Walt Kelley
 
 

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida

August 15, 2001
 
 
 

In the 1950s, the ways in which U.S. opinion leaders and policy promulgators perceived and articulated the domestic threat of Soviet Communism changed drastically. In the immediate wake of World War II, the positive appeal of the Popular Front mentalite in intellectual, academic, labor, and certain political circles was unmistakable. By the late-1950s, however, the radical labor agitator, the naive left-leaning professor, and the subversive film maker were long gone, replaced now as the "enemy within" by pampered consumers, feckless young people, and complacent politicians. The Sputnik launch of October 1957 highlighted this shift. Apprehension over Communism's domestic appeal gave way to concern that, despite its ethical and political repugnance, the Soviet Union was a highly successful regime whose impressive efficiency and purpose contrasted frighteningly with the aimlessness, indulgence, and slackness of the "American way of life." Thus, declared Walter Lippmann in 1959, reporting on his recent interviews with Nikita Khrushchev, it was sometimes hard not to believe that "The tide is running in favor of Communism almost. . . by default." ⁽¹⁾

Through the late 1940s, governmental officials, politicians, and anti-Communist intellectuals and publicists had plausible reasons to be concerned about the appeal that Communism might have for workers, consumers of popular culture, and even voters. After all, the wartime heroism of the Soviet people gave the Stalinist regime enormous credibility, while Communists' vigorous anti-colonialism and their prominent role in labor, civil rights, and social justice causes could easily attract naive, war-weary Americans. Well into the postwar period, influential liberal magazines such as the Nation and the New Republic continued to highlight Soviet achievements and minimize Soviet pathologies. Communists and their close allies dominated the Progressive Party campaign of 1948, which garnered almost 3,000,000 votes for presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace. About a fifth of the membership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) belonged to unions led by Communists or their close allies. As late as March, 1949, Popular Fronters could stage a major pro-Soviet gathering in New York City, the "Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace," winning endorsement for it from such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Aaron Copeland, Rexford Tugwell, and Norman Mailer. ⁽²⁾

By the late 1950s, however, few responsible politicians, publicists, or intellectuals could regard Communism or Communist-friendly progressivism as a relevant political and cultural force. As early as the mid-1950s, Popular Front progressivism seemed a relic of a bygone era. The outbreak of shooting war in Korea, Stalin's death in March, 1953, and multi-pronged programs of official and private repression all but eliminated Communism's domestic political and cultural presence. The Khrushchev revelations of 1956, along with Soviet behavior in Hungary, insured that what had once been a significant political and cultural impulse was now a marginal and embattled relic. 

But spectacular Soviet achievements in space raised a new specter. Now, a ruthlessly efficient and determined adversary capable of mobilizing its citizens and projecting a sense of purpose confronted an America whose self-indulgent and complacent citizens seemed ill-equipped to meet the challenge. Through the late 1950s and into the next decade public moralists, political and governmental leaders, editorialists, and intellectuals sought to alert America to the peril it faced and to instill in their fellow citizens the need to define and animate a sense of national purpose with which to combat this new Red menace.

The lauch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, immediately evoked fears of Soviet nuclear attack. While in fact the orbiting of a small satellite, a President Dwight Eisenhower repeatedly pointed out, carried no immediate military implications, it was true that in the late 1950s the technology of terror escalated. Indeed, declares Michael Mandelbaum,"The boundaries of a 'nuclear epoch' can be fixed with some precision. The logical beginning is the launching of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957; the ending comes with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963. During this half-decade the symbols of nuclear danger seem, in retrospect, more dramatic than before or since." ⁽³⁾ Despite the distinctiveness of this "post-Sputnik" era, historians have devoted little sustained attention to the period as such. Certainly, books, articles, and monographs abound on discrete episodes in the diplomatic and political history of these years. ⁽⁴⁾ But few scholars have thought to analyze the immediate post-Sputnik years as a discrete entity. Nor has there been systematic analysis of the internal discourse within the United States on themes of national purpose, national character, and national will that occupied so many political, journalistic, and academic commentators at the time. Although much impressive scholarship touches on this distinctive period, historians have not acknowledged the distinctive contours of the perceived crisis in national interests and national values that transfixed men such as Walter Lippmann, John and Robert Kennedy, James Bryant Conant, Nelson Rockefeller, Billy Graham. ⁽⁵⁾

In part, relative neglect of the post-Sputnik period is a product of periodization. The time between Sputnik's launch in October 1957 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, after all, was a mere five years, hardly sufficiently lengthy to be awarded the status of a distinctive era. For many scholars, the Cuban crisis marks the denouement to a Cold War that began in 1945 or 1946, which lapsed into wary detente, at least insofar as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were concerned, only after the two rivals had pulled back from the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Moreover, the overused term "crisis" has seemed to some observers an overblown one with which to label the late 1950s and early 1960s. After all, Stalin was dead and the new Soviet leadership publically repudiated his crimes. Observers spoke of a thaw in Soviet society as the authorities released prisoners from the camps, relaxed restrictions on publication, and entered into unprecedented programs of cultural and artistic exchange. Thus, if some analysts include this period on the long first phase of the Cold War, others see it as giving birth to detente. According to historian Richard Pells, for example, by the late 1950s, "International crises began to resemble household quarrels; by 1959, the balance of terror had dissolved into a 'kitchen debate' between Nixon and Khrushchev," a reference to the encounter between the two men at the U.S. Moscow exposition of July, 1959. Still others fold the post-Sputnik years into a stereotyped notion of the placid 1950s, a time when "optimism prevailed in the United States," in the words of Hoover Institution Director W. Glenn Campbell. ⁽⁶⁾

Neglect of the post-Sputnik years may reflect younger historians' skepticism of the widespread crisis-talk of the period. Thus, for example, the very term "crisis" is often enclosed in inverted commas, suggesting that contemporary Americans' perceptions of peril were misplaced or wrongheaded. While there is little doubt that the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over Cuba in October, 1962, was indeed a full-blown crisis, wide skepticism prevails over whether the Kennedy administration should have regarded the actual placement of the missiles as constituting a dire threat to U.S. interests or security. The lengthy U.S.-Soviet quarrel over Berlin, which led on at least one occasion to an armed standoff between American and Russian tanks separated by just a few yards of pavement, seems increasingly remote and arcane, although between 1958 and 1961 it probably absorbed more diplomatic attention than any other single issue. It is easy to forget the sense of ebullient confidence and vigorous challenge exemplified by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, borne along by surging crowds during his 1958 visit to India, exchanging barbs with Richard Nixon in the "kitchen debate" of 1959, pounding his shoe on the rostrum at the United Nations in 1961. "We will bury you!," he told western reporters in 1956, and Soviet domestic economic performance and evidences of widespread appeal in the underdeveloped world made the prediction seem all too plausible. 

