ON THE AIRWAVES: TRANSISTOR RADIOS
“The only regret I have about the transistor is its use for rock and roll,” Walter Brattain often remarked. The music was bad enough, but the fact that the radios were made in Japan was a peculiar form of torture.1
Brattain worked at Bell Labs in New York. There, in December 1947, he and his colleagues John Bardeen and William Shockley invented the transistor. The tiny piece of germanium crystal with two wires poking out of it had the amplification properties of conventional vacuum tubes, but was much smaller, did not produce heat, did not need to warm up, and used a fraction of the energy. Bell Labs formally unveiled the revolutionary component on June 30, 1948, demonstrating its use in, among other things, a radio.
That was the world’s first transistor radio. Logic suggests that the prototype should have been snapped up and mass-produced in time for Christmas 1948. But that didn’t happen, due to a number of problems. First, transistors were expensive and no one wanted to pay a lot of money for a radio unless it produced great sound, and transistor radios were hardly high-fidelity. Second, the idea of a small radio was not particularly appealing, since listening had always been a group activity. Most families had one big radio—the central feature of every living room.
As a result, the only transistor radios produced over the next six years were built by amateurs. The transistor was recognized as an important invention (Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley won the Nobel Prize in 1956), but practical uses were slow to materialize. Then, in 1951, Texas Instruments (TI) of Dallas paid Bell $25,000 for a manufacturing license. TI wanted to sell transistors to IBM but first had to prove that it could mass-produce them. Patrick Haggerty, general manager at TI, decided to invest $2 million in a secret project to develop an all-transistor radio which, the company hoped, would furnish the proof IBM needed. The project was given to the engineer Paul Davis, who came up with a prototype in four days. TI then went looking for a firm to manufacture and market it. The big companies like RCA and Philco all rejected the idea, on the grounds that they were already doing well in the radio and television market and did not see any reason to diversify by making a product that would not actually produce better sound. They failed to grasp that, if the radio could fit inside a shirt pocket, the way it sounded was immaterial.
Some years earlier, John Pies and Joe Weaver had started a new company called Industrial Development Engineering Associates, or IDEA, whose aim was to develop civilian applications for wartime technologies. Eventually, Ed Tudor, originally hired to do marketing, took over, while Pies and Weaver concentrated on development. Tudor hated the name IDEA, which he thought sounded like a building contractor, so he changed it to Regency, the name of his favorite cigarettes.
After TI’s rebuff by the big manufacturers, the company knocked on Regency’s door. Tudor liked the idea of pocket radios, which he thought would prove useful in a nuclear war. He boasted that he could sell 20 million units to the duck-and-cover generation in just three years. In June 1954, Regency and TI signed an agreement to put the world’s first mass-produced transistor radio on the market.
Regency fiddled with Davis’ design, cut the number of transistors from six to four, and came up with a radio capable of fitting in a shirt pocket. The TR-1 was five inches tall, three inches wide, one and a quarter inches thick and weighed just twelve ounces. It came in a variety of colors and retailed for a rather steep $49.95—battery not included. The new product hit the shops on November 1, 1954. In keeping with its price, it was marketed as a plaything for the wealthy. As a tie-in with the release of the film Around the World in Eighty Days, publicity stills of Trevor Howard and Shirley Maclaine, with radio in hand, were used to advertise the TR-1. In June 1955, Holiday magazine carried a similarly targeted ad: “He Drives a 300SL; She Charges at Cartier; He’s a Letterman in His Junior Year. They All Have This in Common: A Winter Vacation with a Regency Radio.”2
Journalists poked fun at the product, remarking that it was not quite as small as the one Dick Tracy wore on his wrist. The most damning critique came in Consumer Reports: “Though its transmission of speech was adequate under good conditions, its music transmission was quite unsatisfactory under any conditions. . . . At low volume the sound was thin, tinny, and high-pitched and at higher volume distortion increased.”3 Sales, however, soon demonstrated that the press had grossly underestimated the public’s desire to hear distorted music. Regency couldn’t produce the radios fast enough to keep up with demand. Stores had long waiting lists. The transistor radio, like the mobile phone and the iPod, was popular because it was private—it did not have to be shared. In that sense, it evoked the exclusivity of the new consumer culture. It was a piece of modern technology which doubled as designer wear and said to those who did not own one: “You like this? Get your own.”
Before long, the market was flooded with portable radios—none of them, however, quite as portable as the TR-1. Zenith, RCA, and General Electric entered the fray, though they still didn’t grasp that size was more important than quality. New models had combinations of transistors and tubes, making them considerably bigger than the TR-1, though they did sound better. Other manufacturers simply ignored the trend, denied that it was a trend, and concentrated on televisions.
The Japanese, however, had no trouble reading the runes. In 1953, a small tape recorder manufacturer called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Ltd., or TOTSUKO, convinced the Japanese minister of trade to allow it to purchase a transistor manufacturing license. In August 1955 they came out with their first radio, a limited edition sold only in Japan. A short time later came the TR-63, a genuinely new compact radio made with specially engineered parts. When it proved slightly too big to fit in a shirt pocket, the Japanese put bigger pockets on the shirts of their salesmen. Improved production techniques and cheap labor meant that TOTSUKO could easily compete with American manufacturers. Around this time, the company began calling itself Sony, a name chosen so that Americans could pronounce it.
By 1958, worldwide sales of portable radios exceeded five million, yet some big American manufacturers still steered clear. Seven years later, in 1965, Americans purchased twenty-one million transistor radios, 94 percent of them made in Japan. The transistor was the first American electronic product to be overwhelmed by foreign competition. When baby boomers were young, “Made in Japan” had been synonymous with “second-rate.” Japanese radios changed all that. They came on the market precisely when baby boomers were turning into consumers. “Japanese” began to signify quality, innovation, and affordability. After purchasing their transistors, boomers proved steadfastly loyal, buying Japanese stereos, televisions, cameras, and eventually cars.
Before long, Regency quit making transistor radios, citing unfair Japanese competition. They had at least recognized a market and tried to exploit it. More inexplicable is the behavior of the industry giants, who decided not to demean themselves by producing portables. It is difficult to imagine how a technological revolution so profound, and in retrospect so obvious, could have been missed by American manufacturers—to such an extent that some were put out of business by Japanese competition. To be fair, American manufacturers had been tooling up for what they thought would be an even more profound communications revolution, namely color television. In this sense, pocket radios seemed hardly worth the effort, since the profit margin was so small. Unfortunately, by the time color TV really took off, the Japanese had such a firm foothold in the electronics market that it was easy for them to dominate that field as well.
