The Fifties
4/5
()
About this ebook
Joe McCarthy. Marilyn Monroe. The H-bomb. Ozzie and Harriet. Elvis. Civil rights. It’s undeniable: The fifties were a defining decade for America, complete with sweeping cultural change and political upheaval. This decade is also the focus of David Halberstam’s triumphant The Fifties, which stands as an enduring classic and was an instant New York Times bestseller upon its publication. More than a survey of the decade, it is a masterfully woven examination of far-reaching change, from the unexpected popularity of Holiday Inn to the marketing savvy behind McDonald’s expansion. A meditation on the staggering influence of image and rhetoric, The Fifties is vintage Halberstam, who was hailed by the Denver Post as “a lively, graceful writer who makes you . . . understand how much of our time was born in those years.” This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.
David Halberstam
David Halberstam (1934–2007) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author. He is best known for his brazen coverage of the Vietnam War for the New York Times and for his twenty-one nonfiction books, which cover a wide array of topics such as the plight of Detroit and the auto industry, and the incomparable success of Michael Jordan. The recipient of the Mailer Prize for distinguished journalism, Halberstam wrote for numerous publications throughout his career and, according to journalist George Packer, single-handedly set the standard of “the reporter as fearless truth teller.” Halberstam died in 2007.
Read more from David Halberstam
The Powers That Be Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Reckoning Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summer of '49 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5October 1964 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Children Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy: A Biography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5David Halberstam on Sports: Summer of '49, October 1964, The Amateurs, Playing for Keeps Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Next Century Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Best Fishing Stories Ever Told Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Gigantic Book of Fishing Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFinding the Words: The Education of James O. Freedman Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStill Pitching: Musings from the Mound and the Microphone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The Fifties
Related ebooks
The Next Century Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Watergate: A New History Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bush Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, September 3, 1929–September 3, 1939 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51948: Harry Truman's Improbable Victory and the Year that Transformed America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fifties: An Underground History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): An American History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5That's the Way It Is: A History of Television News in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Being Poppy: A Portrait of George Herbert Walker Bush Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Children Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Popular Culture & Media Studies For You
Communion: The Female Search for Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know: Secrets, Conspiracies, Cover Ups, and Absurdities Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pimpology: The 48 Laws of the Game Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5And The Mountains Echoed Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thick: And Other Essays Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Element Encyclopedia of 20,000 Dreams: The Ultimate A–Z to Interpret the Secrets of Your Dreams Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-first Century Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dream Dictionary from A to Z [Revised edition]: The Ultimate A–Z to Interpret the Secrets of Your Dreams Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Regarding the Pain of Others Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bad Gays: A Homosexual History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hollywood's Dark History: Silver Screen Scandals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Betty Page Confidential: Featuring Never-Before Seen Photographs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Propaganda and the Public Mind Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Servant Leadership in Action: How You Can Achieve Great Relationships and Results Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gary Larson and The Far Side Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Psychology of Totalitarianism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Butts: A Backstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Fifties
276 ratings17 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Who knew that the Fifties were so dascinating?
As a child in the 1950s I missed the import of much of what went on in the world. As a teenager in the 1960s, i thought of the Fifties as another era with a dramatic break between. Halberstam vividly shows that so much of what has happened since has deep and profound roots in the decade that gets unfairly painted as monochrome. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Extremely well done chronicling of this critical decade in our country...Reads like a novel, but loaded with important insights.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A really interesting read. So many things got their start in the 50s
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The author and I are the same age, both graduated from high school and college the same years. Therefore the fifties for both of use was "our" decade. What amazes me about reading this book, now 50 years later is how much of it went right by me. Of course much was also secret, as the spy planes over the USSR, and "now it can be told". However, not reading many newspapers, with only network tv, concerned with family and job. I just not have been paying attentiong. . I did nor realize the controvery over the H bomb, the possibility McArthur might have led us into nucelar war. A very, very well written book, that should be pulled out for rereading from time to time. Policy makers would learn a lot, though where we had been might still not affect the future.I was especially interested in the bit about the cotton picker..both human and mechanical...It was introduced as part of the topic on the northern migration of the southern black (Obama's wife's family story), but also had a good history of the invention and prefection of the mechanical cotton picker itself, biography of a man named Rust. I immediately called my friend who manages family farms on the Mississippi and asked about the first time she had seen a cotton picker. About 1965 she said. When she gave me a tour of her farms she kept commenting on how the people, the white sharecroppers (all white) had left, and there were no more people. The book is replete with these unexpected details.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For novel research...A thorough, in-depth investigation into a decade that gets too much credit for being another era of the "good ol' days" when there was much social, cultural, and political turmoil that is responsible for founding the counter-cultural revolution of the sixties.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the first book of the late, great David Halberstam's that I read. Wonderful writing into the some light and deep events that happened in the 1950s. I have since read almost all his published works. My favorite historian/reporter.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fascinating and well written history of this tumultuous decade in American history: Elvis, Marilyn, the H-Bomb, McCarthy, Castro, Rosa Parks, Little Rock, The Feminine Mystique, TV, Sputnik... It all happened in the 50s and Halberstam covers them all and much more.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great read, covering a multitude of subjects and written in a popular style which is easy on the eye.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An easy book to read. The individual chapters stand alone as mini-masterpieces. A dynamic period in America's history. If you are a baby boomer you will love reading this book. Halberstam is one of the best journalists to write about the American Experinece.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Halberstam is of my parents generation and the 1950s were when they came of age, graduating high school and college, entering the work force. They were the "Silent Generation" because it is overshadowed by the larger Greatest and Boomer generations. The 50s tend to get short attention compared to the exciting 1940s (WWII) and the 1960s. Nevertheless, Halberstam makes a good case the decade was just as important. This simplistic thesis almost goes without saying (why else write the book?), but shows how dominate the narrative of the 1950s has become as a sort of gentle calm - rather The Fifties shows a time of great change in its own right. When it was published, I don't believe it received the kind of critical attention it deserved, fittingly for the Silents. It was ahead of its time, the early 90s and end of the Cold War sought to put that period behind us. But interest is starting to come around again, this book should see a lot more attention over the next decade or so. It is improving with age.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was born in 1952 and my recollections (as faint as they are) were of a much simpler time. But as Halberstam points out, there were tremendous changes about to begin in American culture, business, media, morals, technology and politics. The civil rights movement received a huge push with the Brown decision. The bith control pill was being developed.
I remember Dwight Eisenhower as a rather reserved leader. I was surprised about his promotions of overthrowing the governments of Iran and Guatemala. He would have also tried to over throw Castro if he had time left in office. He left that and the ill fated Bay of Pigs fiasco to the Kennedy administration.
I enjoyed the portrait of Charles Van Doren and the game show scandal. Joe McCarthy was shown as an alcoholic bully and liar. The Korean War was a mistake and we were about to repeat the mistakes of the French in Vietnam.
The portrait that registered most to me was Frederic Morrow, a black man who endured tremendous insults working in the Eisenhower administration. He was constantly humiliated when it came to travel and hotel arrangements. People treated him as a porter and driver. A very depressing story of the lack of civil rights and civility in the Eisenhower White House.
It’s a long book but there are so many interesting stories, people and events that even if you are not a historian, you will enjoy the book. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I read Halberstam's wonderful and important "Best and the Brightest" when it came out. This is the second one of his I've read and it is just about as good and important. It was also very heartening to read during the recent Gov't Shutdown fiasco, just to realize that people can be even more stupid and more evil and more self-interested and more ignorant and more manipulative. Even. And, yet, we survive and move on and change. A little.
