by Jill Lepore
On February 18, 1954, McCarthy questioned General Ralph Zwicker, a holder of a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. The senator told him the general didn’t have “the brains of a five-year-old child” and that his testimony was “a disgrace to the army.”106 Eisenhower had long since lost patience with McCarthy and the damage he had done. But going after the army was the last straw. The next month, on CBS Television’s See It Now, Murrow narrated an edited selection of McCarthy’s speeches before the public and during congressional hearings, revealing the cruelty of the man, his moral shabbiness and pettiness, his brutality. Murrow’s thirty-minute presentation of evidence took the form of a carefully planned prosecution. “And upon what meat doth Senator McCarthy feed?” Murrow asked. “Two of the staples of his diet are the investigation, protected by immunity, and the half-truth.” (McCarthy was given an opportunity to reply, which he took up, feebly, two weeks later.) Murrow closed with a sermon. “We will not walk in fear, one of another,” he said. “We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.”107
U.S. Army Chief Counsel Joseph Welch holds his head in his hand as Joseph McCarthy speaks during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. One week after Murrow’s broadcast, the Senate convened the Army-McCarthy hearings, to investigate charges that McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn—later Donald Trump’s mentor—had attempted to obtain military preferment for another McCarthy aide, David Shine. Lyndon Johnson slyly arranged for the hearings to be televised. The hearings lasted fifty-seven days, of which thirty-six were broadcast. On June 9, when Army Chief Counsel Joseph Welch asked McCarthy if, finally, he had any decency, viewers had seen for themselves that he hadn’t. Cohn resigned. Johnson, reelected by a landslide in the fall of 1954, when Democrats regained control of the Senate, decided the moment to strike had finally come. He named a special committee to investigate McCarthy and made sure the committee was dominated by conservatives, so that no one could question that the investigation had been partisan. The committee recommended disciplining McCarthy. That December, the Senate voted 65–22 to censure him. John F. Kennedy, whose brother Robert worked as a McCarthy aide, and whose father had long supported McCarthy, was the only Democrat to not publicly support censure. McCarthy’s fall had come.108
“It’s no longer McCarthyism,” said Eisenhower. “It’s McCarthywasm.”109 McCarthy, struggling with drinking, died three years later, only forty-eight.
“THIS COUNTRY NEEDS a revival,” House Speaker Sam Rayburn said, “and I believe Billy Graham is bringing it to us.” Against the godlessness of communism, before and after McCarthy’s fall, Americans turned anew to religion. In the decade following the end of the war, church membership grew from 75 million to 100 million.110 Much of the growth was driven by Southern Baptists, like Billy Graham, who asserted a growing influence on American life and politics. Between 1941 and 1961, membership in the Southern Baptist Convention doubled. In eight days in the fall of 1949, Graham preached to more than 350,000 people in Los Angeles.
Broad-shouldered and Brylcreemed, Graham left audiences swooning. But he didn’t only draw new members to the Southern Baptist Convention; he brought together all manner of white conservative Protestants, North and South, into a new evangelism. For Graham, the Cold War represented a Manichaean battle between Christ and communism. “Do you know that the Fifth Columnists, called Communists, are more rampant in Los Angeles than in any other city in America?” he demanded. “The world is divided into two camps!” Communism “has declared war against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion! . . . Unless the Western world has an old-fashioned revival, we cannot last!” Communists became the new infidels.111
Graham, who’d grown up in North Carolina, romanticized rural America, calling the shepherds of the Bible “hillbillies.” His anti-intellectualism aligned well with a broader critique of liberalism. “When God gets ready to shake America, he might not take the Ph.D. and the D.D. and the Th.D.,” Graham preached. “God may choose a country boy! God may choose a man no one knows . . . a hillbilly, a country boy! Who will sound forth in a mighty voice to America, ‘Thus saith the Lord!’”