The arrival of transistor radios coincided with the emergence of rock and roll, the two trends reinforcing each other. Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock,” released in 1955, was the first rock single to top the American Billboard charts. Elvis Presley had his first chart topper in 1956. The transistor was perfectly suited to the rock invasion, since it allowed the individual to listen in private. For parents, it provided a solution to the great problem of rock and roll. Teenagers who would insist on listening to Elvis on the family’s walnut-cased Motorola could instead be sent to their rooms to listen on their Sony, preferably with headphones. For parents, giving a teenager a transistor was an act of self-preservation. Music that was played out of earshot of parents could in turn be more daring. Transistor radios gave baby boomers the facility and confidence to develop their own musical tastes. “I thought the nice part was that . . . there was music on the radio . . . which made my father say, ‘What is this?’” one Dutch rock fan recalled. “That was of course what you wanted.”4
In early 1956, Scholastic magazine revealed that thirteen million American teenagers had a disposable income of $7 billion a year, which worked out to an average of $10.35 a week. Meanwhile, the British Daily Mail estimated that Britain’s five and a half million teenagers were spending £1 billion annually, a good portion of that on fifty million records. “CALL THEM SPENDAGERS!” the paper shouted on October 2, 1963. A billion dollar industry was built upon the spending power of the young. “There was an arrogance that came along with it,” Steve McConnell reflected. “Our music was good, your music was not good. Rock-and-roll was our music, our identity. It was almost good that our parents said, ‘How can you listen to that stuff? Turn it down.’ It meant that you got bigger speakers and a better stereo and you turned it up.”5
The fact that teenagers now had their own radios meant that stations no longer had to cater to a diversity of tastes. All-rock stations emerged, funded by advertisements for products teenagers wanted. Live shows like that of Alan Freed, the disc jockey at WINS in New York, showcased new talent. White kids in Memphis were introduced to hip black music by Dewey Phillips who fronted a show called Red, Hot, and Blue on WHBQ. Daddy-O Dewey was an irrepressible force in the racial integration of popular music.
In Europe, the diversification of musical tastes was impeded by state-run broadcasting monopolies. The BBC, self-proclaimed arbiter of British culture, decided that too much pop music was harmful to the nation. Broadcasters across Europe took a similar view. Into the breach stepped a London record producer named Allan Crawford, who committed the biggest crime of 1964 by positioning his ship, the Caroline, ten miles off the Suffolk coast, from where he bombarded the mainland with the music the young demanded. The Foreign Office, Customs Office, and Post Office all swung into action, as did that righteous mouthpiece of the establishment, The Times. “The motive of these operations is profit, cloaked with the assertion that such vessels provide a service which the public wants,” the paper complained. “There is not a shred of evidence for this.” In fact, there were seven million shreds—the number of regular listeners. Since Radio Caroline was relatively easy to pick up in Holland, young Dutch listeners asserted their independence from their parents not just through rock music but also by speaking English. Interviewed many years later, they recalled how pirate radio had seemed like revolution:
| Wil: | You had the feeling [the DJ] was part of the conspiracy . . . |
| John: | Against the older people . . . |
| Karel: | Against the government. |
When an enterprising Dutchman established Radio Veronica, broadcasting from the North Sea, he insisted that the output mirror Caroline’s. English phrases were liberally interspersed with Dutch commentary. Hardly any Dutch music was played, except when Dutch performers sang in English.6
The raw sexuality of the new music, not to mention the influence of black artists, caused tremors in lily-white communities. Disc jockeys were accused of corrupting youth. In the US Senate, witnesses summoned by Estes Kefauver’s Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee made direct connections between rock and the rise in youth crime. One psychiatrist called rock “a communicable disease,” while preachers everywhere warned that young people would be permanently scarred. On September 4, 1956, the Daily Mail asserted that rock “can make the blood race. It has something of the African tom-tom and voodoo dance.” The paper speculated that it might be “the Negro’s revenge.” Meanwhile, the far-right American Nationalist, worried that white girls were “squealing and drooling over Negroidal crooners,” called for a boycott of all radio stations playing black music. None of this, however, had the slightest effect on the listening habits of baby boomers. Between 1955 and 1963, the number of top-ten hits by blacks increased by 50 percent. In this sense, the transistor radio made a small but significant contribution in helping the young to develop an immunity against the bigotry of their parents.7
In 1968, the radical Czech economist Ota Sik used the transistor radio as a standard of economic health, pointing out that his compatriots had to work 117 hours to buy one, while workers in West Germany needed only 12 hours.8 To many, the device seemed a revolution in a pocket. Looked at from another angle, however, it was also a rather clever instrument of social control. All that music kept young people content. Like an Orwellian black box, the transistor told them what music to like, what to buy, and ultimately how to think.
SAN FRANCISCO: A COLLECTION OF ANGELS
HOWLING AT THE WORLD
In October 1955, Allen Ginsberg was searching for a suitable venue in San Francisco where he and his fellow Beats Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac could read their poems. Friends spoke to friends, and eventually the Six Gallery at Fillmore and Greenwich was proposed. The venue was both gallery and metaphor: being an old auto-repair shop, it was perfectly suited to the Beats, an artistic movement devoted to dissonance. The podium was an up-ended fruit crate.
Ginsberg took charge of publicity, distributing flyers in the bohemian bars and coffeehouses around the city: “6 poets at 6 Gallery. Philip Lamantia reading mss. of late John Hoffman—Mike McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Phil Whalen—all sharp new straightforward writing-remarkable collection of angels on one stage reading their poetry. No charge, small collection for wine and postcards. Charming event.” The turnout was larger than expected. More than a hundred people showed up on October 13. The wine was gone in a few minutes, prompting Kerouac to pass around a hat. The atmosphere was not unlike a jazz jam session, with poets offering words instead of music in free-flowing improvisation. The audience occasionally uttered cool words of encouragement, and kept time by clicking fingers or drumming on tables.9
Lamantia read the poems of his late friend John Hoffman. Then came McClure and Whalen. After an intermission, Ginsberg took the stage, clutching seven typewritten pages of a poem called “Howl.” “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” The audience at first cheered him on. Kerouac periodically shouted “Go!” as if there was a risk that Ginsberg might stop. But he couldn’t stop; he could hardly pause to take breath. By the end of the first page, the audience sat in stunned silence, letting the words batter them like hailstones in a Midwestern storm. Words were weapons to attack the world—“Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! . . . / . . . Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!”10 The end came in orgiastic explosion, leaving listeners bruised, frightened, exhausted. Ginsberg wept.