[edit]
I did not elaborate on the above. As bad as some things were in the Fifties, the US still passed into law and thru the courts de-segregation and fought towards the 1960s Civil Rights. It is often simply unbelievable what civilization can do.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I read this book because I'm writing a novel set in the '50s and I wanted to learn as much about the period as I could, and it certainly did teach me a lot. I found the author's lack of objectivity (giving very strong opinions about different people) interesting. My only frustration with the book was the lack of attention paid to women. I understand that in certain areas of life (e.g. politics) there just weren't many prominent women to discuss, but it seemed like there were other chapters when women could've been focused on more but were pushed aside in favour of men. And the discussion of the oppression of women in mainstream society at large was shoved way back towards the very end of the book.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The practice of using decades as a units of history seems to be popular in the US but not elsewhere. Appropriately, The Fifties is primarily about the United States; its topics may seem as insular as some of the individuals who figure in the story.. Another characteristic of the decade as an American historical unit is that it is probably more of a popular rather than an academic way to think about the past. The Fifties is popular not academic history.CONS: Ends rather abruptly. Tend to lose track of the year being covered; since a lot of the biographical sketches naturally pre-date the period under consideration. Noteworthy gaps in coverage: general financial history, infrastructure and the economy, and taxes. Feminist history lacks nuance. Focusing on Betty Friedan limits scope to college-educated women’s careers. LGBT history barely touched on. Nothing on the environment although to be fair, the book was written before it became a big topic. Maybe too much attention paid to what I would consider relatively trivial popular culture topics: basketball, rock and roll, quiz shows. The juxtaposition with the themes of race relations and the development of the birth control pill (and the hydrogen bomb) with lengthy coverage of the passion of Charles Van Doren or the adventures of Allen Ginsberg at Columbia made me a little uncomfortable. PROS. Highly readable. The biographies and the details of the topics the author chooses to cover are skillful and on point. The technique is not all that different from pre-modern histories except the biographies aren’t about kings, emperors, generals and clerics. History as a series of interesting lives can be a little misleading, on the other hand. Some items I found interesting:Theme. The triumph of the Midwest. The image of the family, the family car, and the interaction of family and car on TV, all come out of the Midwest. Biography. Pat Nixon meets Gloria Steinem. Pat Nixon did not have a Betty Friedan childhood. While, understandably, the author emphasizes the growth of the economy in the 50s, one wonders what portion of the population was not able to float with the rising tide. The ironies of US foreign policy. Eisenhower, a former general, was nevertheless a fiscal conservative. His objection to the military industrial complex was that its minions spent too much taxpayer money. The trump card for the MI complex was the conventional wisdom that the Soviets were devoting most of their economy to weapons development. The U2 spyplane showed that the size and power of the Soviet arsenal was highly exaggerated. Eisenhower and his staff knew this, but the thinking was that making this common knowledge would be admitting that the US was flying over Soviet airspace and would, in addition, undermine the CIA, so the information had to be classified. So during the Eisenhower presidency the Democrats and the Republicans out of the classified loop constantly attacked the administration for not keeping up with the Soviets because the government was not spending enough on weapons development. This also resulted in the administration considering nuclear weapons as the first resort in times of crisis because they were seen as the cheaper alternative to conventional weapons development. Detail: the pill. Gregory (Goody) Pincus was denied tenure at Harvard (possibly because he was Jewish). With financing via Margaret Sanger, he put together a laboratory and staff that isolated the steroid that would be used to regulate ovulation. The big pharma company Searle controlled the patent on progesterone, the basis of the oral contraceptive, and did not pay out royalties to Pincus, his widow, and his staff, but Searle generously donated a half million dollars to Harvard research! Related detail: during the 20s it was apparently against Roman Catholic doctrine to perform a Caesarean section (logically as unnatural as condoms and the pill, after all). John Rock, instrumental in the development of the pill, was Roman Catholic (devout, not nominal) and was nearly denied the sacrament because he performed Caesareans in his practice.Detail. In segregated Alabama, African-Americans paid fare to the bus driver, but were then required to exit from the front and enter through the back door of the bus. Some bus drivers did not open the back door and simply drove off. Many more details about life as it was lived by African Americans in the decade. Micro and macro aggression squared. Eisenhower’s racism (see the anecdote about Ralph Bunche) and how it allowed the Little Rock crisis to expand.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the best book that I have read for a long time. It is not however, a comprehensive history of the decade but rather, a detailed and engrossing account of American history during the period - no Suez or Hungary here. The breadth of coverage, in terms of topics covered, is stunning (housing, civil rights, foreign policy, pop culture etc etc) and it contains chapters about many, many things I knew nothing about.Halberstam's writing style is easy to follow and includes an appropriate number of humorous anecdotes. Highly recommended.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book has been re-issued several times. This copy was provided by Open Road Media and Netgalley. This a lengthy book that attempts to cover an entire decade. The fifties did indeed bring about a great many changes to our country. This book reminds us of how suburbia took hold, motel chains like Holiday Inn took off , as well as McDonald's. We revisited the cold war , McCarthyism, Eisenhower's administration, Korea, desegregation, television, music, the pill, popular actors and movies, bombs, Cuba, popular automobiles, and a lot of politics. For me personally, I enjoyed the chapters that focused on the roles of women and their growing dissatisfaction and the subtle brainwashing the popular magazines used to sell an image that was impossible to maintain. I also enjoyed the chapters on pop culture. Elvis, Marilyn, James Dean , Marlon Brando, Lucy, and the infamous quiz show scandal. However, there were more chapters devoted to the H bomb, wars, and politics than anything else. While a lot of that was interesting, it did read like very dry history and I often found myself tuning out. I did enjoy most of the book and learned many things about the fifties I didn't know and I enjoyed the nostalgia as well. There are a few photos provided at the end of the book. Overall this one gets a B + Thanks again to the publisher and Netgalley for the digital copy.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5OK, I guess, but not very inspiring.There was nothing to hate in this, but nothing much to love either. We get pretty much what you would expect --- political history intertwined with social history.
Book preview
The Fifties - David Halberstam
The Fifties
David Halberstam
For Julia Sandness Halberstam
Contents
Preface
ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
TWO
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
THREE
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Image Gallery
Author Interviews for The Fifties
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Author’s Note
A Biography of David Halberstam
PREFACE
THE FIFTIES WERE CAPTURED in black and white, most often by still photographers; by contrast, the decade that followed was, more often than not, caught in living color on tape or film. Not surprisingly, in retrospect the pace of the fifties seemed slower, almost languid. Social ferment, however, was beginning just beneath this placid surface. It was during the fifties, for example, that the basic research in the development of the birth-control pill took place; but it was not until a decade later that this technological advance had a profound effect upon society. Then, apparently overnight, rather conservative—indeed cautious—sexual practices were giving way to what commentators would speak of as the sexual revolution. It was in the fifties that the nation became wired for television, a new medium experimented with by various politicians and social groups. Ten years later television had begun to alter the political and social fabric of the country, with stunning consequences.
