America /The Fifties

THE FIFTIES

DAVID HALBERSTAM, ©1986 ​

The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon, but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers; Grace Metalious, who wrote Peyton Place; and "Goody" Pincus, who led the team that invented the Pill.
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NOTABLE QUOTES

Television would change more than just the face of comedy and entertainment.  Politics was soon to follow, and from then on politics became, in no small part, entertainment. The first political star of television was a freshman senator from Tennessee, intelligent, shrewd, but also awkward and bumbling. No one would have accused Estes Kefauver of being...just another pretty face.  His face was, to be kind, plain.

-The Fifties, page 188

By the time Eisenhower was elected, Hoover was untouchable, based on his length of office, the lack of constitutional limits on his authority, and the fear of the average congressman of what was in his [FBI] files. Since the fear of his files was such that he rarely, if ever, had to use them, there was an ongoing debate in Washington over whether they were as extensive as some people thought.

The Fifties, page 341

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REVIEWS

Kirkus Review

April 1993

The Fifties

In The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, and The Reckoning, Halberstam proved that he can master intimidating subjects with aplomb—and in this massive tome on a convulsive decade in American life, he meets with equal success.
Such a sprawling panorama can't be depicted coherently without selective use of material, and some of Halberstam's omissions are open to question. While rightly lingering over McCarthyism and the development of the atomic bomb, he skims over Communism's advances in Eastern Europe and China in the late 40's, leaving an inadequate sense of why Americans yielded so readily to national-security hysteria during the period. Halberstam also fails to explain fully America's role in reviving the postwar economies of Japan and Western Europe. And why is there nothing on the advances that put air travel in reach of the average American? Nevertheless, Halberstam keeps his narrative tightly focused by concentrating on the era's human instruments of change, including some famous (Eisenhower, Elvis, Brando, Kerouac, Milton Berle, et al.) and others more obscure (Kemmons Wilson and Dick and Mac McDonald, founders of, respectively, Holiday Inn and McDonald's). In this often "mean time" of redbaiting, change still managed to burst out, with the invention of the Pill, the moves by Japan and Germany to undercut GM's preeminence in the auto industry, and the assault on legalized segregation. Halberstam finds at the heart of this decade of social, political, and economic innovation a deep split between an acceptance of change and a yearning for earlier and simpler times, and he examines thoroughly how TV altered various aspects of American life—its recreation habits, its advertising, and, inevitably, its politics, through the medium's coverage of the Little Rock crisis and the JFK-Nixon debates.
Compulsively readable, with familiar events and people grown fresh in the telling

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The Bridgewater Review, Charles F. Angell

January 1994

The Fifties

David Halberstam's The Fifties will come to rest on many bookshelves sandwiched between Code!' Escher, Bach and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, much praised and little read. Halberstam has in magisterial detail reconstructed the decade of Eisenhower, Elvis, and East of Eden. His interest, he tells us in an 'Author's Note' tucked behind the index, was "to write a book which would not only explore what happened in the fifties...but in addition show why the sixties took place-because so many of the forces which exploded in the sixties had begun to come together in the fifties, as the pace of life in America quickened" (799). Unaware at the outset that Halberstam means to view the fifties as launching the rocket that burst in the sixties, the reader proceeds through his narrative wondering what trajectory the book is describing. Made aware of the intent, the reader wonders what exactly Halberstam finds in the fifties that explains why the sixties happened. [Review Continued]

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