These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  79.Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 4–12 and see especially ch. 2.

  80.Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1953), 3, 4, 8; Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy, 19–22.

  81.George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 72, 142, 150–51; William Buckley, “Publisher’s Statement,” National Review, November 19, 1955.

  82.Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 117, 113.

  83.Perlstein, Nixonland, 85.

  84.Rymph, Republican Women, 138, 162.

  85.Ibid., 94, 107, 117, 131–38.

  86.Kennan quoted in Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century, 324.

  87.Ira Chinoy, “Battle of the Brains: Election-Night Forecasting at the Dawn of the Computer Age,” PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2010, 244–45, 256, 260.

  88.“Briefs . . .,” Journal of Accountancy 92 (1951): 142; Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 292–344.

  89.“8-Foot ‘Genius’ Dedicated,” NYT, June 15, 1951.

  90.Saval, Cubed, 128–131, 144–47; C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 209. The quotation is from a Melville story called “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” which appeared in Harper’s in 1855 (volume 10; quotation, 675).

  91.Mills discusses “The Cheerful Robot” in The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959, 2000), 171–76, but introduces it in White Collar, in a section called “The Morale of the Cheerful Robot” (233–34).

  92.Chinoy, “Battle of the Brains,” 206–7.

  93.Whitaker and Baxter to Carey McWilliams, May 1, 1951, in Campaigns Inc. Records, Box 10, Folder 3; McWilliams, “Government by Whitaker and Baxter,” May 5, 1951, 420; McWilliams, “Government by Whitaker and Baxter,” April 21, 1951, 368; Frances Burns, “Mass. General Chief, Dr. Means, Quits AMA Over Health Insurance,” Boston Globe, June 21, 1951. Whitaker and Baxter reported to McWilliams that his exposé had been sent, anonymously, to the president of the AMA, “probably from someone who thinks W&B should be fired forthwith!” (Whitaker and Baxter to Carey McWilliams, May 1, 1951). Editorial, “Whitaker and Baxter Bow Out,” New England Journal of Medicine, 247 (1951): 577.

  94.Larry J. Sabato, The Rise of Political Consultants: New Ways of Winning Elections (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 112, 113, 117, 114; Citizens for Eisenhower, “Eisenhower Answers America,” The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952–2016, Museum of the Moving Image.

  95.Johnson, Lavender Scare, 121–22; Lecklider, Inventing the Egghead, 206–7; Daly, Covering America, 290.

  96.Perlstein, Nixonland, 35–36; Farrell, Richard Nixon, 199–200; Bernard Schwartz and Stephan Lesher, Inside the Warren Court (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 17.

  97.Richard Nixon, Checkers speech, September 23, 1952.

  98.“23 Professors Score Nixon Campaign Fund,” Columbia Spectator, October 6, 1952. And see Philip Ranlet, Richard B. Morris and American History in the Twentieth Century (Dallas: University Press of America, 2004), 63–5. But see Farrell, Richard Nixon, 200.

  99.Perlstein, Nixonland, 41; Farrell, Richard Nixon, 194–5.

  100.Perlstein, Nixonland, 38–43; Farrell, Richard Nixon, 198–9.

  101.Farrell, Richard Nixon, 208.

  102.Chinoy, “Battle of the Brains,” 210, 194–196.

  103.Ibid., 369–88. And see “CBS News Election Coverage: November 4, 1952.” YouTube video, 31:02, posted by “NewsActive3,” December 17, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vjD0d8D9Ec; Wuthnow, Inventing American Religion, 64.

  104.Murrow, quoted in Ibo, Averaged American, 180–81.

  105.C. Wright Mills, “The Mass Society” in The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 298–324.

  106.Farrell, Richard Nixon, 222.

  107.“A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” See It Now, CBS, March 9, 1954.

  108.Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism, 47–49.

  109.Farrell, Richard Nixon, 225.

  110.Sydney E. Ahlstrom and Daniel Aaron, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 952.

  111.FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, 145, 236, 169; Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 87, 77.

  112.FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, 170, 177, 186; Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 80–81.

  113.FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, 204, 184–85; Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 88.

  114.Marc Linder, “Eisenhower-Era Marxist-Confiscatory Taxation: Requiem for the Rhetoric of Rate Reduction for the Rich,” Tulane Law Review 70 (1995–96): 905.

  115.Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 23–4. Leuchtenberg, “Consumer Culture and Cold War,” 763; David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 217–18.

  116.Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence, 45–46; Zak, Almighty, 47–49; The Future of the U.S. Military Ten Years After 9/11 and the Consequences of Defense Sequestration: Prepared for the Use of the Committee on Armed Services of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2011), 35.

  117.The year was 1938, and the subject was how democracies should respond to dictatorships, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/Radio/TownMeeting/TownMeeting.html.