Three decades later, the fifties appear to be an orderly era, one with a minimum of social dissent. Photographs from the period tend to show people who dressed carefully: men in suits, ties, and—when outdoors—hats; the women with their hair in modified page-boys, pert and upbeat. Young people seemed, more than anything else, square
and largely accepting of the given social covenants. At the beginning of the decade their music was still slow and saccharine, mirroring the generally bland popular taste. In the years following the traumatic experiences of the Depression and World War II, the American Dream was to exercise personal freedom not in social and political terms, but rather in economic ones. Eager to be part of the burgeoning middle class, young men and women opted for material well-being, particularly if it came with some form of guaranteed employment. For the young, eager veteran just out of college (which he had attended courtesy of the G.I. Bill), security meant finding a good white-collar job with a large, benevolent company, getting married, having children, and buying a house in the suburbs.
In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society. After all, it was reflected back at them not only by contemporary books and magazines, but even more powerfully and with even greater influence in the new family sitcoms on television. These—in conjunction with their sponsors’ commercial goals—sought to shape their audience’s aspirations. However, most Americans needed little coaching in how they wanted to live. They were optimistic about the future. Young men who had spent three or four years fighting overseas were eager to get on with their lives; so, too, were the young women who had waited for them at home. The post–World War II rush to have children would later be described as the baby boom.
(Everything else in the United States seemed to be booming, so why not the production of children as well?) It was a good time to be young and get on with family and career: Prices and inflation remained relatively low; and nearly everyone with a decent job could afford to own a home. Even if the specter of Communism lurked on the horizon—particularly as both superpowers developed nuclear weapons—Americans trusted their leaders to tell them the truth, to make sound decisions, and to keep them out of war.
For a while, the traditional system of authority held. The men (and not men and women) who presided in politics, business, and media had generally been born in the previous century. The advent of so strong a society, in which the nation’s wealth was shared by so many, represented a prosperity beyond their wildest dreams. During the course of the fifties, as younger people and segments of society who did not believe they had a fair share became empowered, pressure inevitably began to build against the entrenched political and social hierarchy. But one did not lightly challenge a system that seemed, on the whole, to be working so well. Some social critics, irritated by the generally quiescent attitude and the boundless appetite for consumerism, described a silent
generation. Others were made uneasy by the degree of conformity around them, as if the middle-class living standard had been delivered in an obvious tradeoff for blind acceptance of the status quo. Nonetheless, the era was a much more interesting one than it appeared on the surface. Exciting new technologies were being developed that would soon enable a vast and surprisingly broad degree of dissidence, and many people were already beginning to question the purpose of their lives and whether that purpose had indeed become, almost involuntarily, too much about material things.
ONE
ONE
IN THE BEGINNING, THAT era was dominated by the shadow of a man no longer there—Franklin D. Roosevelt. He had died in 1945, but his impact on American politics was so profound that even the most powerful Republican leaders believed privately that their party might be permanently in the minority. Roosevelt had been cast forth in the midst of two transcending events—the Great Depression and World War Two. The first was responsible for a massive reordering of the American economy and society, thereby creating a huge, new base for the Democrats; the second permitted Roosevelt to emerge as an international leader in a time of great crisis and to prolong his presidency for two additional terms. During that time, the infrastructure of the Democratic party became ever more powerful and Roosevelt was able to extend his reach into the courts.
Roosevelt was the ultimate modern politician, the first great master of modern mass communications in a democracy. For millions of poorer Americans and for the new immigrants and their children, his ability to exploit radio and make it seem his personal vehicle had a particular resonance. To them, Roosevelt was not only President-for-life, he was their guide to the rites of American politics.
The effect of this on the Republican party, mired as it was in political attitudes that predated the Depression, World War Two, and the coming of radio, was devastating. In July 1949, some nine months after his own shocking defeat by Harry Truman (which seemed to promise the Roosevelt coalition would go on ad infinitum), Thomas E. Dewey met with Dwight Eisenhower, then the president of Columbia University, to begin the process of coercing Ike to run for the presidency in 1952 as a Republican. Eisenhower’s notes of that meeting are unusually revealing of the Republican dilemma: "All middle-class citizens of education have a common belief that the tendencies towards centralization and paternalism must be halted and reversed. No one who voices these opinions can be elected. He [Dewey] quotes efforts of Hoover, Landon, Willkie, Himself. Consequently we must look around for someone of great popularity and who has not frittered away his political assets by taking positive stands against national planning, etc, etc. Elect such a man to Presidency, after which [N.B.: italics Ike’s] he must lead us back to safe channels and paths." In effect Dewey was saying that the solid citizens who could make the right decisions for the future of the country had, because of the New Deal, become a minority and that the nation had fallen into the clutches of dark and alien forces.
Not surprisingly, the Republican party was traumatized and bitterly divided. Certainly, the Democratic party was divided as well, between the liberal Northern urban coalition and the Southern conservative Jim Crow wing. But for all their differences, the Democrats had a certain glue: They won, and in victory there was patronage and power, a combination that transcended ideology. For the Republicans there was only the taste of ashes. They had been out of office since 1932. The shadow of the Depression still hung over them, and the Democrats were still running against Herbert Hoover, portraying the Republicans as the party of cold, uncaring bankers. Were the Republicans forever to be trapped by those events then twenty years in the past?
Of the divisions within the Republican party, the most obvious was a historic, regional one. On one side were the lawyers and bankers of Wall Street and State Street, their colleagues through the great Eastern industrial cities, and those in the powerful national media, based in New York. They were internationalist by tradition and by instinct: They had fought against the New Deal in states where the power of labor was considerable but had eventually come to accept certain premises of the New Deal. By contrast, the Republicans of the heartland were essentially unchanged by the great events that had overtaken them; they were resentful of World War Two and suspicious of how Roosevelt had gotten them into it. This was particularly true of the many German-Americans in the region. Instinctively Anglophobic, they were wary of our growing involvement in Western Europe and our close alliance with the British. If they had a bible other than the Bible, it was the conservative, isolationist Chicago Tribune of Colonel Robert R. McCormick. They were anxious to go back to the simple, comfortable world of the twenties, before the New Deal had empowered labor unions, before air travel had shrunk the Atlantic Ocean into a pond, and before scientists had ever thought about developing intercontinental ballistic missiles to catapult atomic warheads into their midst.
They lived in God’s country, a land far from oceans and far from foreigners, and they were all-powerful in their own small towns. Many had gone to college and returned home to succeed their fathers in family businesses. They had always controlled their political and economic destinies locally, and they presumed that by acting in concert with others like themselves in other small towns, they could control the national destiny. Earlier in the century they had regarded Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover as the guardians of their values in Washington; they had considered the nation’s capital an extension of their own small towns. Now they looked at Washington and saw the enemy. Even in their own towns, their mastery had been limited by the rise of arrogant, impertinent labor unions. Even worse, they seemed to have lost control of their own party. That was the final insult. Confident that they represented Republicanism and true patriotism, they were at war with the Eastern Republicans, who, in their eyes, were traitors, tainted by cooperation with the New Deal. Robert Taft, the conservative wing’s great leader, believed Easterners had fallen victim to the liberal press and labor unions. As Taft wrote in a letter to a friend about Tom Dewey: Tom Dewey has no real courage to stand up against the crowd that wants to smear any Republican who takes a forthright position against the New Deal.
The conservatives had lost in 1940, when the Easterners had blitzed them at the last minute with Wendell Willkie at the convention. A Hoosier by birth, Willkie had to their minds lost touch with his roots and become a captive of the East. The barefoot boy from Wall Street,
he was called. Willkie had, said Alice Roosevelt Longworth, grass roots in every country club in America.