And indeed, material from the Soviet archives reveals a Russian leader launching a "well-documented campaign of brinkmanship and disinformation" in 1961 to bolster his demands for western concessions on Berlin. Driven by ideological zealotry, feelings of personal and national ambition, and often ill-considered hunches and impulses, the Soviet leader brandished the threat of nuclear weapons with seeming nonchalance. Observe Russian scholars Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, "The image of a superbomb and nuclear missiles as the ultimate expression of Soviet power had always remained of paramount importance to the Kremlin ruler. . . ." In view of seemingly impressive Soviet and Chinese economic performance, Russian military might, and the apparent popularity of communism among the non-Western masses, declared novelists William Lederer and Eugene Burdick in a "factual" afterword to their 1958 novel The Ugly American, the United States was losing the world struggle "not only in Asia, but everywhere." ⁽⁷⁾ "I imagine," a citizen remarked to a U.S. State Department functionary in a widely circulated, though doubtless apocryphal story in the early 1960s, "that a lot of people in the government are learning Russian." "Actually," went the response, "the optimists are learning Russian. The pessimists are studying Chinese."

To be sure, historians have hardly neglected the diplomatic and military confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union than punctuated this period. In Mayday: Eisenhower, Khruschev, and the U-2 Affair (1986) and The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khruschev, 1960-1963 (1991), historian-television commentator Michael Beschloss provides a detailed survey of the diplomatic encounters between the two super powers. Based on exhaustive research in the documentary record and extensive interview material, these two books provide blow-by-blow accounts, albeit with little interpretive edge, of the public diplomacy of the post-Sputnik era. Beyond cursory discussion of party-political matters, however, neither volume takes note of the domestic discourse that permeated U.S. political culture during this period. Lawrence Freedman's Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (2000) provides detailed accounts of U.S. foreign and defense policies and debates. Biographies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and other leading policy makers and critics are likewise largely focused on formal diplomatic, military, and political issues, while an emerging interest in the cultural dimension of foreign policy has yet to focus on this period. Thus, for example, Walter Hixson's imaginative study of "Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War" ends in 1961 and, quite appropriately, concentrates on U.S. efforts to promote American values and institutions abroad rather than on the domestic debate over values and culture. ⁽⁸⁾

Indeed, examination of the domestic reverberations of perceived diplomatic crisis during this period are few. Doubly notable, then, is Robert A. Divine's careful monograph, The Sputnik Challenge (1993), a thorough and thoughtful study of the impact and implications of the Soviet space launch for defense policy, the space program, and educational reform especially. Divine, however, rarely strays from the formal debates and commentaries related directly to policy and political issues, registering little interest in the remarkable anxiety over fundamental values and goals that claimed so much public attention. ⁽⁹⁾ Commentary on the character and scope of domestic discourse as related to the aftermath of Sputnik has largely been confined to relatively brief apercus in books otherwise focused. For example, William L. O'Neill's American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960 (1986) concludes with shrewd, but abbreviated, discussion of national soul-searching at the end of the Eisenhower administration, while Michael Sherry inIn the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (1995) provides tantalizing but undeveloped glimpses into the distinctive discourse of this period in a fast-paced narrative that is not always sensitive to chronological continuity. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Other important works on the cultural history of the postwar decades by Elaine Tyler May, Margot A. Henricksen, Tom Engelhardt, Stephen J. Whitfield, J. Fred. MacDonald, Nancy E. Bernhard, and Richard M. Fried either confine themselves to the pre-1960 period as the "classic" Cold War era or elide the distinctive features of the post-Sputnik years into an undifferentiated Cold War chronology. ⁽¹¹⁾ Rupert Wilkinson's arresting work The Pursuit of American Character (1988) does provide a suggestive typology for discussion of these themes and has insightful, if brief, remarks on some of the efforts of politically and culturally articulate people to express and address problems of morale and resolve in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Wilkinson's work, however, is more suggestive than definitive, sketching out an agenda rather than providing a sustained analysis. ⁽¹²⁾

There is a need to recapture the distinctive public atmosphere of the post-Sputnik years. Declared Washington Senator Henry M. Jackson in the spring of 1960, "the fact [is] that we are now in a war. . . [.] We are in a conflict now." The threat to America was partly military, partly institutional, partly ideological, and essentially moral. As depicted by John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural address in January, 1961, Americans faced "a long twilight struggle" against the forces of darkness. Several inter-related considerations made this crisis more difficult and more dubious than even the most profound earlier tests of national survival, the Civil War and Pearl Harbor. The external enemy was not merely powerful and newly capable of direct and catastrophic attack on the United States-though he was that. In addition, his system, though pernicious and false, did produce great material advances, gains that threatened to beguile the impoverished masses of the underdeveloped world. He challenged Americans in Berlin, Cuba, the Congo, Southeast Asia, rattling his rockets, inciting internal unrest, working relentlessly to weaken the resolve of free people. Earlier generations of Americans had been equal to the task but could a wealthy and prosperous people find the inner resolve and the capacity for sacrifice with which to meet this new challenge?
 