  118.Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LaMay, Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 18–19; “Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver—First Televised Debate, 1956,” broadcast by WTVJ on May 21, 1956.

  119.“GOP Calls Debate ‘Flop,’” NYT, May 23, 1956; Minow and LaMay, Inside the Presidential Debates, 20.

  120.William E. Porter, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 9–17; Farrell, Richard Nixon, 206–7, 217, 233–34.

  121.Richard Rovere, “Letter from San Francisco,” TNY, September 1, 1956; Herbert M. Baus and William R. Ross, Politics Battle Plan (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 258. On Proposition 4, see the files in Campaigns, Inc., Records, Box 29, Folders 23–25.

  122.Farrell, Richard Nixon, 243. Perlstein, Nixonland, 46.

  123.Citizens for Eisenhower, “Cartoon Guy,” The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952–2016, Museum of the Moving Image.

  124.Democratic National Committee television advertisement, “The Man from Libertyville,” available for viewing at the online exhibit The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952–2016, Museum of the Moving Image.

  125.Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 21.

  126.Ibid., 155–60.

  127.Desk Set, dir. Walter Lang (20th Century Fox, 1957); The Desk Set: Screenplay, film-script, March 14 1957.

  128.Linda Greenhouse, “Thurgood Marshall, Civil Rights Hero, Dies at 84,” NYT, January 25, 1993; Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark, Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992), 9.

  129.Greenhouse, “Thurgood Marshall, Civil Rights Hero, Dies at 84”; Davis and Clark, Thurgood Marshall, 9, 160–65.

  130.Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

  131.Leuchtenberg, “Consumer Culture and Cold War,” 765; Mary L. Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review 41 (1988–89): 81–93, 111.

  132.Michael J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 3.

  133.“Supreme Court: Memo from Rehnquist,” Newsweek, December 13, 1971. On how word of the memo leaked, see Jill Lepore, “The Great Paper Caper,” TNY, December 2, 2014, and my note on sources at https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jlepore/files/lepore_great_paper_caper_bibliography.pdf.

 
134.Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement, ch. 3.

  135.In one footnote, Warren wrote, “And see generally Myrdal, An American Dilemma”: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

  136.Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” 65, 115.

  137.Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 4.

  138.Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 201; “Divergent Views of Public Men,” Life, September 17, 1956, 119–20; Jim Newton, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), 386.

  139.Leuchtenberg, “Consumer Culture and Cold War,” 766–67.

  140.Taylor Branch, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), ch. 1.

  141.Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 50.

  142.Leuchtenberg, “Consumer Culture and Cold War,” 771–72; Harvard Sitkoff and Eric Foner, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1945–1992 (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 45–46. And, broadly, see David L. Chappell, Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  143.Davis and Clark, Thurgood Marshall, 191.

  144.Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education, 187–91; Davis and Clark, Thurgood Marshall, 458.

  145.Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism, 53–54; Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995, 2000), 96–97.

  146.Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education, 191; Leuchtenberg, “Consumer Culture and the Cold War,” 770; Orval E. Faubus, “Speech on School Integration” (1958).

  147.Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 147–48.

  148.Thurgood Marshall, oral history interview, 1977, in Thurgood Marshall, ed. Tushnet, 463.

  Fourteen: RIGHTS AND WRONGS

  1.Farrell, Richard Nixon, 269–71.

  2.Jerry Marlatt to Dwight Eisenhower, July 10, 1969, in Shane Hamilton and Sarah Phillips, The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 2014), 41–43.

  3.Hamilton and Phillips, The Kitchen Debate; “The Kitchen Debate,” July 24, 1959, posted by “Richard Nixon Foundation,” August 26, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRgOz2x9c08.

  4.Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming (New York: Russell Sage, 2006), 66.

  5.John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 2010), 355.

  6.Leuchtenberg, “Consumer Culture and Cold War,” 678–80.

  7.Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 393, 402.

  8.Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century, 351.

  9.Robert Haber, The End of Ideology as Ideology (New York: Students for a Democratic Society, c. 1960).

  10.Daniel Bell, “The End of Ideology in the West: An Epilogue,” in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 393–407; Macdonald quoted in Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 330.

  11.Philip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (1964): 207–60; Angus Campbell and Philip E. Converse, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), 193–94.

  12.Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” And see Alan Abramowitz and Kyle Saunders, “Is Polarization a Myth?,” Journal of Politics 70 (2008): 542.

  13.Galbraith, The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 356; Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century, 339; Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Against the American Grain (New York, NY: Random House, 1962), 4.

  14.William Miller, “Provocative Goals,” Life, December 12, 1960.

  15.Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 271–74; Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Leuchtenberg, “Consumer Culture and Cold War,” 772; Susan Gushee O’Malley, “Baker, Ella Josephine,” American Biography Online.