Then in 1944, with Willkie virtually supporting Roosevelt against his own party (which, of course, did not surprise the conservatives—they had known that about him before he knew it himself), the same Eastern forces coalesced behind Thomas E. Dewey, the modern, reform-minded governor of New York. The Easterners knew, after all, what it took to be elected governor of New York in this day and age—the kind of deals necessary with labor and ethnic groups. The first time around, Dewey was easily defeated by an aging, sickly Roosevelt, who won his fourth term. But in 1948, the Republicans were finally free from Roosevelt’s personal charm. The Easterners nominated Dewey a second time.
The 1948 campaign proved to be a watershed for the Republicans. They were absolutely confident that Thomas E. Dewey would beat Truman, whom they saw as a small-town haberdasher, devoid of Roosevelt’s charm and as uncomfortable with an open radio microphone as the average Republican. But there was the problem of Dewey’s stiffness. Alice Longworth described Dewey as looking like the little man on the wedding cake.
The chocolate soldier,
the Chicago Tribune called him. He had come to prominence as a crime-busting D.A. and then had proved a capable governor of New York. During the 1940s he had become a serious internationalist, thus becoming the singular target of the Republican isolationists. To Colonel Robert McCormick, of the Chicago Tribune, and his followers, Dewey was virtually a New Deal Democrat. "If you read the Chicago Tribune you’d know I am a direct lineal descendant of FDR," Dewey once noted.
For all his bureaucratic skills, Dewey was a cold piece of work. He was, said one longtime associate, cold—cold as a February icicle.
The little man,
Roosevelt had called him privately, referring not merely to his lack of height. Even those who worked closely with him and who admired him thought he was unbending and self-righteous. He struts sitting down,
said Lillian Dykstra, a close friend of Martha Taft, and thus not an entirely unbiased source. Dewey was uncomfortable with political bonhomie; he would spend as little time as possible with working politicians (and when he did, more often than not he offended them); he could not bear to go to wakes or funerals, a crucial ritual in the Irish-dominated politics of New York City. His disrespect for other politicians extended to both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, whom he referred to privately as those congressional bums.
Campaigning for the presidential nomination on his own train with such supporters as the governor of Connecticut, he would excuse himself from his guests after the morning’s stops and lunch alone. Smile, Governor,
a photographer once said to him. I thought I was,
he answered.
His strengths were his sense of purpose, his integrity, and his political cleanliness. An honest cop with the mind of an honest cop,
William Allen White called him. When he signed autographs he would date them, so that no stranger could imply a closer relationship than truly existed. In 1948 he refused—and this was a point of honor—to use the Communist-in-government issue as a political weapon, and he refused, despite mounting pressure from the Republican right, to do any red-baiting, even as that was becoming ever more fashionable in postwar American politics. He had forbidden one of his New York colleagues to mail a letter critical of George Marshall and his policies in China to the editor of a local paper. During the 1948 campaign, when Harold Stassen had presented something of a surprise challenge to Dewey’s renomination, he and Dewey had debated during the Oregon primary on the question of whether or not the Communist party should be outlawed or not. Dewey argued that it should not. He was against outlawing it, he said, because you can’t shoot an idea with a gun.
Some of his advisers suggested that he soft-pedal his advocacy of civil liberties, that this was not the right time for it. He refused, telling them, If I’m going to lose, I’m going to lose on something I believe in.
The debate had been the forerunner of the televised presidential campaign debates to come twelve years later, and some 40 to 60 million people were said to have listened. Dewey carried Oregon, and won the nomination. During the regular campaign, the right-wing New Hampshire publisher William Loeb and his favorite senator, Styles Bridges, pleaded with Dewey to start hitting the Communist-in-government issue. He listened to them and then, in the words of Hugh Scott, one of his campaign aides and later a senator, he said he would fleck it lightly.
The right-wingers were furious. As far as they were concerned, he was throwing away their best issue. Yet Dewey remained adamant. He thought it degrading to accuse the President of the United States of being soft on Communism. He was not, he told Styles Bridges, the Republican national campaign manager, going around looking under beds.
His aides got nowhere, Herbert Brownell, his top political adviser, decided, because his wife hated the idea of partisan attacks. She wanted him to be, in her words, more presidential. This was not the first time she had blocked the requests of the political men around him. For years Brownell and others had thought his trademark mustache—which perhaps gave him a crisp no-nonsense look as a district attorney—was a detriment for him as a national politician, because it made him look cold and unfeeling. In photographs and in newsreels, it was the only thing that people seemed to remember about him. His face was so small, and the mustache was so large,
Brownell later lamented. Again and again his political people suggested the removal of the mustache, but every time the idea was vetoed by Mrs. Dewey.
He was a heavy favorite to win, and he took the high road. Thus there was not a great deal dividing Truman and Dewey on foreign policy, and on domestic issues Dewey had no great desire to emphasize whatever differences existed. Dewey was also wary of attacking too hard; he did not want to appear as the prosecutor he had been. He would be above pettiness, above partisanship. His platform, said Samuel Rosenman, the Roosevelt-Truman speechwriter, was fit for any good New Dealer to run on.
In truth he campaigned not as the challenger but as the incumbent, as a man who had already been elected President by endless polls and surveys. He would be the good administrator who cleaned out the mess in Washington after sixteen years of Democratic rule. The idea of a Truman victory seemed impossible to nearly everyone. George Gallup even told the Republican high command that it was a waste of their money to continue polling, since the results were a foregone conclusion. But Harry Truman had not spent all those years in the Pendergast machine for nothing. That summer he ambushed Dewey; he called the Congress back into session and fed it legislation that underlined the vast differences between Dewey the modern Republican as presidential candidate and the Republican party as embodied by those conservatives still powerful in the Congress and still fighting the New Deal. It was the defining moment of the campaign. It resurrected Truman and gave him something to run against. Even so, no one really believed he could win. Dewey’s chief campaign tactic was to make no mistakes, to offend no one. His major speeches, wrote the Louisville Courier Journal, could be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead ...
In the final few weeks a few Republicans sensed that the tide had turned against Dewey. Among them was Bob Taft. He knew Dewey was going to lose, he told The New York Times writer Bill White, when his wife Martha stopped listening to his speeches on the radio and watching his occasional appearances on television.
On election eve, the Chicago Tribune had its famous headline proclaiming Dewey’s victory, and Alistair Cooke had already sent in his piece for the Manchester Guardian entitled, Harry S Truman, A Study in Failure.
But even with Roosevelt gone, the Republicans blew the election. But Truman won and the Republicans now faced four more years out of office. The bitterness within the party grew. So much for the high road in American politics. The Communist issue would be fair game in the near future. It was the only way they knew how to fight back.
It was a mean time. The nation was ready for witch-hunts. We had come out of World War Two stronger and more powerful and more affluent than ever before, but the rest of the world, alien and unsettling, seemed to press closer now than many Americans wanted it to. An unwanted war had not brought a true peace, and there would be many accusations that the Democrats had won the war but lost the peace. As David Caute wrote in The Great Fear, the true isolationists thought that Roosevelt had dragged us into the wrong war: wrong allies, wrong enemies, wrong outcome.
A peace that permitted Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe was unacceptable to many Americans. There had to be an answer; there had to be a scapegoat: These things could not merely have happened, not in a fair and just world. Nor would anyone in the United States Congress score points with the folks back home by pointing out that the Soviets held Eastern Europe because they, more than anyone, had borne the brunt of the Wehrmacht, and at a terrible price—the loss of some 20 million people. We knew of the war what we chose to know; to most Americans it had begun only on December 7, 1941, and as for the action in Europe, it had begun only after the American forces landed on the continent in June 1944.
