Scrapbook of a Decade
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Scrapbook of a Decade The Fifties By David Halberstam Villard. 800 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers; author, "American High: The Years of Confidence,...
...Korvettes, the first major chain of discount stores...
...Halberstam does convey a sense of these particular phenomena, but he does not analyze them or place them in context...
...That context included the final flowering of American domestic life before it withered in the '60s and '70s...
...The Fifties is a readable volume, filled with tidbits of information about countless noteworthy figures of the decade...
...A work about the '50s that does not recognize this leaves out much of what makes those years worthy of our attention...
...Bits and pieces, though, do not add up to a coherent picture, and will leave readers who are unaware of Eisenhower's foreign and national security policies with no real way to understand them or gauge their lasting effects...
...The problem is that one cannot say anything insightful by writing personality sketches and nothing else...
...His reporting on the Vietnam War rendered the nation a great service and The Best and the Brightest is a classic, a brilliant expose that no historian could have written, yet that every historian of the 1960s must come to terms with...
...For instance, he deals with foreign affairs by discussing the CIA coup against Mohammed Mossadegh that restored the Shah to power in Iran, the toppling of an unfriendly regime in Guatemala, John Foster Dulles and Vietnam, and the shooting down of Gary Powers' U2 spy plane, a particularly low moment in the Cold War...
...Many other topics are slighted by Halberstam's method as well...
...Reading The Fifties is like going through 10 years of People magazine—fun, in a way, but not exactly nourishing...
...It is therefore no pleasure to say The Fifties does not enhance Halberstam's reputation...
...My judgment, I realize, opens me to the charge of sour grapes...
...and Kemmons Wilson, who invented the Holiday Inn...
...Ray Kroc, who bought out the McDonald brothers and festooned America with golden arches...
...To his credit Halberstam avoids many of the cliches some writers still find appealing—that Americans were a lonely crowd of conformists living in unlovely houses, that every intelligent citizen was terrified of Joe McCarthy, and that President Eisenhower was a lazy boob whose policies were dictated by others...
...author, "American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960" David Halberstam, one of thecountry's outstanding journalists in the 1960s, was among the first to report not only that the Vietnam War was going badly but that Americans were being lied to about it by their government...
...In addition, homicides and other violent felonies were committed less frequently than today, and there was no national drug problem...
...These are facts any author can discover by looking at such vital indexes of social health as the divorce, illegitimate birth and crime rates...
...For I too have done a book about the 1950s, but it has enjoyed only modest success, whereas The Fifties has become an instant bestseller...
...Nevertheless, the United States was at its zenith?both as a political, economic and military power, and as a society in which family integrity and the work ethic were the foundations of national life...
...Halberstam's The Making of a Quagmire (1965) told the full story of what was happening in Vietnam, and his The Best and the Brightest (1972) explained how it was that so many intelligent government officials managed to make such a mess of things...
...If none of his subsequent books had quite the impact of those two, they did show him to be an exceptionally fine popular historian of our day...
...It is disappointing to learn so many details about individuals and so little about the era...
...The '50s were extraordinary, bounded by the tremendous growth of America's consumer and popular cultures on the one hand, and the emergence of the civil rights movement on the other...
...We are a substantially sicker society than we were then...
...It would have been a bigger one if Halberstam had gone on to examine the '50s more searchingly...
...people married earlier than they do now, had a larger number of children and took better care of them...
...They are essential to providing an accurate impression of the time, not to mention raising questions about what was going right then that is going wrong now...
...Some are well-known—ranging from the likes of Milton Berle, Lucille Ball and James Dean to Adlai E. Stevenson, Dwight D. Eisenhower and J. Edgar Hoover...
...This is a big plus...
...The embarrassment his dispatches caused prompted President John F. Kennedy to ask the New York Times to send him somewhere else—which, to its everlasting credit, the paper did not...
...The truth is, however, that I admire Halberstam very much...
...Hardly a book at all, it is rather a collection of sketches and vignettes that, taken as a whole, adds practically nothing to our knowledge, offers no new ideas, and fails to present an interpretation—much less a reinterpretation—of that important decade...
...1 do not mean to fault Halberstam for refusing to idealize the '50s...
...In the '50s families were more stable...
...Racism, sexism and homophobia continued to be rampant in the country...
...Others, although virtually unknown to the general public, illuminate aspects of American life seldom touched on by scholars of the period—for example, Eugene Ferkauf, founder of E.J...
Vol. 76 • July 1993 • No. 9