  16.Goals for Americans: Programs for Action in the Sixties (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), 3, 42–48.

  17.William Miller, “Provocative Goals,” Life, December 12, 1960.

  18.Ithiel de Sola Pool and Robert Abelson, “The Simulmatics Project,” Public Opinion Quarterly 25 (1961): 167–83; Ithiel de Sola Pool, Robert Abelson, and Samuel L. Popkin, Candidates, Issues, and Strategies: A Computer Simulation of the 1960 and 1964 Presidential Election (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).

  19.Eugene Burdick, The 480 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), vii.

  20.1960 Democratic Party Platform, July 11, 1960.

  21.Pool and Abelson, “The Simulmatics Project”; Pool, Abelson, and Popkin, Candidates, Issues, and Strategies.

  22.John F. Kennedy, Address of Senator John F. Kennedy to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Houston, Texas, September 12, 1960.

  23.Memo, James Dorais to Clem Whitaker Jr. and Newton Stearns, 1960 Nixon Plan of Campaign, Campaigns, Inc., Records, Box 60, Folder 25; Minow and LaMay, Inside the Presidential Debates, 20; Farrell, Richard Nixon, 299.

  24.Perlstein, Nixonland, 52.

  25.Newton N. Minow and Clifford M. Sloan, For Great Debates: A New Plan for Future Presidential TV Debates (New York: Priority Press Publications, 1987), 9–10, 13–14.

  26.Farrell, Richard Nixon, 287–89, 294–98.

  27.John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961.

  28.Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961; Kennedy, Inaugural Address.

  29.Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), xi–xii.

  30.James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 79.

  31.Carter, Inventing Vietnam, 113–14, 31–32, 97–98; William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: Norton, 1958), 272–73, 282.

  32.Logevall, Embers of War, xiii.

  33.Joy Rohde, “The Last Stand of the Psychocultural Cold Warriors: Military Contract Research in Vietnam,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47 (2011): 232–50.

  34.Carter, Inventing Vietnam, 33–34, 139–42.

  35.Trask, “The Imperial Republic,” 638–45; John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba,” October 22, 1962.

  36.Robert F. Kennedy, Speech, University of Georgia, May 6, 1961.

  37.Freedom Riders, dir. Stanley Nelson, American Experience, PBS, May 16, 2011; Branch, Parting the Waters, 428–91.

  38.Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1965), 200.

  39.Marable, Malcolm X, chs. 3–6 (quotation, 133); Portable Malcolm X Reader, 34–71, 97–117, 145–65, 184–98.

  40.Portable Malcolm X Reader, 199–206.

  41.Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1962); Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 13, 136.

  42.Carter, The Politics of Rage, 115; Branch, Parting the Waters, 737–45; Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963.

  43.Carter, The Politics of Rage, 90–6, 11, 112, 133.

  44.Branch, King Years, 49–57; John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” June 11, 1963.
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  45.Bayard Rustin, I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters, introduced and edited by Michael G. Long (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012), 257, 261–64.

  46.Branch, Pillar of Fire, 133.

  47.Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” speech delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington, DC, August 28, 1963; Branch, King Years, 61–67.

  48.Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism, 83–84; Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at the University of Michigan,” Ann Arbor, May 22, 1964.

  49.Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 56; Leuchtenburg, “The Travail of Liberalism,” 824; Lyndon B. Johnson, Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union, Washington, DC, January 8, 1964.

  50.Leuchtenburg, “The Travail of Liberalism,” 810; Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 419; Leuchtenberg, “Consumer Culture and Cold War,” 726; Dwight Macdonald, “Our Invisible Poor,” TNY, January 19, 1963. And see Jill Lepore, “How a New Yorker Article Launched the First Shot in the War against Poverty,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2012.

  51.Lyndon B. Johnson, Address before a Joint Session of the Congress, Washington, DC, November 27, 1963.

  52.Portable Malcolm X Reader, 311–26.

  53.Ibid., 318.

  54.Thurgood Marshall, Glenn L. Starks, and F. Erik Brooks, Thurgood Marshall: A Biography (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012), 42.

  55.Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 25.

  56.Carter, The Politics of Rage, 206–7.

  57.Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy, 72.

  58.Ibid., 53.

  59.Ibid., 67.

  60.Ibid., 67.

  61.Ibid. 70–71; Fitzgerald, Highest Glass Ceiling, 142.

  62.Perlstein, Nixonland, 63–64; Barry Goldwater, Acceptance Speech, 28th Republican National Convention, Daly City, California, July 17, 1964.

  63.Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century, 395; Leuchtenburg, “The Travail of Liberalism,” 812–13; FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, 243–44.

  64.Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 77.