The domestic coalition to fight the war, which Franklin Roosevelt had put together, had been more fragile than anyone realized. Republican politicians had been out of power for too long, and their postwar political rhetoric had a basic purpose and tone: It was about getting even. There were, in those days following the war, a great many speeches given in civic clubs and chambers of commerce in towns throughout America about the need to get back to Americanism, returning to the American way, and the domestic dangers of Communism and Socialism. Included under the label of Socialism, in the minds of those giving the speeches (and among many of those hearing them), was almost any part of the New Deal. In 1946 B. Carroll Reece, the Tennessee congressman and chairman of the Republican National Committee, said the coming election would be a choice between Communism and Republicanism.
George Murphy, an actor, singer, and dancer turned politician, told one Republican fund-raiser, Party labels don’t mean anything anymore. You can draw a line right down the middle. On one side are the Americans, on the other are the Communists and Socialists.
No matter that in the dramatic wartime and postwar expansion of the American economy many of these heads of industry had become substantially wealthier. It was time to get even for the New Deal. Whittaker Chambers, who would be the key witness against Alger Hiss, wrote in his book Witness, When I took up my little sling and aimed at communism I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely and somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for the last two decades.
In the early years of his administration Truman was hardly an ideal target for the angry conservatives; he was so solidly Midwestern, small-town, and unpretentious that he was perilously close to being one of their own. If there was an enemy, someone who represented a target for all the accumulated resentment of the past and all the tensions of class, region, and education, it was Dean Acheson—he of Groton, Harvard, Wall Street, and State, the very embodiment of the Eastern establishment. His timing, as he ascended to the position of secretary of state, was not exactly ideal. On January 21, 1949, the day on which Acheson was sworn in, Chiang Kai-shek turned over what remained of his command on the mainland to one of his generals and left for Formosa. The civil war in China was over, and the Communists had won. It was a bad omen.
In the face of what may well have been some of the most relentless domestic criticism aimed at a public official in this century, Acheson showed one fatal flaw: He never failed to show his contempt for his critics and their ideas. Once, when Senator Taft called for a reexamination of American foreign policy, Acheson retorted that the idea reminded him of a farmer who goes out every morning and pulls up his crops to see how they have done during the night.
He had many qualities, but the capacity to resist his innate snobbery was not one of them. Even his clothes and personal manner, British in style, were viewed by the right-wingers as one more snobbish affectation on his part. It meant that American styles of clothes and haircuts were not good enough. ... I watch his smart-aleck manner, and his British clothes and that New Dealism ... and I want to shout, Get out, Get out. You stand for everything that has been wrong with the United States for years,
said Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska. Even his mustache seemed to offend. Averell Harriman once told Acheson: Shave it off. You owe it to Truman.
Acheson came honestly by his Anglophilic tendencies. His father had been born in Ulster and, at the age of fourteen, immigrated to Canada, where he eventually married a handsome young woman from a wealthy Canadian family. They moved to Connecticut when Dean was a year old. Of his mother’s love of things English, he wrote, My mother’s enthusiasm for the Empire and the Monarch was not diluted by any corrupting contact with Canadian nationalism.
Fearless and intellectually superior, he possessed a highly developed sense of integrity and honor. In a world in which the old order had collapsed and a new and dangerous adversary risen up, he retained a clear view of the challenges America faced: to prop up an exhausted and shattered Europe and, at the same time, to make this policy acceptable to his own countrymen. Acheson was far more successful at the former than the latter. His internationalism was instinctive, although he was far less interested in such exotic places as Asia and Africa than he was in Europe. He was not alarmed by the collapse of China, and he urged Congress not to exaggerate the consequences. China, he told them, was not a modern, centralized state, and the Communists would almost certainly face as much difficulty in governing it as had the previous regimes.
In his first year as secretary of state he was dogged by the turn of events in China and by the growing anger among the Republicans. However, it was when the Alger Hiss case broke that he became the perfect target for the right-wing. The case symbolized (or seemed to symbolize) the divisions of an entire era. A man named Whittaker Chambers, his own background quite shady, charged that Hiss had been a fellow member of the Communist Party while serving in the government. At first it seemed an accusation unlikely to stick. Chambers—aka David Breen, Lloyd Cantwell, Charles Adams, Arthur Dwyer, Harold Phillips, Carl Carlson, and perhaps George Crosley—was a confessed former underground member of the Communist party, an admitted homosexual (a pervert,
as the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, often referred to him and other homosexuals in private memos), and unusually sloppy in dress and personal hygiene. His political past was so filled with dramatic changes of direction and ideology that it made even his closest friends uneasy. The man he accused of being a Communist was strikingly patrician and handsome. His aristocratic bearing seemed to confirm his political legitimacy and sum up his perfect pedigree: Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Law Review. Felix Frankfurter arranged a clerkship for him with the famed Oliver Wendell Holmes, the preeminent jurist of his generation. At the time of the accusations, Alger Hiss was head of the Carnegie Endowment, the chairman of whose board was none other than John Foster Dulles.
Even members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, who were inclined to believe any accusations about anyone, looked down on Chambers. The House Committee was made nervous, even intimidated, by Hiss’s immediate and complete denial of ever having known Chambers, and seemed on the verge of withdrawing from the case. Only a very junior member, Richard Nixon (Rep. of Calif.), persisted—among other reasons, because he was being fed secret FBI documents—and kept the Committee from backing off completely.
The setting was this: August 3, 1948, the House Committee, which included a large number of the most unattractive men in American public life—bigots, racists, reactionaries, and sheer buffoons—held hearings in which Whittaker Chambers not only said that he himself was a Communist but that there was a Communist group in the government in the late thirties and that Alger Hiss was a member of it. Hiss denied the accusation and denied under oath that he had ever even known Chambers. His friends rallied round. Dean Acheson, then a law partner of Hiss’s brother, Donald, helped with the early legal planning; William Marbury, a prominent Baltimore attorney and a very old and close personal friend, sent a note to Donald Hiss, who had been similarly accused: If you and Alger are party members, then you can send me an application.
Hiss himself seemed to play down the seriousness of the charges, and told his wife, Priscilla, Don’t worry, little one. This will all blow over. I will handle it.
On August 5, that is precisely what he did. Before the Committee, Hiss seemed imposing, almost imperious, a paragon of the establishment. His appearance caused the British journalist Alistair Cooke to call him an American gentleman, one of the incomparable human products, all the rarer for the heavy parodies that crowd it out, the glossy tailored caricatures of metropolitan society ... Here was a subject for Henry James; a product of New World courtesy, with a gentle certitude of behavior, a ready warmth, a brighter, naiver grace than the more trenchant, fatigued, confident, or worldlier English prototype.
I am not and never have been a member of the Communist party,
he said under oath. When asked by the chairman, Karl Mundt, if he recognized photos of Chambers, he answered, I might mistake him for the [acting] chairman of the Committee.