That was the first public reading of “Howl,” the iconic poem of the Beat Generation. The poem still possesses immense power, still shocks and offends. But the energy it emits in print today is nothing compared to the raw force it produced on that night in October 1955. “It was very exciting,” Whalen recalled. “Ginsberg getting excited while doing it was sort of scary. You wondered was he wigging out, or what—and he was, but within certain parameters. It was a breakthrough for everybody. The mixture of terrifically inventive and wild language, with what had hitherto been forbidden subject matter, and just general power, was quite impressive.” After regaining his composure, Kerouac congratulated his friend on both the poem and the performance, which he said would make Ginsberg famous in San Francisco. In fact, his fame would soon stretch from the Golden Gate to the Brooklyn Bridge and beyond, but that was beside the point. The poem was never about becoming famous; it was an extended howl at a terrible, cruel, ugly world.11
Six poets and a hundred listeners do not a revolution make. To pretend that the poetry reading at the Six Gallery was a watershed is to assign far too much power to literature, especially a literature that few people would ever read. But that night was a harbinger; premonitions of much of what happened in the 1960s can be discerned in the atmosphere at the old auto shop. “We had gone beyond a point of no return and we were ready for it,” McClure later wrote. “None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.” The pronoun “it” is usually supposed to have an identifiable referent. In McClure’s case, what “it” means is unclear. But that hardly matters, since to define it is to contain it. The great power of the Beat message was its elusiveness. It questioned everything and was identifiable as nothing.12
Defining the Beat movement is an act of futility leading to vague generalizations and flaccid platitudes. Beat writers lacked direction, whether driving their cars or composing at their typewriters. Comprehensibility was not a priority; rhythm mattered as much as meaning. The conservative critic Norman Podhoretz once called the Beats “Know-Nothing Bohemians”; “spiritually under-privileged” writers who revolted against coherence and destroyed “the distinction between life and literature.” The Beats were, he said, “a revolt of all the forces hostile to civilization itself.” He was a lover of plot and meaning. Ginsberg responded by defending the “expression of what one feels,” however chaotic that might be. The validity of a feeling lies in the simple fact that it is felt. He was not remotely interested in words as diction, preferring instead words as rhythm. Words provided the backbeat to expression.13
The term “Beats” was not a musical reference but rather an allusion to the feeling of being roughed up by life—aching souls lost in the wasteland of materialism and conformity. Beats were visionary gypsies on the run from conventional society, which they saw as a smothering monster. They were apolitical for the simple reason that practicing politics implied buying into the system. “In the wildest hipster,” wrote poet John Clellon Holmes, “there is no desire to shatter the ‘square’ society in which he lives, only to elude it. To get on a soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd.” Escape came through aimless wandering “on the road,” through mind-expanding drugs, through formless music and art, or through stream-of-consciousness literature. The Beats befriended those on the perilous margins of society—pimps, whores, drug dealers, petty thieves—because, as cultural outlaws, they felt empathy with those who defied rules. The criminal world, likewise, seemed to offer entry into a supreme reality very different from the sheltered middle-class life in which they’d been raised. “The only people for me are the mad ones,” wrote Kerouac, “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Theirs was a reckless, risky, and rather naïve quest, but they had little concern for their own physical or emotional safety, since “safety” was a synonym for “conformity.” The highways of their exploration became littered with corpses, the casualties of bohemian excess or of criminal friends gone nasty. Yet seldom does one sense that they mourned their dead, since dying constituted the ultimate act of rejection.14
The Beats never really saw themselves as a movement; they saw instead a group of like-minded individuals determined to explore the outer reaches of creativity. But the culture of disaffection led inevitably to imitation. Acting like a Beat became cool, which is another way of saying it became a trend. In the Hegelian sense, a trend begins as antithesis and ends as synthesis, an element of conformity and an example of cultural absorption. Around the time the columnist Herb Caen coined the derisive term “beatnik” in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958, the Beats were dangerously close to becoming a cliché. The beatnik wore a black turtleneck and black beret, grew a goatee, smoked foreign cigarettes, drank strong coffee or rotgut wine, and listened to avant-garde jazz or poetry. Women slithered around in black leotards and let their hair hang long and straight. But behind the mask of nonconformity, beatniks were as normal as 98.6. The Beats resented the hijacking of their motif, but the rest of the world indulged in careless generalization, seeing the two as one. When Beat became beatnik, the jig was up; the cultural edge went blunt. For subsequent generations, living the Beat life became confused with reading Beat literature, which was never what Ginsberg and his friends had in mind.
Tracing the Beat legacy is much easier than identifying what the Beats actually were. That poetry reading at the Six Gallery was thick with premonitions. It was about freedom, the enemy of conformity. “Howl” evokes alienation, but it is also, more specifically, about drugs, homosexuality, and madness. As such, it was a statement of what was to come, plus an act of defiance against those inclined to censor thought. Other harbingers can be found in the rest of the poetry showcased that night. Hints of ecological consciousness are evident in the works of McClure, Snyder, and Kerouac. The outlaws admired by the Beat poets would eventually make their way into songs of Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and Leonard Cohen. The poems themselves bring Bob Dylan to mind, while the rhythm and ethereality of their delivery would eventually find a place in much Sixties music.
The Beats provided the tempo for a subsequent generation who lacked their seriousness but admired their idiosyncrasy. They were the American cousins of the Existentialists, with whom they shared a disdain for the world and a belief that reason stifled emotion. They lacked the coherence of Camus and Sartre but were much more fun. Their rejection of reason, rules, and logic eventually became a license to do anything at all, especially when it was taken up by their descendents, the hippies. An acceptance that the world is absurd allows every act of lunacy to acquire significance. But that is hardly the fault of the Beats, who cannot be held to account for every fool who walked through the doors they opened. The Beats deserve admiration for asking questions during an era inclined toward nodding compliance. “Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own,” Ginsberg later reflected. “We were all three, I suppose.”15
“No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body,” Margaret Sanger wrote in 1922, six years after she established her first birth control clinic. A free spirit, she wanted to divorce sex from procreation. Women could enjoy sex, she argued, only if they were given a reliable form of birth control.16
In 1948, Sanger joined forces with Katharine McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune. Like Sanger, McCormick was interested in birth control as a way of freeing women from the burden of unwanted pregnancies. She also had a virtually endless supply of money to devote to the search for an effective contraceptive. In 1951, she pledged $2 million to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, where a team led by the geneticist Gregory Pincus began exploring the possibility that a woman’s reproductive capacity might be artificially manipulated with hormones. The right dosage, it was thought, might inhibit the release of eggs for as long as the woman did not want to conceive. Then, if she decided she wanted to become pregnant, she could simply quit taking the hormones and her body would return to its natural equilibrium. That, at least, was the theory. The problem lay in establishing the right dosage.