The precipitating event was the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik on October 4, 1957. This spectacular demonstration of Russian technological prowess brought a number of closely related fears to the surface. An enemy that could fire a satellite into space could, it was widely believed, reach American cities with nuclear warheads, an apprehension that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev did nothing to discourage. Beyond the immediate sense of sudden vulnerability, though, lay the belief we had been outpaced by nation hitherto regarded as primitive and backward. Whereas Americans had attributed earlier Soviet technological achievements to espionage or exploitation of captured German scientists, now the rumor circulated that American scientists and engineers were so far behind their Soviet counterparts that when they did get access to Russian aerospace research, they often could not understand it. The Soviet regime, editorialists and commentators declared, had found ways to mobilize the intellectual and economic capacities of its citizens while Americans frittered away their patrimony in mindless consumption and frivolous amusements. In November, the editors of Life warned that "Khrushchev may well calculate that if he is ever to start a major war, now he will find the United States most divided and unnerved." Another Soviet launch on November 7-this one with a much larger payload, including the dog Laika-intensified the alarm. Scientist George Price, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, declared that "Unless we depart utterly from our present behavior, it is reasonable to expect that by no later than 1975 the United States will be a member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." ⁽¹³⁾ Responding to a constituent's shrill call for action in the wake of Sputnik, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson demurred from this man's warning that it was "five minutes to midnight. . . ," remarked the Texas senator, "might have understated the facts. . . . I cannot help but think it might be more appropriate to say 3, 2 or even 1 minute to midnight." The American people, he agreed, "must be summoned to 'battle stations'. [sic]" ⁽¹⁴⁾

Nor was Sputnik the only emblem of American distress. Almost simultaneously with its launching, President Dwight Eisenhower received the report of a blue ribbon commission he had appointed in the spring of 1957 to assess America's ability to withstand a Soviet attack. This "Gaither Committee"-so named after its chairman, foundation executive H. Rowan Gaither-dismayed the president by endorsing critics' views of the administration's defense policies and calling for massive new programs of missile development, strategic bombing enhancement, and bomb shelter construction. And only months after these twin alarms, the prestigious Rockefeller Brothers Fund issued a long-awaited special report, detailing alleged deficiencies in US defense policy and implicitly indicting the administration for permitting the country to fall behind the Russians. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson was holding highly publicized hearings designed to expose the administration's failures and to convince the public of the existence of a missile gap. Declared Massachusetts Senator and presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy on a 1959 television panel addressing the question "Can the Democracy meet the Space Age Challenge?," the country now faced its "Most critical peril since the time of Lincoln." Nor was a sense of apocalypse-soon confined to political opponents and unfriendly critics. Thus, in February, 1959, a leading Eisenhower factotum, educator, diplomat, and governmental scientific expert James B. Conant, warned the president that "we are in a period of real peril," for even in the 1930s "we were not faced . . . with the kind of struggle which [now] characterizes our divided world. . . ." ⁽¹⁵⁾

Behind these evidences of the failure of American science and military posture lay more fundamental criticisms of American society in general. Indeed, as the initial shock of the Soviet achievement wore off and fears of America's alleged military weakness moderated, the earlier sense of crisis-the moral panic-triggered initially by Sputnik remained, now increasingly focusing on the putative failures and weaknesses of the American people. Even before Sputnik, a spate of popular and scholarly indictments of virtually every phase of American life had burst forth. America, it seemed, once the stalwart guardian of freedom, had become a land of tail-finned gas-guzzlers, ticky-tack suburbs, decaying and ineffectual schools, and selfish and feckless citizens. Americans, economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, lived in an affluent society in which private indulgence masked public squalor. Hidden persuaders, social critic Vance Packard warned, were corrupting a gullible and pampered public. Writer John Keats was particularly vocal in a series of best selling books whose very titles indicted an America seemingly awash in a sea of mediocrity, blandness, and indulgence. The Crack in the PictureWindow (1956) savaged conformist suburban life-styles, while The Insolent Chariots (1958) ridiculed the country's love affair with dysfunctional automobiles and Schools without Scholars (1958) joined a host of critics of the aimlessness and triviality of public education. 

Young congressional staffer Robert F. Kennedy, head counsel in probes of labor union corruption, caught the zeitgeist in his 1960 book The Enemy Within. Corruption in the Teamsters' union, he declared, joined "other evidences of [America's] moral and physical unfitness." He pointed to recent television quiz show scandals and to revelations that American school children were overweight and physically unfit. Economic abundance had "so undermined our strength of character that we are now unprepared to deal with the problems that face us." Union corruption and similar evidences of public dishonor were "merely the symptom of a more serious moral illness." "Disaster is our destiny," he warned, "unless we reinstall the toughness, the moral idealism which has guided this nation during its history." ⁽¹⁶⁾

The president himself endorsed this mordant view of the quality of life in the United States. Thus, in June, 1960, he warned graduating seniors that "freedom is imperiled where peoples, worshiping material success, have become emptied of idealism. Peace with justice," he admonished, "cannot be attained . . . where opulence has dulled the spirit. . . ." Critics of American education contrasted diligent, focused Russian youngsters with milkshake-slurping, slack-jawed American boys and girls. Tawdry scandals involving popular quiz shows and radio personalities led to somber reflections on the country's descent into moral decay. "The citizens," declared an academic observer, "seem to have lost . . . courage and power. . . [and to be afflicted with] anxiety and weakness. . . ." ⁽¹⁷⁾

This atmosphere of crisis both invoked and differed from earlier Cold War episodes. During the first phase of the confrontation with the Soviet Union (1946-53), technological and logistical realities limited realistic fears of direct Soviet attack on the United States. Soviet actions, it is true, might thrust the U.S. into a shooting war in Europe or the Far East-and in fact, did so in Korea. And the successful Soviet development of atomic bombs, accomplished in 1949, heightened American fears. But unlike the situation in the earlier crisis, the Russians now had the capacity to reach the U.S. with nuclear warheads, subjecting the American people for the first time since 1815 to the threat of external attack. "A critical and urgent situation" now faced the country, Eisenhower's science advisor MIT president James R. Killian declared, for the Soviets could "spring a surprise attack without certain, decisive retaliation." ⁽¹⁸⁾

