their rebellion; their public personae and the characters they played were not fighting against the sinister injustices of the McCarthy era or racial injustice. Only Brando came close to politics when he confronted the mob in On the Waterfront.

To serious fans of the era’s theater and movies, Dean’s legend would eventually surpass Brando’s, and that was almost heretical, because Brando was the original and Dean the imitation.

Even more than Brando, he came to symbolize the belief of the youth of that era that because they were young, they were misunderstood.

If Dean had learned from Brando, now others would copy Dean. Elvis Presley, for one, wanted to be known as the James Dean of rock and roll. A line was beginning to run through the generations. Suddenly, alienation was a word that was falling lightly from his own lips and those of his friends, noted the writer Richard Schickel in an essay on the importance

of Marlon Brando as a cultural figure: “The Lonely Crowd was anatomized in 1950, and the fear of drifting into its clutches was lively in us. White Collar was on our brick and board bookshelves, and we saw how the eponymous object seemed to be choking the life out of earlier generations. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit stalked our nightmares and soon enough The Organization Man would join him there, though of course, even as we read about these cautionary figures, many of us were talking to corporate recruiters about entry-level emulation of them.”

It was a heady time. Everything was a risk. It was quite possible to do a campaign that succeeded brilliantly by mistake: It was equally possible to do a brilliant campaign and have it turn out to be a disaster.

A kind of misguided ethic began to take root, one of great and dangerous hubris—that it did not really matter how well made the cars were; if the styling was halfway decent and the ad campaign was good enough, the marketing department could sell them.

But in the new, affluent America even blue-collar jobs brought middle-class salaries. Young Americans, though, if they had one foot in the future and responded eagerly to the cornucopia of goods around them, still knew of a Calvinist past. The dilemma for them, and thus for Madison Avenue, was the question of how to balance the cautiousness of the past with the comparative opulence of the present.

The job for the advertiser, he said, was therefore not so much to just sell the product “as to give moral permission to have fun without guilt.” This was, he believed, a major psychological crisis in American life: the conflict between American

puritanism and appetites whetted by the new consumerism. Every time a company sold some item that offered a new level of gratification, he argued, it had to assuage the buyer’s guilt and, in his words, “offer absolution.”

America, it appeared, was slowly but surely learning to live with affluence, convincing itself that it had earned the right to its new appliances and cars. Each year seemed to take the country further from its old puritan restraints; each year, it was a little easier to sell than in the past.

One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-five years later was not

so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television.