In December 1954, John Rock of Harvard Medical School started testing a steroid called progestin on fifty women at his clinic. The women were chosen because they were all having problems conceiving. Rock felt that the steroid might stimulate their reproductive system. He was not, in other words, looking for a contraceptive. The test was a modest success—seven of the women got pregnant after coming off the drug. More remarkable, however, was the fact that all fifty women stopped ovulating while on the drug. When Pincus got wind of that result, he invited Rock to join his team.
The Worcester group decided to widen Rock’s sample by testing in Puerto Rico—a place conveniently removed from moral inquisitors. In April 1956, tests of the new drug, now called Enovid, began in San Juan. The initial trial, involving 221 women, was astonishingly successful. Not a single woman became pregnant. The tests were then widened to a larger group of Puerto Rican women, and another group in Haiti. While these tests demonstrated that the drug worked, they were too brief to measure its long-term effects.
In the following year, in an interview with TV journalist Mike Wallace, Sanger announced that an oral contraceptive was on its way. Despite having endured decades of abuse, she was astonished at the angry reaction, mainly from the Catholic community. This especially worried her since Senator John Kennedy, a Catholic, was making noises about running for president. “God help America if his father’s millions can push him into the White House,” she remarked. As it turned out, Sanger overestimated the strength of the Catholic community. In 1957 the Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid for the treatment of menstrual disorders. Three years later came approval as a contraceptive. By the end of 1963, nearly 2.5 million American women and perhaps half a million British women were taking the drug.17
The Pill is often credited with triggering a sexual revolution, but in truth the revolution was already under way. Between 1941 and 1964, illegitimate births in the United States rose by 150 percent. After 1960, Pill usage rose, but so too did the number of unwanted pregnancies, which implies that the rise in promiscuity was not directly linked to the pharmaceutical breakthrough. In any case, the Pill was at first prescribed almost exclusively to married women. For others, the preferred method remained the condom, which perhaps explains all those unwanted pregnancies.
The feminist Judy Wajcman maintains that since the Pill was used to reinforce patriarchal social relations, it is, by implication, an instrument of patriarchy. She believes that the Pill was developed not because it benefited women, but because a greedy pharmaceutical industry recognized the potential for huge profits. The argument is buttressed by claims that potentially deadly side effects were ignored in order to get Enovid on the market. “The devisers of the Pill,” Germaine Greer argued, “worried so little about the female psyche that it was years before they discovered that one woman in three who was on the pill was chronically depressed.” Granted, the drug was introduced with undue haste, but it seems reckless to assume that this is proof of male conspiracy—rather the opposite. It is difficult to explain away the enthusiasm women felt. To contend that the millions who immediately embraced the Pill were manipulated suggests an implausible level of female submissiveness.18
Doubts about the Pill were raised in the late 1960s, even as many people—male and female—were celebrating its merits. By that time, the commonly held opinion was that the woman who took oral contraceptives had a better chance of being alive a year later than one who chose to have a baby. That reasoning, faulty or not, was all the reassurance that most women needed. They desperately sought validation for a method of contraception which, despite its abundant flaws, was life-enhancing.
The Pill gave women the opportunity to enjoy sex without worry of pregnancy and to see themselves as something other than mothers. That said, it also made life easy for men, created new health hazards for women, contributed to the overemphasis upon women as sex objects, and made billions for the pharmaceutical industry. In other words, the issue is far too complicated to permit simple judgments on matters of utility. Benefits and risks were weighed differently by each individual according to the situation in which she found herself and the life she wanted to lead.
“I left home and got on the birth control pill my first semester at college,” recalls one baby boomer. “My friends and I considered it very in.” Another woman confessed: “for the first time in my life I could think about sex just as it was, just as sex and not as a potentially life-destroying event, that you could do something impulsively that would not have consequences for years.” A married woman, who had had two children and a miscarriage in quick succession, recalled bursting into tears in front of her doctor over the thought that this might be the pattern of her life. “I . . . just cried and cried and said that I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it again, I just couldn’t bear it and I hated the cap and it didn’t work . . . and all those things.” Her doctor then told her about the Pill.
It was completely wonderful. It changed my life. . . . I felt in control, I felt free. If I had known then what we know now about it, how dangerous and so on it is, I don’t think I would have cared. . . . I felt so wonderfully clever. Women say now that the Pill was just a man’s plot so that women would be more available, but they can’t be serious. . . . They would have to be women who can’t remember what it was like before: worrying all the time and all that messing about. Sex belonged to me.
Conspiracy theories are the last resort of paranoid groups who consider the construction of society unfair and seek reprobates to blame. The idea that the Pill was a male conspiracy ignores the involvement of women in its development and the fact that it fulfilled an undeniable female need. Emphasizing that it also made life easier for men is to confuse side-effect with motive. “What [the Pill] gave to me was the sense of ownership of myself, which at that point in my life was very, very important,” one woman revealed. “The fact that women had a method that allowed them to be free of pregnancy and to make decisions on their own had a profound effect on how we began to think about all sorts of things.”19
On January 21, 1961, Gerard Soete, a Belgian police commissioner, went with his brother Michel into the Katangan bush, to the site of a fresh grave. They dug up the body, hacked it to bits, and then plunged the pieces into sulfuric acid. Their aim was to erase a hero.
The hero in question was Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the Belgian Congo. Lumumba was doomed from the moment he became prime minister on June 23, 1960. Within days of his inauguration, his enemies were queuing up to kill him. He lasted just ten weeks, leaving behind a country even more chaotic than the one he’d inherited. His heroic status arose from the fact that he died young, before failure could tarnish him. As a result, he achieved more as a martyr than he could ever have accomplished as a leader.
The Belgians were expert exploiters. Untroubled by notions of civilizing the savage, they assumed control of a region with the primary purpose of bleeding it white. Colonies were machines for producing wealth. Belgian Africa was uranium and diamonds; Union Minière, Banque Empain, and Unilever; gonorrhea, rape, mutilation, chain gangs, and floggings—not to mention black bodies floating in the Congo River. Natives were beasts of burden used to extract the natural resources that made whites wealthy. Their abundance made life cheap. Natives did not need to be well educated or well fed, since they were infinitely replaceable.
By the mid-1950s, this kind of imperialism had grown old-fashioned. In the “civilized” nations, sensitivity to exploitation went hand in hand with an acceptance, at least in theory, of self-determination. A change in colonial status, however, did not necessarily mean an end to colonialism. Cynics found ways of adapting old ways in order to allow exploitation to continue, under the guise of democratic reform. This was the sort of transformation the Belgians sought in the Congo. They hoped that, with a few concessions to the natives, the Congo’s riches might continue to flow.