The current crisis, however, extended beyond this frightening vulnerability. It lay also in the public face of the Soviet regime and in its leadership. To be sure, basic Russian aims remained constant. The Soviets, aided by their Chinese clients, still sought world domination and the destruction of liberal, capitalist society. On the surface, to be sure, the death of Stalin and the accession of Nikita Khrushchev suggested an easing of tensions. Stalin and the system of governance and ideology associated with his name were unique in their sinister, implacable, and minatory character. In contrast, Khrushchev's rough peasant charm-to say nothing of his denunciation in 1956 of the excesses and pathologies of Stalinism-conveyed a new openness and accessibility. For some American leaders, however, it was precisely the Soviet premier's affability and ebullience that made him even more dangerous than his predecessor. Soviet achievements in technology, economics, and education lent troubling credibility to the Red regime. Expanding and popular Soviet initiatives among former colonial peoples, symbolized by triumphant visits of Khrushchev and Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Bulgarin to India, Egypt, and other underdeveloped nations triggered alarm at the highest governmental circles. Thus, warned C. D. Jackson, one of Eisenhower's most trusted advisors, emblematic of the new post-Stalin Soviet theat was the Burmese government's rejection of U.S. aid projects while its leaders were making "economic googoo eyes at Moscow. . . ." Indeed, the combination of Russian scientific and economic progress and Khrushchev's popular appeal, fulminated U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1957, made the Soviet leader "the most dangerous person to lead the Soviet Union since the October Revolution. . . ." ⁽¹⁹⁾

The focus of Americans' internal apprehensions also shifted between the two periods. During the immediate postwar period, political and opinion leaders were concerned that the relative depression-era and wartime popularity of the Soviet Union and of Communism in general would hamper the effort to confront and contain the USSR. The rise of industrial unions, often with the active involvement of Communists, vigorous pro-Soviet political campaigns such as that conducted by Henry Wallace and his Progressive party in 1948, and the creation of what historian Michael Denning has termed a "cultural front," whose ecumenical leftist orientation most emphatically included pro-Soviet elements, meant that the effort to persuade Americans of the dangers of Soviet power and of Communism would encounter spirited political resistance at home. At the same time, an active Soviet spy network in the U.S., Canada, and Britain raised legitimate issues of national security and domestic loyalty, for as a number of spectacular cases revealed, the Soviet Union claimed the positive loyalty of important scientists and government officials whose involvement in espionage stemmed from inner conviction rather than from pecuniary motives. Thus, although few Americans were Communists, the Popular Front mentality of the World War II years lingered into the postwar years. As late as March, 1949, for example, a pro-Soviet peace conference in New York City attracted significant public attention and rallied hundreds of sympathizers and participants. Thus in these early Cold War years, the existence of strong pro-Soviet elements in labor, political, and cultural circles posed potent challenges to men and women determined to expose and blunt Soviet influence at home and abroad. ⁽²⁰⁾

By 1957, however, pro-Soviet sentiment in the U.S. had all but vanished. The ouster by the CIO of pro-Soviet affiliates in 1949-50, repressive legislation, a de facto media blacklist, and the chilling effects of the Korean War and McCarthyism had all but destroyed a once-flourishing pro-Soviet American left. Khrushchev's revelations at the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February, 1956, soon widely circulated throughout the West, further eroded sympathy for Russian Communism. Espionage, of course, remained a problem, but the connection between ideological fervor and the passing of military secrets had largely ended. Whereas just a few years earlier, those seeking to mobilize the American people for the struggle against Stalinism had to deal with labor, cultural, and political activists inspired by the Soviet version of a better world, now they could safely abandon fears of domestic disloyalty.

But if the objects of fear and apprehension had shifted, the intensity of elites' concerns did not wane. The enemy was no longer the implacable Stalin, whose ruthless designs threatened to dominate Europe and plunge America into war. It was now the boisterous Khrushchev, brandishing impressive statistics on economic growth, educational achievement, and scientific accomplishment even as Russian satellites glittered in the night sky. Whereas men of the Truman-Marshall-Acheson generation had worried about a triumphant Red Army and communist unions and politicians in war-torn Europe, men of the Eisenhower-Kennedy generation feared the appeal of Soviet economic and military achievements for impoverished former colonial subjects in Asia and Africa. Thus, in December, 1960, General Dynamics CEO and former U.S. Secretary of the Army Frank Pace warned college students that "the cold hard facts still are that the Communist states are making giant strides, not only militarily but in the economic and psychological fields as well. We have no time to lose." And looming beyond the Russian steppes, he added, was the specter of "over half a billion dedicated zealots, the Chinese Communist nation. . ." challenging the West and competing for the hearts and minds of people of color. ⁽²¹⁾

Soviet and Communist Chinese successes stimulated fears that, as malevolent as it was, the Communist system might in fact be better equipped to face a perilous world than was its western counterpart. The suspicion that as a centralized, ideologically charged, and disciplined regime, the Soviet Union (and now, the People's Republic of China) enjoyed key advantages over the individualistic, disputatious, and self-indulgent peoples of the West had long been a staple of Cold War alarm-thinking. The current crisis being a decisive turning point, the problem of democratic inefficiency now loomed even larger. Editors, officials, academics, and military leaders wondered if democracy and pluralism were compatible with the nation's survival in the competition with such a ruthless, dedicated, and efficient foe. Thus, declared CBS correspondent Howard K. Smith, moderating an April, 1960, television broadcast titled "How Can You Get Things Done in a Democracy?," the United States faced competition from "a powerful autocracy that can apply the swift changes [necessary for military and educational development] without having to go through time-consuming elections. . . ." In his first national television interview, sage Walter Lippmann worried along the same lines: The Soviets, he observed , had a "great sense of purpose [while] we do not at present have that sense of purpose. . . ." Senators, educators, journalists, and intellectuals endlessly and often pessimistically discussed the question that Lippmann posed: "Can a loose democracy compete with a . . . dictatorship?" ⁽²²⁾