This line received considerable laughter. It was the high-water mark for him in the case. All day he was relaxed and confident. By the end of the day, Mundt congratulated Hiss for his forthright testimony. John Rankin, the virulent racist from Mississippi, came over to shake his hand. Let’s wash our hands of the whole mess,
said F. Edward Hebert, the Louisiana Democrat. Only Richard Nixon wanted to push on. There was something about Hiss that he did not like and did not trust. Nixon, rejected after his graduation from Duke Law School by all the top New York law firms, was always conscious of social distinctions and East Coast snobbery, and he was irritated rather than impressed by Hiss’s imperiousness. Someone was clearly lying. Why not have the two men confront each other? Nixon suggested. Robert Stripling, the Committee’s chief investigator, later said in an interview that Nixon had his hat set for Hiss. It was a personal thing. He was no more concerned about whether or not Hiss was [a Communist] than a billygoat.
The confrontation was set for August 17.
Even those who knew and liked Chambers marveled at his paranoia and his need to dramatize almost everything he did. When he went out for a simple lunch with friends, he would have to come up with an elaborate method of exiting the building in case anyone was following him. A Coolidge Republican at the start of his undergraduate years, then a didactic Communist, he eventually became the most unforgiving anti-Communist intellectual in the country.
Anyone who later read his personal memoir, Witness, could understand why he was so tortured. His had been a childhood of unrelieved misery. His father was an alcoholic who eventually left home for a homosexual lover. As a boy, Chambers used to say to himself: I am an outcast. My family is outcast. We have no friends, no social ties, no church, no organization that we claim and that claims us, no community.
In his post-Communist years, as a senior writer at Time, it became clear he was a man of considerable talent and one of the most accomplished writers on the Luce publications of that era. He was, the journalist Murray Kempton noted, the perfect writer for a somewhat gloomy news magazine given in those days to portentous warnings about the future of the West and its relationship with the East. There was no one who could do the drumroll of alarm, of Western civilization come to the brink, like Chambers,
Kempton said.
On August 16, Hiss wavered for the first time: Perhaps he had known the person testifying against him under another name. The picture of Chambers, he said, is not completely unfamiliar.
Then, rather late in the session, he said that he had written down the name of someone it might be. The name he wrote down was George Crosley. The next day, unbeknownst to Hiss, a confrontation was arranged at Room 1400 of the Commodore Hotel. With Hiss already in the room, Chambers was brought in. Are you George Crosley?
Hiss asked. Not to my knowledge,
answered Chambers. Then Chambers added: You are Alger Hiss, I believe.
I certainly am,
Hiss said. Hiss asked Chambers to speak, then asked him to speak more loudly, then asked him to open his mouth wider. Have you had any dental work done on your teeth? he asked. Finally, Hiss said that he did not need to ask any more questions, that he had known this man as George Crosley. He thereupon demanded that Chambers make his accusations in a public arena, without the protection from libel offered by the Committee. I challenge you to do so, and I hope you will do it damn quickly,
he said. Chambers did so on national radio.
Eight days later, their public confrontation took place, and the Hiss case exploded into America’s collective consciousness. At first even the general public thought that Hiss, so eminently respectable, might be wearing the white hat and Chambers, so unattractive, the black, but slowly, as evidence mounted, the tide of public opinion shifted. From the beginning, Nixon was impressed by how steadfast, unflappable, and unbending Chambers was. He did not use a lawyer as Hiss did, he did not study the transcript before each session as Hiss did, and he did not qualify his statements (to the best of my recollection
) as Hiss often did. He was willing to take a lie-detector test, as Hiss was not.
By August 25, Karl Mundt was saying to Hiss, You knew this man [Chambers]; you knew him very well. You knew him so well that you trusted him with your apartment; you let him use your furniture; you let him use, or gave him, your automobile. You think you probably took him to New York. You bought him lunches in the Senate Restaurant. You had him staying in your home ... and made him a series of small loans. There seems to be no question about that.
It was a damning moment. At the end of the hearing, Parnell Thomas announced that one of the two men would be tried for perjury. For the liberals, and thoughtful people of any stripe, a dilemma arose: Could it be that this committee—so scabrous, indeed almost farcical, so insensitive to the rights of individuals and which had so often and so carelessly thrown around charges of Communism—was actually on to something? And if so, was there a larger truth to this? Was the New Deal itself on trial, as Hiss himself was quick to claim? Look who spoke well of Hiss: Dean Acheson; Adlai Stevenson; even John Foster Dulles (at least early on, anyway, until warned privately by Nixon to keep some distance). Two members of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed, appeared as character references at his first trial.
The case began to assume dimensions far greater than anyone had ever imagined. As 1949 went on,
Eric Goldman wrote in The Crucial Decade, Whittaker Chambers receded into the background; the specific testimony was less and less discussed. Even the figure of Alger Hiss, the individual, blurred. Everything was turning into Alger Hiss the symbol.
There was,
Alistair Cooke once noted, a strong desire in both those who believed Hiss guilty and those who believed him innocent to make him out to be a more representative Rooseveltian figure than he was.
In fact, Hiss had hardly been a key player in the State Department: He was not a Kennan or a John Paton Davies or a Paul Nitze. He was a high-level clerk. Both sides in the Hiss case, Kempton wrote, overplayed the importance of Hiss as a figure in the government.
The Hiss case broke just as the lines in the Cold War were becoming more sharply drawn. In March 1948, when Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister and an admired symbol of democratic hopes in that country, committed suicide. Then, in the summer of 1948 the West used the Berlin airlift to bypass the Berlin blockade created by the Soviets. As much as anything else, those two events signaled that the wartime alliance between the Soviets and the West was over. A new, edgier, political era had begun.
In response to Hiss’s denials, Chambers began to escalate his charges, now accusing Hiss of partaking of espionage. This was buttressed with dramatic documentary evidence that Chambers said he had squirreled away for just such an occasion some ten years earlier, when he had left the Party. The evidence—State Department documents copied either in Hiss’s handwriting or some documents typed on what was claimed to be Hiss’s typewriter—was particularly incriminating. Whether Hiss actually participated in espionage was never proven and the evidence was, at best, flawed. The government briefly pondered going after him on espionage, decided its case was insufficiently strong, and went instead for a lesser perjury charge.
In the two ensuing trials, even those who were unbiased and who tried to separate the record from their own political biases always had a feeling that there were missing pieces and that each of the principals was holding back something, whether it was Hiss shielding his wife, as some, including his own lawyers, thought, or a homosexual infatuation on the part of Chambers for Hiss, as others thought. More than forty years later, the pieces still did not entirely add up. If there was a romance, thought Murray Kempton, the New York Post columnist who later wrote exceptionally well about the two men, it was platonic, the attraction of what he called The Other
: Hiss, coming from his airless, aristocratic, tightly controlled background, with the constant need to live up to family expectations; Chambers, and his quasi-adventurous underground life, filled with mystery and intrigue. But, as Kempton said, each got the other wrong—Hiss was not really an aristocrat, and Chambers was not that much of an adventurer.
The first trial ended in a hung jury; the vote was 8–4 for a perjury conviction against Hiss. That, according to one of Hiss’s friends and lawyers, Helen Buttenweiser, was the only time she had ever seen Alger shocked—stunned by the fact that eight of his fellow citizens did not believe him. In the second trial the jury found Hiss guilty of perjury, and he was sentenced to five years in a federal prison.