The Belgians wanted the Congolese to prove themselves incapable of self-government. That was a reasonable expectation, given that the Congo was an arbitrarily defined country whose boundaries bore no relation to ethnicity. Congolese nationalism was difficult to muster, since the first loyalty of the people was to their ethnic group. The transformation from colony to nation projected clan rivalries onto a national stage, rendering the country ungovernable. Belgium sought a Balkanization of the area in which small regions, defined by ethnicity, would remain dependent upon colonial control to maintain viability. The trappings of power would be transferred to handpicked loyal natives, a ruse that would give the new nation a semblance of self-government yet keep colonial interests intact. In order to increase the likelihood of this scenario, the Belgians intentionally quickened the pace of decolonization, while neglecting to prepare the Congolese for self-rule.
Lumumba stood in the way of this clever plan. He was the only politician who could command anything like a national following, independent of ethnic loyalties. His hero was Kwame Nkrumah, who had achieved a miraculous nationalist transformation in Ghana. Lumumba realized that, while democracy was essential to such a transformation, it also represented the greatest threat. Unrestrained democracy would allow tribal tensions to surface, leading to the erosion of national unity. Like Nkrumah, Lumumba believed that success was dependent upon the establishment of a strong central government in which minority opinion was silenced or eliminated. In time, the loyalty of the people would be won through the progressive improvement of their lives.
Lumumba was a formidable character, which explains why the Belgians feared him. His youth (he was born in 1925) harmonized with a new age and new beginnings. He was also handsome, charismatic, and intelligent, despite his lack of formal education. His life was an allegory: like his country, he had personally suffered exploitation at the hands of the Belgians, but had risen through sheer force of will. The vehicle of his ambition was the Movement National Congolais (MNC), a liberal nationalist organization formed in 1956. The MNC was the only party with any hope of expansion, since others were limited by the size of the ethnic group they represented. As such, the MNC stood to gain from the massive influx of workers to the cities in the years 1940–1955. Urbanization eroded particularist loyalties.
Out of the blue, in March 1959, the Belgians announced plans to quit, setting elections for the following May. This announcement coincided with Lumumba’s consolidation of power within the MNC. The party won 33 of 137 seats, a victory that made it the largest parliamentary bloc and gave Lumumba the right to form a coalition government. The fact that his victory was neither decisive nor unifying meant that Lumumba had numerous enemies. From his very first day in office, they worked hard to undermine him. He thought that the answer to this problem was naked strength—a government held together by fear more than by consent. Paraphrasing Nkrumah, he argued: “In a young state, you must have strong and visible powers.” Lumumba’s power was visible, but never strong.20
His Congolese enemies would eventually have disposed of him, if not through assassination then by making it impossible for him to govern. They, however, were not quite as impatient as his external enemies. The Belgians despised Lumumba because he stood between them and the country’s wealth of uranium, copper, gold, diamonds, tin, cobalt, manganese, and zinc. Belgian fears were validated when Lumumba used the first Independence Day ceremony on June 30, 1960, as an occasion to criticize colonial rule. The festivities began with a succession of Belgian dignitaries, including King Baudouin, spouting paternalistic platitudes about how the Congolese had been civilized by their European benefactors. Lumumba’s speech sent them reeling: “We have known harassing work, exacted in exchange for salaries which did not permit us to eat enough to drive away hunger, or to clothe ourselves, or to house ourselves decently, or to raise our children as creatures dear to us . . . . We have known ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon and evening, because we are Negroes. . . . We have seen our land seized in the name of allegedly legal laws which in fact recognized only that might is right.” All this was undoubtedly true, but Lumumba was not very politic to mention it in the presence of the Belgian king, at a time when the new nation was still dependent upon Belgian help and when most businesses remained in Belgian hands. Lumumba’s speech, though applauded by his people, was essentially an invitation to murder. The Belgians understood that if their plans were to proceed, the new prime minister would have to go.21
The Americans had come to the same conclusion. They balked at Lumumba’s frequent use of the word “socialism.” “We must adapt socialism to African realities” was in truth a rather tame statement, but not tame enough for American ears. Nor did they appreciate Lumumba’s boast that “the Congo’s independence is a decisive step toward the liberation of the entire African continent.” That kind of talk frightened President Eisenhower, who feared that the Congo was the cutting edge of a socialist revolution in Africa. Privately, he expressed the wish that Lumumba would “fall into a river of crocodiles.” American fears were exacerbated by the fact that the Soviets, keen to expand their influence, had cast themselves as champions of Pan-Africanism.22
As a gesture of goodwill, Lumumba traveled to New York in late July, hoping to calm American fears. All he wanted, he explained, was to be left alone. “For the Congo, there are no blocs, because we are an African people,” he insisted. “We desire no political programs from the US or USSR; we seek only technical assistance.” He needn’t have bothered, since those words were hardly less frightening to his hosts than an open admission of Communism. Nor did it help that during his visit Lumumba met the black nationalist leader Malcolm X, who sang his praises. The White House feared that Lumumba might become a cause célèbre for militant blacks everywhere.23
Meanwhile, at home, Lumumba was powerless to stop his country’s descent into anarchy. Within days of the independence ceremony, government troops had mutinied and local despots had begun to assert themselves. Since this deterioration suited Belgium, she refused to intervene, and in fact fomented unrest. The most damaging mutiny occurred in Katanga, the main mining region. Encouraged by Western interests, Moise Tshombe declared Katanga an independent state. Lumumba, unable even to maintain order in his stronghold of Leopoldville, was powerless to stop Tshombe.
The chaos provided Belgium with an excuse to send its troops back into the Congo, on the pretext of protecting Belgian nationals. Desperate for help, Lumumba appealed to the UN, but in doing so sparked a row between the US and USSR, each with a different opinion of how help should be administered. He also found that he could not use UN troops as he pleased—their mission to restore peace conflicted with his need to consolidate power. Eventually he grew exasperated with the UN, but not before the UN lost patience with him.