Much of the blame for America's new technological vulnerability and moral decay devolved upon the president. Believing that ill-informed journalists, ambitious politicians, and hardware-hungry service chiefs were grossly misrepresenting implications of Soviet successes, Eisenhower shelved the Gaither report and sought to calm the public in a series of reassuring speeches and press conferences. He pointed to the crudeness of the Sputnik launch's technology and its inapplicability to direct military purposes. In the wake of Sputnik, military budgets expanded, Eisenhower appointed a special science advisor, and, after embarrassing failures, U.S. satellites began criss-crossing the skies and medium-range American missiles began appearing in Turkey and Italy. Nonetheless, the notion that the administration was in denial about the crisis facing the country gained currency. Thus, when on November 25 the president suffered a stroke, the sense of a nation in peril and governed by a sickly and distracted old man became pervasive.The president, declared Walter Lippmann-a close observer of every occupant of the White House since William Howard Taft-was simply "not aware of the nature of the world as it is. . . [and] is out of date. . . .not preparing the country for the needs of the 1960s. . . .not meeting the real challenge of the Soviet Union. . . ." ⁽²³⁾

Culpable though he was, according to even friendly observers, Eisenhower was not alone in bearing the burden of blame. The American people themselves bore much of the responsibility 

for national distraction and complacency. Some treated the Soviet feat as a joke. Thus, a New York City radio station capitalized on the public interest that Sputnik had aroused by running a jocular "Name the Earth Satellite" contest. More alarming to proponents of national strength and resolve were the findings of pollsters indicating indifference or ignorance. A Gallup Poll during the week after the first Soviet launch found that almost half the respondents felt no particular alarm and over 60% viewed the Soviet achievement as a positive technological development. In October, pollster Samuel Lubell took it upon himself to supplement his structured interviews in New York to ask citizens informally what they thought of Sputnik and was shocked by the complacency and indifference he encountered. "'The people in Washington know what they're doing,'" a truck driver told him. "'There's only one thing that worries us,'" an elderly man told him. "'It's all these taxes. . . . Let someone else worry about sputnik.'" A few months later, a Life magazine reporter was appalled when another survey revealed that 4 million Americans had not even heard of Sputnik. True, by then concern over military defense and educational deficiencies had roused "a hard core of millions of people who see clearly the danger implicit in Sputnik and who take an enlightened and responsible view of the country's dilemma." Even so, declared Paul O'Neill, many more-a "complacent majority"-remained disengaged or indifferent. A year later, James Conant remained "disturbed both by the present complacency and the confusion even among the leading citizens. . . we cannot meet the Soviet challenge unless people are willing to make more sacrifices. . . ." ⁽²⁴⁾

Indeed, this theme of popular complacency and self-indulgence emerged as central to the crisis talk of the post-Sputnik period. Thus, for example, in 1962, Yale historian Samuel Flagg Bemis had indicted the American people as "experiencing the world crisis from soft seats of comfort. . . . Our manpower," the elderly scholar declared, had been "softened in will and body in a climate of amusement." On the hustings in the fall of 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy hammered away at the theme of lethargy and lack of resolve. "A man who has extra fat," declared the lean contender, "will look doubtfully on attempting the four-minute mile," a reference to British runner Roger Bannister's remarkable recent feat. But "A nation replete with goods and services, confident that 'there's more where that came from,' may feel less ardor for questing." At the same time, however, it was dangerous politics to tell the voters that they had it too good. The call for sacrifice had to be couched in sufficiently broad and ambiguous terms to permit citizens to exempt themselves from the blame and guilt implicit in calls for self-restraint and discipline. The pages of Life magazine, a leading voice in the condemnation of national indulgence, graphically revealed the dilemma. Earnest articles and editorials might well remind citizens that the "Romans were complacent before the Visigoths sacked the city," but as General Motors told Life's readers, "There's Nothing Like a New Car for Festivity." Material plenty might be sapping the nation's resolve but any hint of slackening consumer demand sent the country into a recession. Thus, throughout the sharp economic downturn of 1958-59, even as critics lashed out at spirit-sapping abundance, car dealers insisted that "You auto-buy now." Here then was the critical dilemma that faced post-Sputnik moralists: the bounty of the American economy was at once America's glory and its nemesis. ⁽²⁵⁾

One way out of the dilemma was to point to the advertising and television industries as the culprits. Indeed, popular writer Vance Packard made a career out of castigating Madison Avenue, whose machinations provided endless grist for the mills of comedians and pundits. Bemis saw a public "debauched by [the] mass media. . ., fed full of toys and gewgaws." Fabled newscaster and commentator Edward R. Murrow assailed the television networks for their role in making Americans "wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent." Television, declared John F. Kennedy's chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was "a vast wasteland." Charged a trade union official participating in a symposium on American values sponsored by the Advertising Council, "advertisers whet our appetites for a still higher standard of living and make us still softer and more the slaves of the things they have taught us to use." The people, in short, were being seduced into lives of sloth and ease by devious men in gray flannel suits whose cynical stimulation of desire deflected citizens from proper attention to public duty. ⁽²⁶⁾

But offloading responsibility onto the advertising industry was finally no resolution to the dilemma either. Who were financial and cultural elites to tell American citizens what was good for them or where their civic duty lay? Woe betide the politician who would set himself up as an arbiter of popular taste or an enemy of ever-expanding consumption. Moreover, millions of Americans remained on the margins of the vaunted material abundance of the 1950s, as candidate Kennedy himself frequently charged. Arguments that combined a critique of wasteful consumption, on the one hand, with acknowledgment of the plight of the poor and excluded on the other raised disturbing questions of income redistribution and economic equality. In the 1950s, Democrats no less than Republicans, trade unionists no less than corporate executives, were committed to consumer-driven economic growth, and thus to avoidance of talk of equity and redistribution, as the key to American progress. 