Reverend Billy Graham, here preaching in Washington, DC, in 1952, reached a nationwide audience but boasted an especially strong following in Congress. Graham himself, though, traveled in powerful, cosmopolitan circles. In 1950, he began praying before Congress. He held prayer meetings with senators. He met with presidents. He preached evangelism as Americanism. “If you would be a loyal American,” he said, “then become a loyal Christian.” To Graham, the tool of the enemy (and of the devil) was “the sin of tolerance.” “The word ‘tolerant’ means ‘liberal,’ ‘broad-minded,’” he said, and “the easy-going compromise and tolerance that we have been taught by pseudo-liberals in almost every area of our life for years” means nothing so much as appeasement to communism. “My own theory about Communism,” he said, “is that it is master-minded by Satan.”112
As Graham’s influence grew, Eisenhower came to see his lack of membership in any church as a political liability. Raised a Mennonite, he decided to convert to Presbyterianism, becoming the first president to be baptized while in the White House. His administration inaugurated the practice of national prayer breakfasts. “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith, and I don’t care what it is,” Eisenhower said. During his administration, Congress mandated the inclusion of “In God We Trust” on all money and added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.113
For more reasons, too, conservatives had high hopes for Eisenhower, whose 1952 campaign had included a promise to repeal New Deal taxes that, he said, were “approaching the point of confiscation.”114 Eisenhower’s cabinet included the former president of General Motors. (With Eisenhower’s pro-business administration, Adlai Stevenson said, New Dealers made way for car dealers.) Eisenhower was also opposed to national health care, as was his secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, a longtime conservative Texas Democrat named Oveta Culp Hobby, who’d recently switched parties. She liked to say she’d come to Washington to “bury” socialized medicine. Both Eisenhower and Hobby considered free polio vaccinations socialized medicine, and Hobby argued against the free distribution of the vaccine, a position that would have exposed millions of children to the disease. In the end, after a related scandal, Hobby was forced to resign.115
But Eisenhower proved a disappointment to conservatives. From the start, he had his doubts about the nature of the Cold War. A decorated general, Eisenhower was nevertheless the child of pacifists who considered war a sin. And, even as he oversaw a buildup of nuclear weapons, he questioned the possibility of the world surviving an atomic war. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the street,” he said. Nor was he so sure that any part of the manufacture of so many weapons could possibly make any kind of sense. In his first major address as president, delivered on April 16, 1953, weeks after Stalin’s death—when he may have hoped for warmer relations with the Soviet Union—he reckoned the cost of arms. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” He invoked, of all people, William Jennings Bryan, and his cross-of-gold speech. “This is not a way of life at all in any true sense,” Eisenhower went on. “Under the clouds of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”116 It was Eisenhower’s best speech about the arms race, if by no means his last.
“WE’RE ALL IN AGREEMENT on the format,” moderator Quincy Howe said in 1956, introducing the first-ever televised debate between two presidential candidates. “There’s going to be a three-minute opening statement from each of the two gentlemen here and a f
ive-minute closing.” Radio hosts had tried fighting fascism in the 1930s by holding debates over the radio. In the 1950s, television hosts tried to fight communism—and McCarthyism—by doing the same on TV. Howe, a former CBS Radio broadcaster, had been director of the American Civil Liberties Union. In the 1930s, he’d served as a panelist on NBC Radio’s America’s Town Meeting of the Air.117 He cared about the quality of an argument; he cherished public debate. In 1956, he served as moderator of a debate between Adlai Stevenson and another Democratic presidential prospect, former Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, broadcast on ABC.
The idea had come from Stevenson and his adviser Newton Minow—later the head of the FCC. In the spirit of radio debates hosted by the League of Women Voters since the 1920s, Stevenson and Minow were convinced that television could educate American voters and model the free and open exchange of political ideas. Stevenson challenged Kefauver; Kefauver agreed, and the two met in a one-hour debate at a studio in Miami. In between opening and closing statements, Howe explained, he’d allow “free-wheeling talk in which I act as a kind of a traffic cop, with the power to hand out parking tickets if anyone stays too long in one place or to enforce speed limits if anyone gets going too fast.” The debate took place the day after the United States dropped on the Bikini Atoll a bomb far more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Stevenson said, about the new bomb, “The future is either going to be a future of creativity and of great abundance, or it’s going to be a future of total incineration, death and destruction.”118
The Stevenson-Kefauver debate, like the H-bomb, had been a test. The Republican National Committee chairman called the debate “tired, sorry, and uninspiring.” But debating his opponent didn’t hurt Stevenson, who won the nomination, and began making a case to the nation that presidential candidates ought to debate one another on television regularly. “I would like to propose that we transform our circus-atmosphere presidential campaign into a great debate conducted in full view of all the people,” he later wrote, calling for regular half-hour debates between the major-party candidates.119
Meanwhile, Stevenson squared off against Eisenhower and his running mate, Richard Nixon, who’d drawn inward, convinced that the print press was conspiring against him, even though, for a long time, he’d been something of a media darling. “The tall, dark, and—yes—handsome freshman congressman who has been pressuring the House Un-American Activities committee to search out the truth in the Chambers-Hiss affair,” is how the Washington Post had described him at the beginning of his career. “He was unquestionably one of the outstanding first-termers in the Eightieth Congress.” All the same, newspaper columnists had badly drummed Nixon after his Checkers speech, and especially after McCarthy’s very bad end, and not always fairly. Syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson had reported that Nixon had taken a bribe from an oil company; the report was based on a letter that turned out to be a forgery. Then there were stories that were simply unwarranted, dumb, and mean. Time had gleefully reported that Checkers was not housebroken and had not been spayed and had gotten pregnant by a neighborhood dog. Nixon, fed up, said he wanted to write a memoir called I’ve Had It. But then, in September 1955, Eisenhower had a heart attack, and Nixon decided to hold on, though he had to fight for a spot on the ticket.120
He won that spot in San Francisco in 1956 at a Republican convention managed by Whitaker and Baxter. “The key political fact about the gathering now breaking up is that it has made Richard M. Nixon the symbol, if not the center, of authority in the Republican Party,” reported Richard Rovere in The New Yorker. Campaigns, Inc., had teamed up with the California firm of Baus and Ross. Whitaker and Baxter wrote the copy; Baus and Ross produced the radio and television spots. That same season, they campaigned on behalf of Proposition 4, a ballot measure favoring the oil industry and giving them more license to drill. The measure was written by attorneys for Standard Oil. Whitaker and Baxter succeeded in getting the referendum’s name changed to the Oil and Gas Conservation Act. “Political campaigns are too important to leave to politicians,” Baus and Ross said.121
In a 1956 campaign speech written by economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Stevenson described “Nixonland” as the “land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving, the land of smash and grab and anything to win.” (“I want you to write the speeches against Nixon,” Stevenson had written Galbraith. “You have no tendency to be fair.”)122 But Nixonland was Whitaker and Baxter–land.