International distrust fueled misunderstanding. Lumumba never quite understood how his actions fired Western suspicions. The United States, feeling manipulated, decided that his cooperative gestures had been designed to mask Communist objectives. These suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Lumumba, having run out of friends, requested help from the Soviets. CIA director Allen Dulles called Lumumba a “mad dog” who needed to be put down. “In high quarters,” he told Eisenhower, “it is the clear-cut conclusion that if [Lumumba] continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will [have] disastrous consequences . . . for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently, we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective.”24 Eisenhower agreed that Lumumba had to go. Robert Johnson, a minute-taker at the White House, later recalled a meeting in August 1960 at which the president “said something . . . that came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba.” He noted: “There was stunned silence for about fifteen seconds and [then] the meeting continued.” Dulles later telegraphed the Congo station to confirm “every possible support in eliminating Lumumba.” One such support was CIA agent Sidney Gottlieb, who was sent to Africa with a vial of poison. The lethal dose was supposed to be administered via Lumumba’s toothbrush.25
Before Gottlieb could get anywhere near the prime ministerial toothbrush, its owner had been arrested. The Belgians, leaders in the race to kill Lumumba, had the advantage of an intimate familiarity with those Congolese who hated him. In September, President Joseph Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba. Though he did not technically have this power, those who objected were helpless to stop him. Real authority now rested in the hands of the defense minister, Joseph Mobutu, who had the backing of the army. Lumumba spent the next two months desperately trying to reassert himself, without success.
In December, Lumumba was sent to Katanga, which, though nominally headed by Tshombe, was in truth under Belgian control. Harold d’Aspremont Lynden, Belgium’s minister of African Affairs, had ordered Lumumba’s transport, which was in effect a sentence of death. At each stage of the transfer, Lumumba was brutally beaten in an attempt to break the spirit of his movement. Crowds watched as he was led through streets with a rope around his neck. On one occasion, he was beaten outside Mobutu’s villa in full view of television cameras. The Americans, now satisfied that an African troublemaker had been brought to heel, took refuge in the assertion that cruelty was culturally defined. “In the Congo what passes as inhumane to US [citizens] is customary among them,” an embassy document argued. “Thus, the abuse of Lumumba shocks civilized countries while Congolese themselves consider he is pampered. Fact is he is much better treated than any other prisoner has been, to the best of our knowledge.” A Belgian witness noted that pieces of wood had been inserted under Lumumba’s fingernails and toenails.26
Lynden advised that “the main aim to pursue in the interests of the Congo, Katanga, and Belgium is clearly Lumumba’s definitive elimination.” That wish was carried out on January 17, 1961, when he was taken into the bush, tied to a tree, and shot. A Belgian commission of inquiry in November 2001 revealed that four Belgian officers were present, though the execution was commanded by Katangans. The Belgian government nevertheless felt moved, the following February, to admit a “moral responsibility . . . in the events that led to the death of Lumumba.” CIA documents reveal that the United States was kept informed of Belgian actions but did not actively take part in the execution.27
The American and Belgian governments breathed a collective sigh of relief, confident that the Congo was now in trustworthy hands. The Americans, however, did not anticipate the reaction in Africa and the Caribbean, where Lumumba was quickly transformed into a martyr and a symbol of American perfidy. For black nationalists in the US, he became an emotive link between racism at home and neocolonialism abroad. Within the civil rights movement, Pan-Africanism became a shibboleth for militants keen to demonstrate radical credentials. Black leaders would henceforth stumble over one another in their efforts to define their position relative to Lumumba.
In a startlingly honest analysis of the American role in the Congo crisis, former CIA director William Colby remarked in 1984: “The question we faced . . . was whether that country . . . would be run by some toadies of the old Belgian mining companies or by men aided by Che Guevara and supported by the Soviet Union. The CIA found a midpoint between these two extremes—it helped Joseph Mobutu, then a nationalist member of the Congolese forces, become the third alternative.” By deft management, Mobutu consolidated his power, eventually establishing a dictatorship which would last thirty-two years. His rule was sadistic and corrupt even by African standards. In contrast to Lumumba, Mobutu was perfectly willing to sell his country to the West, so long as the rewards were substantial. Congo’s former UN representative, Thomas Kanga, complained that his country became “an international, and, more specifically, an American colony.”28
“No brutality, mistreatment, or torture,” Lumumba wrote on the eve of his execution, “has ever forced me to ask for grace, for I prefer to die with my head high, my faith steadfast, and my confidence profound in the destiny of my country, rather than to live in submission and scorn of sacred principles.” He became the perfect martyr for a decade given to myth and magic. But myths are possible only because he died before he could do much harm. Death rendered him forever young, forever perfect.29
The Belgians and Americans undoubtedly acted with cynical criminality, seeking to establish a postcolonial Congo which could be bled of its riches. But the fact that there was evil on one side does not imply that there was perfection on the other. Lumumba’s enemies were legion. Had the Americans and Belgians not been so eager to eliminate him, the Congolese would undoubtedly have done so. Lumumba was trying to achieve the impossible: he was attempting to balance the demands of the imperialists with the needs of his oppressed people. The two groups were, however, inevitably antagonistic. If some see him as a democrat, that is only because he died when Congo’s experiment with democracy was in its infancy. It is perhaps best to judge him by his heroes—Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Jomo Kenyatta—men who, back then, seemed noble statesmen, but whose reputations have since been tarnished by revelations of the corruption and cruelty they employed to preserve power. They succeeded by accommodating foreign capitalists—to the detriment of their people. Only true romantics can convince themselves that Lumumba would have acted differently.
THE OLD BAILEY: LADY CHATTERLEY ON TRIAL
The seats were hard, the view terrible, the acrid smell of unwashed bodies thoroughly unpleasant. But none of that mattered to the audience, who would not have missed the spectacle for anything in the world. Every day, crowds queued outside the Old Bailey; those who did not arrive ridiculously early were inevitably disappointed in their quest for a seat. In the pubs and on the street, the drama was retold, discussed, disputed, analyzed. For six intense days in the autumn of 1960, the British were gripped by the trial of Constance Chatterley.
Lady Chatterley was not, of course, actually on trial. She is, after all, a fictional character, though that simple fact escaped the prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones. The trial, conducted under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, brought suit against Penguin Books for the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D. H. Lawrence. The unexpurgated version had been banned in Britain since its publication in 1928, largely due to the fact that laws against obscenity were so ill-defined that they made no distinction between raw pornography and works of literature. The new act attempted to correct this deficiency by introducing a standard of “literary merit,” which the trial was intended to test. Most people had decided beforehand that the prosecution was destined to fail, but that did not stop some tub-thumping moralists from making the most of their time in court.
The act allowed both prosecution and defense witnesses to testify regarding a book’s merit. The defense, under the direction of Gerald Gardiner, collected thirty-five such “experts.” These included writers, philosophers, theologians, teachers, psychologists, and critics. The prosecution, on the other hand, could find no one of sufficient authority to testify that Lady Chatterley was obscene. Many thought the book dull and self-indulgent, but that was hardly sufficient grounds for banning publication.