Moreover, in a deeper sense, America was about consumption and commerce. The argument over which type of republicanism-commercial or civic-best defined the national character had long been settled in favor of the former. It was too late now for America's leaders and publicists to apply the brakes, shift gears, and redefine the national style. We were, in the words of historian David Potter's important 1954 study of the national character, a People of Plenty, not a people of restraint and sacrifice. Advertising and television, then, were merely vehicles through which Americans were brought to their destiny, not an insidious alien force corrupting the people. Declared one industry spokesman, advertising "really powers our whole incentive system," and was crucial to the "tremendous upsurge which the American economy has experienced in our time." ⁽²⁷⁾

Thus, guardians of public purpose were left with a conundrum. In the struggle against Communism, which now took on dangerous new dimensions, the American people had to stand firm and remain true to their heritage of struggle and sacrifice. At the same time, however, the "free enterprise" economy created the cornucopia of riches that elevated the living standards of all. Indeed, in the words of one celebratory publication, "'Of all the great industrial nations, the one that clings most tenaciously to private capitalism[,] has come closest to the socialist goal of providing abundance for all in a classless society.'" Yet could a people blessed with this bounty find the mettle necessary for competition with the disciplined Red masses? ⁽²⁸⁾

In the end, all this talk of moral and physical decline amid unparalleled international tensions and thermonuclear vulnerability grew diffuse and unfocused. Liberals critical of the quality and character of American public life saw more opportunity than threat in the Sputnik phenomenon. Critical of the conservatism of the Eisenhower administration along a whole range of domestic issues, northern Democrats, liberals, racial minorities, and laborites viewed the Soviet achievement as offering a chance to promote a progressive domestic agenda. Soviet inroads into the Third World, for example, highlighted the need for vigorous civil rights measures at home. Seemingly spectacular gains in Soviet economic performance underscored the low growth rate and toleration of high levels of unemployment that, they charged, stemmed from Eisenhower's bean-counting budgetary priorities. The Sputnik-inspired cry for scientific and technical expertise opened the door for federal aid to education. The alleged missile gap, in short, might well prove just the opening needed to carry forth the interrupted agenda of the New Deal and continue the process of building a fairer, more positive social order. ⁽²⁹⁾

Others highlighted the specifically military threat. For people such as the members of the Gaither Committee, New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin, and generals such as Maxwell Taylor and James Gavin, it was Communist military intentions and capabilities that demanded response, pure and simple. Expansion of the defense budget, accelerated development of intercontinental missiles, beefing up conventional forces to offer resistance to Communist subversion in Southeast Asia, and perhaps mass construction of bomb shelters would provide what was needed to confront the Soviets and their clients. Those stressing the essentially military nature of the post-Sputnik crisis rarely invoked the tropes of sybaritic sloth or moral corruption, although they did worry that public reluctance to bear heavier tax burdens might impede necessary build-up. Thus, declared congressional preparedness zealot Representative Dan Flood of Pennsylvania, "I would rather have red ink in the books [to pay for military build-up] than red blood on the streets of America." ⁽³⁰⁾

But for many influential American writers, pundits, and public moralists, the Sputnik challenge was all-embracing, transcending specific concerns about military capacity and social reform. Often in extreme language reflective of a classic moral panic, these people depicted the crisis as lying at the very heart of the American way of life. Thus, declared James Conant, "Our existence and our freedoms are both in danger." The Soviets, wrote Walter Lippmann in the summer of 1959, had a "great sense of purpose [but] we do not at present have that sense of purpose. Without a revival of American purpose Mr. K. Is likely to win the competitive race . . . [and] if he does win the race our influence as a world power will inevitably decline." Conant, Lippmann, and a host of other commentators and editorialists called for sacrifice and resolve. ⁽³¹⁾

Yet how would calls for sacrifice resonate among a populace schooled in the virtues of consumption? Finding the wherewithal for greater military spending, foreign aid, and enhanced education, declared foundation executive Dean Rusk in December, 1957, would require an end to "waste and frivolous consumption," but he acknowledged that it was probably not wise for anyone such as himself associated with the Rockefeller Foundation to make this point publically. Quite apart from the incongruity of the wealthy Rockefellers urging restraint on ordinary citizens, Rusk added, "most people's human reaction [is] that they are not consuming enough." Did the "twilight struggle" not imply a certain degree of economic leveling, lest popular resentment erode the nation's noble mission? Or could a formula be found that would promote expanded economic growth as a means of disguising the sacrifice necessary for meeting the renewed Communist onslaught? Could perhaps an authoritative, definitive statement of the country's mission provide the basis for moving the people to accept the burdens of continued world leadership and for squaring the national commitment to an expanding bounty with the need for discipline and sacrifice in a world suddenly grown so perilous? ⁽³²⁾

1. Walter Lippmann, The Communist World and Ours (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 45.

2. The apparent vitality of the Popular Front wordview in the immediate postwar period is vividly captured in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the 20^th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000; paperback edition, 2002), 394-417, 490-523.

3. Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics before and after Hiroshima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 218.

4. Indicative of the themes capturing the attention of historians dealing with this period are, for example: David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953-1961 (NY: Columbia University Press, 1991); Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (NY: Oxford University Press, 1998); H. W. Brands, Jr., Cold Warriors: Eisenhower's Generation and American Foreign Policy (NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988); Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower's New-Look National Security Policy, 1953-1961 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1996); Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957-1963 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1997); Peter J. Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Robert J. Watson, Into the Missile Age, 1956-1960, vol. IV of History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Washington: Historical office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1997); H. W. Brands, "The Age of Vulnerability: Eisenhower and the National Insecurity State," AHR, 94:4 (Oct. 1989): 963-89; Fred I. Greenstein and Richard H. Immerman, "What Did Eisenhower Tell Kennedy about Indochina?: The Politics of Misperceptions," JAH 79: 2 (Sept. 1992): 568-87; Marvin R. Zahniser and W. Michael Weis, "A Diplomatic Pearl Harbor?[:] Richard Nixon's Goodwill Mission to Latin America in 1958, Diplomatic History 13: 2 (Spring l989): 163-90; William Burr, "Avoiding the Slippery Slope: The Eisenhower Administration and the Berlin Crisis, November 1958-January, 1959," Diplomatic History 18: 2 (Spring 1994): 177-205; Richard V. Damms, "James Killian, the Technological Capabilities Panel, and the Emergence of President Eisenhower's 'Scientific-Technological Elite,'" Diplomatic History 24: 1 (Winter 2000): 57-78; Brian R. Duchin, "'The Most Spectacular Legislative Battle of that Year': President Eisenhower and the 1958 Reorganization of the Department of Defense," Presidential Studies Quarterly 24: 2 (Spring 1994): 243-62; Thomas M. Gaskin, "Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the Eisenhower Administration and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1957-1960," [sic] ibid., 24: 2 (Spring 1994): 341-62; Robert L. Ivie, "Eisenhower as Cold Warrior," Eisenhower's War of Words: Rhetoric and Leadership, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994), 7-25; Douglas Little, "His Finest Hour?: Eisenhower, Lebanon, and the 1958 Middle East Crisis," Diplomatic History 20: 1 (Winter 1996): 27-54; and Robert A. Strong, "Eisenhower and Arms Control,"Reevaluating Eisenhower: American Foreign Policy in the 1950s, eds. Richard A. Melanson and David Mayers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 241-66.