In television ads, both the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns of 1956 acknowledged the confusion that television advertising had itself sown. In one Republican ad, a cartoon voter despairs, “I’ve listened to everybody. On TV and radio. I’ve read the papers and magazines. I’ve tried! But I’m still confused. Who’s right? What’s right? What should I believe? What are the facts? How can I tell?” A comforting narrator calms down the worried voter and convinces him to like Ike.123
Stevenson, in his own television ad, haplessly tried to indict what he considered the callowness and fakery of the medium by exposing the camera, cables, and lights that had been installed in a room in his house in Illinois. He wanted to save Americans from themselves by showing them how what they saw on their screens was produced. “I wish you could see what else is in this room,” he said, speaking directly into the camera. “Besides the camera, and the lights over here, there are cables all over the floor.” The ad is positively postmodern: self-conscious, uncertain, and troubling. “Thanks to television, I can talk to millions of people that I couldn’t reach any other way,” Stevenson said, and then he quavered. “I can talk to you, yes, but I can’t listen to you. I can’t hear about your problems. . . . To do that, I’ve got to go out and see you in person.”124
But when Stevenson did go out on the campaign trail, he proved unpersuasive. In Los Angeles, speaking before a primarily black audience, he was booed when he said, “We must proceed gradually, not upsetting habits or traditions that are older than the Republic.”125 In 1952, Eisenhower had beaten Stevenson in the Electoral College 442 to 89; in 1956, he won 457 to 73.
The parties began to drift apart, like continents, loosed. The Republican Party, influenced by conservative suburban housewives, began to move to the right. The Democratic Party, stirred by the moral and political urgency of the struggle for civil rights, began moving to the left. The pace of that drift would be determined by civil rights, the Cold War, television, and the speed of computation.
How and where would Americans work out their political differences? In Yates v. United States, the Supreme Court gutted the Smith Act, establishing that the First Amendment protected all political speech, even radical, reactionary, and revolutionary speech, unless it constituted a “clear and present danger.” But television broadcasters began to report that their audiences seemed to have an aversion to unpleasant information. “Television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us,” Murrow complained. Magazine and newspaper writers made much the same complaint, finding that their editors were unwilling to run stories critical of American foreign policy. In Guatemala, when the CIA arranged to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, who had seized hundreds of thousands of acres of land owned by the United Fruit Company, an American business, American reporters provided only the explanation given by Secretary of State Dulles, who insisted that Árbenz had been overthrown by a popular uprising. Correspondents from China, including John Hersey, protested at the editing of their own reports. From Luce’s Time, Theodore White threatened to resign.126
In a national security state where dissent was declared un-American and political contests were run by advertising firms, it was hard to know what was true. That bewildered cartoon voter had asked, “Who’s right? What’s right? What should I believe? What are the facts? How can I tell?” Maybe computers could tell. Screenwriters Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron toyed with that claim in th
e 1957 film Desk Set, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and made with the cooperation of IBM. Tracy plays an MIT engineer, a modern Frederick Winslow Taylor, who’s invented an “electronic brain.” He turns up with a tape measure in the fact-checking department on the twenty-eighth-floor of the Federal Broadcasting Company building. Hepburn, who plays the head of the department, invites him into her office.
“I’m a methods engineer,” he says.
“Is that a sort of efficiency expert?”
“Well, that term is a bit obsolete now.”
“Oh, forgive me,” says Hepburn. “I’m so sorry. I’m the old-fashioned type.”
He’s come to Hepburn’s department to install a giant machine called Electromagnetic MEmory and Research Arithmetical Calculator, EMERAC, or Emmy for short, which requires pushing aside the desks of her assistants. Hepburn expects that her entire staff, replaced with this newest Office Robot, will be fired. Demonstrating how EMERAC works, Tracy makes a speech to a group of corporate executives.
“Gentlemen, the purpose of this machine of course is to free the worker—”
(“You can say that again,” Hepburn mutters.)
“—to free the worker from the routine and repetitive tasks and liberate his time for more important work.” He points to the walls of books. “You see all those books there? And those up there? Well, every fact in them has been fed into Emmy.”
No one will ever need to consult a book again, Tracy promises. In the future, the discovery of facts will require nothing more than asking Emmy. Hepburn, asked what she thinks of Emmy, answers archly: “I think you can safely say that it will provide more leisure for more people.”127