The trial began on October 20, 1960. Its drama was enhanced by the way the prosecution rose so enthusiastically to its brief. A journalist described Griffith-Jones as “high cheek-boned and poker-backed, a veteran of Eton, Trinity Hall (Cambridge), the Coldstream Guards and many previous obscenity cases; a voice passionate only in disdain, but barbed with a rabid belief in convention and discipline.” When judging obscenity, Griffith-Jones applied a simple test: “I put my feet up on the desk and start reading. If I get an erection, we prosecute.” On that standard, Chatterley seemed a filthy book worthy of a ban. The prosecutor’s best line came in the first hour of the trial, when he asked the jury whether this was “a book you would . . . wish your wife or your servants to read.” To many, that remark demonstrated that Britain was witnessing a contest between old and new. No wonder, then, that the trial came to be seen as a gateway to modernity, and Griffith-Jones a Praetorian Guard blocking entry. As the critic Bernard Levin later wrote: “The Sixties began with an attempt to stop the decade entirely and replace it with an earlier one.”30
Griffith-Jones started by addressing not the issue of obscenity, but that of literary merit. He focused on Lawrence’s fondness for the words “womb” and “bowels” when describing the effect of Lady Chatterley’s sexual arousal, words which seemed inappropriate. “Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and bowels,’”) he read. “I do not want to be unimaginative, believe me, but can one flow and be alive in one’s womb and bowels?” When the answer to that question, no matter how often it was posed, proved a resounding yes, Griffith-Jones reluctandy abandoned the argument.31
Try as he might, the prosecutor could not break the defense witnesses’ conviction that Lawrence had written a work of merit. He therefore changed direction, focusing on the adultery of Constance Chatterley, a crime all the more serious since she was morally obliged to behave in a manner befitting her class. Perhaps better than Lawrence himself, the prosecutor brilliantly brought the characters to life. “There were long periods of the trial,” one journalist remarked, “during which an outsider might well have assumed that a divorce case was being heard.” Before long, Griffith-Jones, the judge, and the witnesses were talking about Chatterley and her lover Mellors as if they were standing in the dock. So, too, were those beyond the Old Bailey. In the House of Lords, Lord Hailsham explained that, before judging Chatterley and Mellors, he wanted to know “what sort of parents they became. . . . I should have liked to see the kind of house they proposed to set up together; I should have liked to know how Mellors would have survived living on Connie’s rentier income of six hundred pounds . . . and . . . whether they acquired a circle of friends.” The deputy director of public prosecutions, Maurice Crump, complained that he needed more information about Lady Chatterley’s hobbies, “whether she rode, hunted, played tennis or golf.”32
Not satisfied with damning the morals of a fictional character, Griffith-Jones went on to castigate Lawrence himself. “One doesn’t want to talk disrespectfully of the dead, but . . . he had run off with his friend’s wife, had he not?” In the end, however, that attack proved fruitless. In desperation, the prosecutor deployed his last weapon. He argued that, leaving everything else aside, Constance and her lover were guilty of buggery. He referred specifically to a passage in which Mellors is allowed to “have his way . . . burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places.” Griffith-Jones let the jury ponder a moment on what that might mean. He could not bring himself to explain specifically, since the mere idea was abominable. Instead he feigned confusion, as if to imply that one so morally upright as himself could not possibly have knowledge of the crime in question. Unfortunately, eloquence failed him at a crucial moment. It was, he muttered, “not very easy . . . to know what in fact [Lawrence] was driving at in that passage.”33
Neither adultery nor buggery could alter the witnesses’ conviction that the book had merit and was therefore fundamentally different from the kind of magazines seedy Soho newsagents were selling not far from the Old Bailey. Aware that he was losing the argument, Griffith-Jones in the end reminded the jury that the world seemed to be full of academic experts and for that reason they should resist getting lost in “the higher realms of literature.” They should instead think of the factory girls who might read the book during their lunch hour. He went on to argue that the recent rise in crime in Britain was the result of “unbridled sex,” a remark which baffled almost everyone in the courtroom.34
The jury took just three hours to acquit Penguin. The publisher responded by flooding the bookshops with 200,000 copies of Chatterley, which, unsurprisingly, sold out virtually overnight. Over the next two years, 3.3 million copies were sold, though how many were actually read, cover to cover, is unclear.
The event seems so perfectly timed, sitting as it does on the cusp between one age and another. Its momentous nature can, however, be exaggerated. The Obscene Publications Act would, in the course of the 1960s, continue to be used to test literary merit, though never with such fanfare. The trial did not fundamentally alter the moral opinions of the British, the vast majority of whom were oblivious to the implications of what had happened. The chattering classes nevertheless saw the trial as a watershed, for the simple reason that they wanted it to be just that. On questions of culture, their opinions mattered immensely. The critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in the Observer that the battle had been “between Lawrence’s England and Sir Clifford Chatterley’s England; between contact and separation; between freedom and control; between love and death.” That was an exaggeration, but legitimate points often demand hyperbole. Many saw greener pastures of tolerance and expression beyond the fence of British prudery. For them, the verdict was indeed the opening of a gate. As an event, the trial was little more than a six-day circus—a carnival of bawdy innuendo. As a symbol, however, it was huge.35
Heavy snow fell in Washington the night before John Kennedy’s inauguration. There was talk of postponing the ceremony, but the president-elect insisted it should go ahead. The crowds huddling in the bitter cold were astonished when Kennedy rose to the dais without an overcoat. A hero had arrived.
The speech complemented the man. America’s belief in itself was never better expressed than on January 20, 1961. Kennedy’s inaugural address embodied both John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” and the confidence inspired by victory in two world wars. “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” To most Americans, that sounded like an innocent homage to American values. In fact, it was a battle cry. Kennedy, unlike his predecessor, did not want to contain his enemies; he hoped to defeat them.36
Kennedy made a career of fooling the American people. If myths surround him, they are largely of his making. To this day, he is carelessly labeled liberal, when in fact he was something else entirely. He is celebrated as a champion of civil rights, yet his actual achievements were motivated more by pragmatism than idealism. His success, such as it was, arose from his extraordinary ability to market himself—he was perfectly suited to a consumer age.
After the 1956 election, liberal Democrats sensed that their turn would soon come. The end of the decade brought social and intellectual ferment—manifested by Elvis Presley, the Beats, J. D. Salinger, Sputnik, James Dean, and the Little Rock Nine. The comfort and security associated with Eisenhower’s quiet conservatism suddenly seemed old-fashioned. While liberals sensed that the times were a-changin’, they lacked a lead singer.