5. But see James L. Baughman, "The National Purpose and the Newest Medium: Liberal Critics of Television, 1958-1960," Mid-America 64: 2 (April-July 1982): 41-55; John W. Jeffries, "The 'Quest for National Purpose' of 1960," American Quarterly 30: 4 (Fall, 1978): 451-70; and John Andrew III, "Cracks in the Consensus: The Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Studies Project and Eisenhower's America," Presidential Studies Quarterly 28: 3 (Summer 1998): 525-52 for useful introductions to this theme. Warren Susman (with the assistance of Edward Griffin), "Did Success Spoil the United States?: Dual Representations in Postwar America," Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Larry May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 19-37, focuses on cultural elites' critique of the aesthetic tawdriness of American popular culture in the 1950s.

6. Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (NY: Harper & Row, 1985), 349. See also Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (NY: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998 [original publication, 1997]), 87-184; W. Glenn Campbell, Foreword, The United States in the 1980s, ed. Peter Duignan and Alvin Rabushka (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution and Stanford University Press, 1980), vii. Shrewd observations on Cold War periodization are found inMichael Howard, "The Barbarian Solution," Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 11, 1994, 6.

7. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 255, 253. See also John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 238-80. William Lederer and Eugene Burdick are quoted in Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (NY: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998 [original publication, 1997]), 126. On the importance of The Ugly American, see Christopher Shannon, A World Made Safe for Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 16-18.

8. Michael Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khruschev, and the U-2 Affair (NY: Harper, 1986); Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khruschev, 1960-1963 (NY: Harper Collins, 1991); Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (NY: Oxford University Press, 2000); Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961. The leading biographical studies of Dwight Eisenhower are Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower. vol 2: The President (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1984); Robert F. Burk, Dwight D. Eisenhower: Hero and Politician (Boston: Twayne, 1988); Robert A. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (NY, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981); and Chester J. Pach and Elmo Richardson, The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (rev. ed.; Lawrence: Regents Press, 1991).

9. Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge (NY: Oxford University Press, 1993).

10. William L. O'Neill, American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960 (NY: Free Press, 1986), 270-91; Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 169, 214-29. See also Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), 17-18, Charles C. Alexander, Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952-1961 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 267-71, and J. Ronald Oakley, God's County: America in the Fifties (NY: Dembner Books, 1986), 228-66.

11. Nancy E. Bernhard, U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999); Tom Engelhardt, The End of the Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (NY: Basic Books, 1995); Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (NY: Oxford 1998); Margot A. Henricksen, Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley, LA, and London: University of California Press, 1997);

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era ([NY]: Basic Books, 1988); J. Fred. MacDonald, Television and the Red Menace: The Video Road to Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1985); Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; 2d ed., 1996).

12. Rupert Wilkinson,The Pursuit of American Character (NY: Harper and Row, 1988).

13. Life, editorial, October 28, 1957, 34; George Price, "Arguing the Case for Being Panicky," ibid., November 18, 125-28.

14. Lyndon Johnson to Anthony Marcus, Nov. 19, 1957, Preparedness Subcommittee, Senate Papers, Box 355, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.

15. On the Gaither report, see David L. Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999) and Robert J. Watson, Into the Missile Age, 1956-1960, vol. IV of History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Washington: Historical office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1997), 137-39, 183-87. On the Rockefeller project, see Andrew, "Cracks in the Consensus: The Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Studies Project and Eisenhower's America." On Johnson, Thomas M. Gaskin, "Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the Eisenhower Administration and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1957-1960," Political Science Quarterly 24: 2 (Spring 1994): 341-62; interview with George Reedy, by Michael L. Gillette, December 20, 1983, 36-41 and Gerald W. Siegel, interview by T. H. Baker, May 26, 1969, 39-41, both in Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. Conant expressed his concern in a letter to Eisenhower, Feb. 23, 1959, Conant Papers, Harvard University Library, Box 6, while Kennedy's remarks are from a 1959 CBS broadcast viewed at the Library of the Museum of Television and Radio, New York, May 21, 23, 2000. See also Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, 23-33, and Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (NY: Basic Books, 1985), 141-56.

16. Robert F. Kennedy, The Enemy Within, 306-7; Robert F. Kennedy speech, May 6, 1961, in Robert F. Kennedy: Collected Speeches (Viking 1993), 34-38.

17. Sloan Wilson, "It's Time to Close Our Carnival," Life, March 17, 1958, 36-37; address "Beyond the Campus. . .," June 5, 1960, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight David Eisenhower, 1960-61 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1961), 466; rapporteur's transcription of remarks by Professor Dallas W. Smythe in Advertising Council, The American Round Table, The Common Good: An Interpretive Report of The American Round Table on "Moral Attitudes and the Will to Achievement of Americans" (n.p.: The Advertising Council, 1962), 4. Concerns about the steadfastness of the general public were chronic throughout the early Cold War period. See, e.g., John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 64-66.

18. Remarks of Senator Jackson, U.S., Cong., Senate, 86^th Cong., 2d Sess., Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, Hearings, Part 7 (June 28, 1960), 918; James R. Killian to James B. Conant, November 25, 1959, Conant Papers, Box 8.