Beginning on March 21, 1951, Hiss served forty-four months of his five-year term. Hiss continued to protest his innocence. Forty years later the old divisions caused by the case were very much alive. A coterie of loyalists still believed Hiss innocent. They took heart in 1992 when a top Soviet intelligence officer seemed to exonerate Hiss. But a few weeks later the Russian qualified his statement, saying he had been pushed by friends of Hiss, who asked him to comfort an old man. Chambers’s memoir, Witness, was published in 1952, and became a national best-seller. Chambers still brooded about the future and not just Communism, but liberalism, as the enemy. Sidney Hook, reviewing Witness, noted of Chambers, He recklessly lumps Socialists, progressives, liberals, and men of good will together with the Communists. All are bound according to him by the same faith; but only the Communists have the gumption and the guts to live by it and pay the price ... The logic by which he now classifies liberals and humanists with the Communists is not unlike the logic by which, when a Communist, he classified them as Fascists.
Hiss’s conviction darkened an already bleak period, exacerbating the growing political division over the issue of domestic subversion. Even before the Hiss case Yalta was an issue, a magic word for the Republicans, uttered recklessly in the 1946 congressional campaigns, a free and easy chance to attack Roosevelt and the New Deal. Republicans claimed the agreement was the work of a tough and treacherous Stalin, who duped an exhausted and desperately ill Roosevelt, and that it was filled with secret accords and that we had sold out a free Poland. The reality had been quite different; if anyone had been for the Yalta agreements, it had been the American military, whose top brass was in no way convinced that the atomic bomb would work. Fearing that more than a million Americans might be lost in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, the Joint Chiefs had supposedly pressured Roosevelt to get the Russians to come into the war against Japan.
But now Yalta was an even more powerful and divisive word, a synonym in the new political lexicon for betrayal.
For Alger Hiss had been at Yalta, albeit, as diplomat Chip Bohlen noted, in a rather minor capacity. That didn’t matter. Hiss was soon elevated to a position as a principal architect of the Yalta accords. The Alger Hiss group,
in the words of Senator William Jenner, one of the more rabid of the right-wing Republicans, engineered the Yalta sell-out.
To Joseph McCarthy, Yalta and Hiss were something that he could readily seize on: We know that at Yalta we were betrayed. We know that since Yalta, the leaders of this Government, by design or ignorance, have continued to betray us ... We also know that the same men who betrayed America are still leading America. The traitors must no longer lead the betrayed.
At Dean Acheson’s confirmation hearings for secretary of state in January 1949, many of the questions seemed to be about Acheson’s relationship with Hiss and Hiss’s role at Yalta. Finally, Senator Tom Connally, one of Acheson’s supporters, said, It seems that the only argument some persons can present is to holler about Alger Hiss, and then refer to Yalta. They seem to have to dig up something about the dead President of the United States, and then go back to Yalta.
Their main target was now Acheson. When Hiss was convicted of perjury, Acheson knew he would be asked about his onetime associate. Feeling that his own beliefs concerning loyalty and obligation were at stake, Acheson thought of what he would say long before the question was asked. He was the son of an Episcopal bishop, and he believed honor had to be placed above political expediency. There were times when a man had to be counted. He chose his words carefully. I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss,
he told a reporter from the Herald Tribune. Pressed further, Acheson said to look in their Bible for Matthew 25:36, a passage in which Christ called upon His followers to understand that anyone who turns his back on someone in trouble turns his back on Him: Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me.
Later he explained that he was following Christ’s words setting forth compassion as the highest of Christian duties.
His words were those of a very brave man, but they were also political dynamite. Had he, mused Scotty Reston of The New York Times years later, phrased his thoughts in terms ordinary men could understand, had he simply said he would not kick a man when he was down, a great deal less damage might have been done. Acheson’s words were, historian Eric Goldman wrote, a tremendous and unnecessary gift to those who were insisting that the foreign policy of the Truman Administration was being shaped by men who were soft on Communism.
As Goldman noted, Richard Nixon almost immediately responded: Traitors in the high councils of our own government have made sure that the deck is stacked on the Soviet side of the diplomatic tables.
A month later Acheson did something very un-Achesonian; realizing that he had not only damaged himself but, far more important, wounded his President, he tried to explain himself. One must be true to things by which one lives,
he said, changing few if any opinions. That someone as innately suspicious of Russian intentions as Dean Acheson was to become the primary target for the right-wing isolationists was in itself a reflection of the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of that time. Years later he would loom as the quintessential Cold Warrior, the architect of a hard, edgy, anxious peace with the Soviets.
Carving out a policy that drew a line and limited Soviet expansion, creating a consensus for that policy and at the same time contending with but not overreacting to Soviet moves, demanded skill and resolve and vision. Americans might have dreamed of a Europe which much resembled that of the pre–World War Two map, but the Russians were already in place in the East. In 1946 George Kennan was asked about denying Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe. Sorry,
he answered, but the fact of the matter is that we do not have the power in Eastern Europe really to do anything but talk.
For many Americans, that reality was almost impossible to accept. Acheson himself despaired of America’s difficult new role of international leadership. We have got to understand that all our lives the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness, for effort, for discipline, will be with us. This is new for us. It will be hard for us.
All of this profoundly affected Truman. He had come to the presidency unprepared in foreign affairs, barely briefed on major foreign policy issues by the Roosevelt people. He had, he came to realize, arrived at a historic moment. To him and to his closest foreign policy advisers, it was like a replay of the days right before World War Two. In March 1948, after what seemed to him a series of catastrophic foreign-policy events, he wrote to his daughter, Margaret, We are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in 1938–39 with Hitler. Things look black. A decision will have to be made. I am going to make it.
TWO
TO THE COMPLETE SURPRISE of the nation’s political establishment and journalists, Harry Truman’s fellow citizens elected him to the presidency, and yet it was only after he was out of office that people truly came to appreciate the full measure of the man and his virtues. History tended to vindicate many of his decisions—some of them, such as the intervention in Korea, made under the most difficult circumstances—and as the passions of the era subsided he came to be seen as the common man as uncommon man.
In the beginning, his lack of pretense and blunt manner worked against him, standing in stark contrast to Roosevelt’s consummate elegance; later those same qualities were seen as refreshing proof of the rugged character of this fearless small-town man, and, by implication, of all ordinary Americans. As President he was accused of demeaning the Oval Office by turning it over to Missouri roughnecks and poker-playing back-room operators who drank bourbon and told off-color jokes—his cronies,
as Time magazine, then the semiofficial voice of the Republican party, called them. To some extent that charge was true, although Truman was old-fashioned enough not to permit off-color jokes. He liked to call the White House the great white jail.
Even that came to be viewed with tolerance and a certain amount of amusement; after he spent every day grappling with the difficult issues of government, who could begrudge him the pleasure of seeking out old friends in order to relax? To the degree that he could, he continued as he had before, above all to be true to himself in all friendships.
He neither flattered nor responded to flattery. On the rare occasions he showed his anger, it was not over issues of state but rather because he had personally taken offense. Once he wrote a letter threatening to kick a music critic in the genitalia because the critic had panned a concert by his daughter. Even here he was sure that ordinary people would be on his side. Now, you wait and see,
he told his angry wife and daughter after they found out about the letter. Every man in the United States that’s got a daughter will be on my side.
And they were, he added later in an interview with Merle Miller. He did not like people who put on airs—stuffed shirts
and fuddy-duddys,
as he called them. He used simple words in his speeches, never two-dollar words
or weasel words.
His experiences in the military as an artillery officer made him wary of many generals; he liked his generals modest and thought of such men as MacArthur and Patton as big-brass fancy hats. Much to the annoyance of Dean Acheson, he referred to the State Department people as striped-pants boys.
