I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I started reading it to get a better understanding of the background to Mad Men. The show about the lives of the ad men (and women) of Sterling Cooper is set in the sixties, but it is pretty commonly accepted that the early years of the sixties were, in many ways, an extension of the fifties. Many people mark the Kennedy assassination (the anniversary of which was yesterday) as the official death of fifties innocence and the beginning of the sixties awakening.
I’m embarrassed, too, and more than a little, at my own naïveté regarding certain realities in the world. This embarrassment stems from my own history. You see, I was a History major in college. Granted, I was most interested in medieval history and early 20th century European history, especially the period of World War I and its immediate aftermath. My memory is woeful on these periods as well, but I found myself shockingly unaware of certain realities stemming from at least the 1950’s.
I suppose I’m not alone in thinking that the current political atmosphere in our country is unique to our time. I used to regularly read Glenn Greenwald’s column at Salon.com. There, Glenn and his readers discuss the putrid state of our media, the corruption of our government, and the forces at work in the Democrat and Republican parties. Like Glenn and many of his readers, I am often puzzled by the seeming contradictions in press coverage and the actions of our nation’s leaders. I keep looking for the reasons for why we are drifting further from the principles set forth in our Constitution. As Glen continually points out, we so often act contrary to it.
I have long been aware of the prescient warning President Eisenhower gave us on the occasion of his farewell address. The whole speech is well worth reading or hearing, but this excerpt is the heart of his warning:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
For most of us alive today, America has always been the world’s policeman. We pride ourselves that we stand watch over the peace. It has been easy for us to believe this because peace has so often been the state of our nation. Though we have a long history of violence in this country – our country was formed from revolution, challenged by civil war, grown through conquest of the native peoples, and maintained and strengthen by our wars abroad – much of our recent history of violence has taken place on other shores. We have been insulated from the death and destruction in which we have participated and, at times, exacerbated. With such good intentions and receiving such a paucity of information about our activities abroad, it is no wonder we show such great surprise when others question our behavior.
I’ve long questioned much of this, so I was really taken aback at the impact Halberstam’s analysis of the fifties had on me. In an example of just how relevant history is to our current time (and always has been and always will be), Halberstam relates the story of how we came to overthrow the Iranian government in 1953, setting up the Shah of Iran as that country’s new leader. Halberstam notes the ease with which we were able to covertly accomplish this task. Tellingly, in the aftermath, Halberstam claims that the world press and the Iranian people well knew that the CIA had been central to the coup. The American people, however, were in the dark. The American press had run the cover stories their CIA handlers had asked them to.
I think it is largely accepted by most people that our government works covertly. In fact, I’m not sure there are too many people who would argue they shouldn’t. We seem to accept this fact with a shrug, just as we accept the realities of the world – even if we don’t fully understand them – that make this necessary. Still, we comfort ourselves that we live in a democracy, that we are represented in the halls of power, and that this is a free nation of the people. So when I read these words from Halberstam, my eyes shot wide open:
“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 Communists but with our traditions. What was evolving was a closed state within an open one.” (371, emphasis mine)
And there it was. An explanation for all of the seemingly incomprehensible things the press says, the shallowness and lack of breadth of “debate” in the public forum, our insatiable need to launch adventurous military campaigns, the thorough lack of difference between the two major parties, the boldness with which our government ignores what the people want and responds to what the moneyed interests want. None of these things was entirely new in the fifties, but clearly a new center of gravity – one that magnified and expanded these tendencies – had been created.
As if to underscore all of this, Halberstam spends a fair amount of time on Richard Nixon. While his presidency spanned the late sixties and early seventies, his political teeth were cut in the late forties and the fifties. Why is Nixon relevant? Because a number of our older politicians got their start with old Tricky Dick, including another Dick worthy of that appellation: Dick Cheney.
When I was a kid in the sixties and seventies, the fifties seemed an eternity ago. It was my parents’ time, the past. As I got older, I realized that what had seemed an eternity was really just the recent past for people like my parents. Now my recent past is someone else’s eternity. And with each passing year, history contracts for me. The line connecting us to the past seems ever more relevant. And with each recognition of this fact, a little more of my naïveté falls away.
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