19. C. J. Jackson is quoted in Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower's New-Look National Security Policy, 1953-1961 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 170. See also Robert J. McMahon, "The Illusion of Vulnerability: American Reassessments of the Soviet Threat, 1955-1956," International History Review 18: 3 (Aug. 1996): 591-619. Dulles is quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 239-40. Gaddis goes on to note that in part Dulles's concerns about Khrushchev's judgment stemmed from the secretary's mistaken idea that the Soviet premier had a drinking problem that clouded his judgment, but adds that while "Dulles was wrong about Khrushchev's drinking habits. . ., if one switches the intoxicant from alcohol to missiles, then the diagnosis becomes quite accurate."

20. The literature on labor, politics, culture, and espionage in the World War II and immediate postwar period is vast and contentious. On labor, see Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 253-93; on the Wallace campaign, seeNorman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People's Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948 (New York: The Free Press, 1973); on culture, Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, New York: Verso, 1997); David W. Stowe, "The Politics of Cafe Society," Journal of American History 84:4 (March 1998): 1384-1406; and William L. O'Neill, A Better World: The Great Schism-Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1982); and on espionage, see John Earl Haynes and Harvy Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

21. Pace extempore speech, Columbia U. Alumni, June 1, 1960, Vital Speeches [need date], 713.

22. Transcript, "How Can You Get things Done in a Democracy," Great Challenge Series for 1960, broadcast over CBS, April 3, 1960, Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Studies Project Papers, Rockefeller Archives Center, Pocantico, New York, Panels VI-VII, Box 50, Folder 566; Walter Lippmann, interview with Howard K. Smith, July 7, 1970, CBS Reports, viewed at library of the Museum of Television and Radio, New York City, May 23, 2000.

23. On Eisenhower's response to Sputnik, see David Henry, "Eisenhower and Sputnik: The Irony of Failed Leadership," Eisenhower's War of Words: Rhetoric and Leadership, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994), 223-50. On the IRBM's, see Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957-1963 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1997), and on his stroke, see Ambrose, Eisenhower, 2, 436-40. Lippmann's remarks are from Walter Lippmann, interview with Howard K. Smith, July 7, 1970, CBS Reports, viewed at library of the Museum of Television and Radio, New York City, May 23, 2000.

24. Samuel Lubell, "Sputnik and American Public Opinion," Columbia University Forum (Winter 1957), 16-17; Paul O'Neill, "U.S. Change of Mind," Life, March 3, 1958, 91-100; Conant to Eisenhower, February 23, 1959, Conant Papers, Box 6. Observes historian Walter McDougall, in effect Life and other media "instructed the American people to panic and told them that their wiser neighbors already had." McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth, 143-50, quote, 145. For similar developments in television news broadcasting, see J. Fred. MacDonald, Television and the Red Menace: The Video Road to Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1985), 90-91. Giles Alston, "Eisenhower: Leadership in Space Policy," Reexamining the Eisenhower Presidency, ed. Shirley Anne Warshaw (Westport: Greenwood, 1993), 108, stresses the diffidence of public opinion.

25. Bemis quoted in Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 169; Kennedy, quoted in Life, September 26, 1960; George Price, "Arguing the Case for Being Panicky," ibid., November 18, 1957, 126; General Motors advertisement, ibid., December 12, 1960, 96-97. For an engaging reflection on the theme of space exploration and national purpose, see Michael L. Smith, "Selling the Moon: The U.S. Manned Space Program and the Triumph of Commodity Scientism," The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 175-209.

26. Murrow quoted by James L. Baughman, "The National Purpose and the Newest Medium: Liberal Critics of Television, 1958-1960," 45; remarks of Mark Starr, Advertising Council, The American Round Table, The Common Good: An Interpretive Report of The American Round Table on "Moral Attitudes and the Will to Achievement of Americans" (n.p.: The Advertising Council, 1962), 19; Bemis quoted in Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 169.

27. Remarks of Sylvester L. Weaver, Jr., in [The Advertising Council], The American Round Table Discussions on People's Capitalism, Session I: Digest Report by David M. Potter. ([New York]: The Advertising Council, 1957), 48-49. On the triumph of consumerism, see Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (NY: Columbia University Press, 2000). Published in 1954, Potter's book found a ready audience among advertising executives, who credited the Yale professor with appreciating advertising's critical role in sustaining the American economy and hence in underwriting American values. See, e.g., James Webb Young, "Advertising's Balance Sheet: One One Side, Instrument of Plenty; on the Other, 'Copywriter Strain," c. November 1954, Ad Council Papers, University of Illinois Library, 50^th Anniversary File, Box. 1.

28. Remarks of Edmund W. Sinnott in [The Advertising Council], The American Round Table Discussions on People's Capitalism, 5-6 (quoting a Twentieth-Century Fund background paper). See also Rupert Wilkinson, "American Character Revisited," Journal of American Studies 17: 2 (August 1983), 171.

29. Howard Brick, "Talcott Parsons's 'Shift Away from Economics,' 1937-1946," JAH 87: 2 (September 2000): 490-514, is an illuminating discussion of progressive intellectuals' retreat from the privileging of economic forces generally and of class in particular in their analyses of postwar American society.

30. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, 175-78. Divine cites such books as Hanson Baldwin, The Great Arms Race: A Comparison of U.S. and Soviet Power Today (NY: Praeger, 1958), and James W. Gavin, War and Peace in the Space Age (NY: Harper, 1958), as influential indictments of Eisenhower's response to Sputnik and related Soviet challenges. General Maxwell Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (NY: Harper, 1960) criticized the Eisenhower administration's reliance on massive retaliation and called for expansion of American conventional forces so as to be able to meet Communist insurgency, especially in Asia. Flood is quoted in Sherry, In The Shadow of War, 214.

31. Conant's remarks in New York Times, November 13, 1959; Lippmann is quoted by interviewer Howard K. Smith in a television interview with Lippmann, July 7, 1960, viewed at the Library of the Museum of Television and Radio, New York.

32. Dean Rusk to Nelson Rockefeller, with attached draft statement, December 19, 1957, Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Project Study, Panel I, Box 1, Folder 13, Rockefeller Archives Center, Pocantico, New York.