He had virtually no personal income, and he and his family always lived modestly. He knew the value of a dollar and would complain loudly if he thought he had been overcharged, as on the occasion of a breakfast at the famed Peabody Hotel in November 1941: Had breakfast in the coffee shop downstairs and they charged me fifty-five centers for tomato juice, a little dab of oatmeal and milk and toast. I don’t mind losing one hundred dollars on a hoss race or a poker game with friends, but I do hate to pay fifty-five centers for a quarter breakfast ...
The straightforward simplicity of his style would come to seem marvelously human compared to that of the subsequent inhabitants of the White House, ever more image-conscious and isolated from the public by a growing number of handlers, public relations men, and pollsters.
He was the last American President who had not been to college and yet he was quite possibly the best-read President of modern times. His unusually bad eyesight (he was as blind as a mole,
in his own words) had precluded his participation in sports, so as a boy, he had read prodigiously. His broad knowledge of history often surprised his White House aides, a good number of whom had been to elite boarding schools and colleges and were at first inclined to think of themselves as better educated than he.
He was a late bloomer. His early life had been filled with failure, and it was only as a National Guard captain in World War One that he distinguished himself. His entry into the political arena came late in life—he won his first race for a local office at age thirty-eight, and with the help of the Pendergast machine, he narrowly won a Senate seat when he was fifty. As he wrote Bess in 1942, upon the occasion of their twenty-third wedding anniversary, Thanks to the right life partner for me we’ve come out pretty well. A failure as a farmer, miner, an oil promoter, and a merchant, but finally hit the groove as a public servant—and that due mostly to you and Lady Luck.
Within the world of Kansas City politics he had a sterling record for honesty. Three things ruin a man,
he liked to say: power, money, and women. I never wanted power, I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.
He certainly never wanted to be President, but thanks to the considerable muscle of the machine, he slipped into Washington as a senator and soon thereafter, somewhat to his own surprise, was given the 1944 vice-presidential nomination. Then a few months after his inauguration, Roosevelt died and he became the accidental President. Unprepared he may have been, but he turned out to have the right qualities: the ability to take considerable pressure, and, if need be, to wave aside momentary political advantage to do what he thought was right in the long run. In a way his early failures helped him later to empathize with his fellow Americans and allowed him to arrive in the White House without the overweening ambition and distorted values that often distinguish those who devote themselves to the singular pursuit of success.
From the start, he realized that he would be competing not so much with his Republican opponents but with the ghost of his predecessor. Roosevelt had revolutionized the presidency with his use of radio; his seductive Fireside Chats had made it seem like he was visiting with ordinary Americans in their own homes. Roosevelt’s voice—warm, friendly, filled with confidence—suited the medium perfectly. Truman, on the other hand, had no skill with radio. His voice—twangy and simple—was disappointing. Not surprisingly, his most effective venue for communicating with his constituents was the whistle-stop—speaking from the rear platform of a train stopping in small towns. There he could attack the opposition in simple but cutting language, and his audience, knowing he was one of their own, would yell back, Give ’em hell, Harry.
His essential color was gray, wrote the famed journalist John Gunther: bright grayness. Both the clothes and hair were neat and gray. The gray-framed spectacles magnified the gray hazel eyes, but there was no grayness in the mind ...
If his language when he was young was that of a rural Missouri boy, filled with crude references to African-Americans as niggers,
he went far beyond his predecessor in terms of activism for civil rights; if his letters had once been filled with unkind references to Jews and to New York as a kike town,
he, more than any other politician in the world, was responsible for the creation of Israel.
Even Churchill was impressed with him, and the manner with which he set out to inform himself and the ease with which he accepted responsibility. A man of immense determination,
said Churchill upon first meeting him at Potsdam, adding the next day, quite shrewdly, He has direct methods of speech and a great deal of self-confidence and resolution.
Straightforward, decisive, simple, entirely honest,
Dean Acheson wrote his son soon after meeting him. There was a certain jauntiness to his walk and his attitude toward life. He was not afflicted by inner doubts. He made his decisions quickly and cleanly by listening to the evidence and the best advice of those around him, and he did not look back. He was not particularly introspective. Politics was the art of the possible: At the poker table, you took the hand you were dealt and you played it as best you could. Then you slept well.
The backlash against his presidency and the vestiges of the New Deal grew more bitter after his election. On his desk he kept a sign that read THE BUCK STOPS HERE. In the midst of that difficult period, Truman once reminisced with Arneson Gordon, a State Department expert on disarmament, about how he had handled various crises. Arneson later set down Truman’s thoughts: He mused about how many ‘bucks’ he had stopped: the abrupt termination of Lend Lease after the war: bad advice, a blooper; the Truman Doctrine, re. Greece and Turkey: good; the Berlin airlift, right again; and the Marshall Plan, a ‘ten strike.’ Over-all, the batting average was pretty good, he thought.
At that point, Arneson noted, the conversation took an interesting turn. He wondered though whether the decision to reduce drastically the defense budget might have been unwise. True it had been enthusiastically welcomed by the public and the Congress. But considering the unsettled state of world affairs and especially the uncooperativeness of the Russians, was it prudent? He sighed.
It was a remarkably astute assessment from Truman the amateur historian judging Truman the professional politician.
One thing he understood and demanded was loyalty. He gave it unconditionally to those who served him, and he expected nothing less in return. He admired Dean Acheson from the start for his uncommon abilities, intelligence, and courage. Their unlikely and exceptionally close friendship was forged one night in November 1946, when Truman had returned to Washington during one of the lowest moments in his political career, after the midterm sweep by the Republicans of both houses of Congress. There, alone at the train station, to meet him was Acheson. Shortly after Truman’s inauguration as Vice-President, Tom Pendergast died. By that time, Pendergast was a disgraced, bankrupt man recently let out of prison for income-tax evasion, his once considerable fortune squandered on the horses, his physical strength eroded by illnesses. The one thing that had held back Truman’s career when he had first arrived in Washington—the one taint on him—was the Pendergast connection. But Truman opted to go to the funeral, a clear sign of his determination to put obligation, as he defined it, over popularity. Some five years later when Acheson made his I-shall-not-turn-my-back-on-Alger-Hiss statement, he rushed to apologize to the president. Truman told him about the Pendergast funeral and not to worry. Dean,
the President said. Always be shot in front, never [from] behind.
By the summer of 1949 America had enjoyed a four-year monopoly of the atom bomb. It had been finished too late to use against Germany. Nonetheless, it arrived in time to be a trump card in the growing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. A few hours before the first test, Truman said to his aides, apropos of his imminent meeting with Stalin at Potsdam in July 1945: If it explodes—as I think it will—I will certainly have a hammer on these boys.
And midway through the conference, Winston Churchill did indeed notice a change in Truman’s behavior. Subsequently, after Churchill learned of the successful test at Alamogordo, he confided to Harry Stimson, the American secretary of war: Now I know what happened to Truman yesterday. When he got to the meeting after having read the report, he was a changed man. He told the Russians just where they got off and generally bossed the meeting.
That monopoly had given America an edge in the immediate postwar era. Our defense plans, such as they were, were largely based on our exclusive control of the bomb. The initial assumption on the part of America’s top scientists and intelligence analysts was that the Soviets were some five years behind us in developing nuclear weapons. That forecast did not change: As the new decade approached, we assumed that they were still five years behind us. If anything our military-intelligence people were even more confident: The Army thought the Soviets would