The logical man was Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, champion of civil rights, social welfare, and labor reform. But while his politics seemed perfect, his personality did not. Humphrey was a thoroughly decent man, but he reminded one of a weird uncle, the sort of person who, at any moment, could do something totally daft. When excited, his nasal voice turned into an annoying whine. While an undoubtedly distinguished senator, he lacked the stuff to perform on the main stage. So great was liberal desperation that some Democrats still backed Adlai Stevenson, a loser in the previous two elections.
Politics abhors a vacuum. The good politician sees a gap and changes shape to fill it. Starting in 1957, Kennedy turned himself into a liberal in order to gain his party’s nomination. Though he had been a senator since 1952, he had never found a natural constituency beyond his native New England. But, in his favor, Kennedy was a hugely ambitious man with a talent for self-promotion and a yachtsman’s ability to gauge the political wind. “Kennedy had sensed that subterranean pressures were already beginning to fissure the illusions of the fifties, that national discontent was mounting,” wrote his speechwriter Richard Goodwin. With single-minded purpose, Kennedy set out to satisfy the American hunger for something new.37
“It is time . . . for a new generation of leadership—new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities,” Kennedy argued during the campaign. “New” became the mantra, a substitute for policy. Attaching this adjective to something made that something seem promising and exciting. It also meant that anyone who opposed Kennedy could automatically be dismissed as old hat. Of his Republican opponent Richard Nixon, he said: “His party is the party of the past. . . Their pledge is a pledge to the status quo, and today there can be no status quo.” Spoken by Kennedy, that sounded eloquent, dynamic, even meaningful, but in truth it was purely rhetorical. Kennedy had found an effective substitute for policy. He had only to provide a steady drumbeat to the rhythm of the new.38
Kennedy’s message had a profound effect upon young people who desperately wanted to occupy center stage in a world different from that of their parents. When, during the campaign, he uttered an off-the-cuff remark about establishing a Peace Corps, within two days 700 students had volunteered for an agency that did not yet exist. “For years I have scarcely had a single student asking me about a career in Washington,” a Harvard economist remarked just before the inauguration. “But since last November, all my ablest young men have been queuing up as they used to in the New Deal.” “All at once you had something exciting,” one of Kennedy’s campaign workers recalled later. “You had a young guy who had kids, and who liked to play football on his front lawn. . . . Everything they did showed that America was alive and active.”39
Or so it seemed. In fact, everything relied on smoke and mirrors. Behind the image of youthful vigor walked a man who was in decidedly poor health. His famous sun tan, supposedly the result of days spent yachting or skiing, was in fact caused by steroids taken for Addison’s Disease. He fostered his reputation as a family man, but was actually a serial womanizer. He was a Catholic when he needed to be; when surrounded by Protestants or Jews, he argued that religion was irrelevant. He often flaunted his wealth and celebrity, not to mention his famous friends, but also managed to convince the poor and downtrodden that he understood their pain.
The makeover was facilitated by the cooperation of the media. During the campaign for the Democratic nomination, Kennedy got away with murder. He benefited immensely from Irish machine politics, particularly in the crucial state of Illinois, but somehow managed to avoid the stigma that went with that association. Vague noises were heard about his ruthless father and corrupt finances, but none of the allegations stuck. Kennedy also presented himself as a war hero, through clever elaboration of the drama of PT-109. Those who did not quite get the message were encouraged to ask Humphrey what he had done during the war.
The relatively new medium of television was the perfect vehicle for a young, handsome, articulate candidate. This advantage was never more apparent than during his first televised debate with Nixon. Kennedy prepared like a movie star readying himself for a starring role; Nixon, like the captain of the high school debating team. Kennedy refused makeup because he didn’t need it. That made it impossible for Nixon to ask for the makeup he desperately did need. Kennedy therefore looked healthy and vigorous, while Nixon appeared ghoulish. Nixon, who was never a very good actor, could not keep his inner self from emerging in the form of scowls or cynical grins. He looked scary. Those who watched the debate on television thought Kennedy had won hands down. Those who listened on the radio judged it a draw.
The debate was supposed to be about domestic policy, yet Kennedy began by talking about the dangers of the Cold War, an indicator perhaps of his real priorities. “This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country, and is a powerful country but I think it should be a more powerful country,” he maintained. Echoing Lincoln but extending his rhetoric to a world stage, he argued: “The question is whether the world will exist half slave or half free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery.” He questioned whether America was doing as much as it should, and whether it was as strong as duty necessitated. From Lincoln he moved to Roosevelt, talking of a “rendezvous with destiny.” The Cold War was neatly brought home: “I think our generation of Americans has the same ‘rendezvous.’ The question now is: Can freedom be maintained under the most severe attack it has ever known? I think it can be, and I think in the final analysis it depends upon what we do here. I think it’s time America started moving again.” Spoken by a handsome actor, those words were irresistibly inspiring. Few paused to consider the sacrifices they implied.40
Even though he had never shown much interest in civil rights, Kennedy realized he had to address the issue. Thanks to Martin Luther King Jr., the problem was now impossible to ignore. Despite his lack of concern, Kennedy somehow managed to make himself into the black man’s champion. His famous claim that discrimination in federal housing could be eliminated “with the stroke of a pen” was as fatuous as it was cynical. Yet instead of revealing the superficiality of Kennedy’s understanding, the remark confirmed his reputation as an action man. That reputation was sealed in October with Kennedy’s famous phone call to Coretta Scott King after her husband was arrested and denied bail.
In just three years Kennedy transformed himself from a conservative Democrat interested mainly in foreign policy to the logical inheritor of the New Deal. Not everyone, however, found the transformation convincing. Under the circumstances, the Democrats should have won easily in 1960. That they did not do so can be explained in large part by the negatives associated with Kennedy. His money, his aristocratic nature, his father’s machinations, but especially his Catholicism turned voters away. Kennedy beat Nixon by the tiniest of margins: just one-tenth of a percent. But margins of victory were misleading, since the number of Americans who voted for Kennedy was tiny in comparison to the number who had high hopes for him. He’d been encouraging Americans to believe that a new frontier beckoned. Now he had to lead them to it.
The Sixties was a decade of consumerism—despite the efforts of all those who tried to make it something else. In the 1960 election, the American people were sold a product named Kennedy. During the course of the long campaign he remained the same person, though his image changed to suit public taste. Image and man were both present on January 20,1961. Kennedy’s inaugural address was a mixture of fancy rhetoric and frighteningly blunt policy, though most people heard only the beautiful words. For baby boomers, one line is remembered above all others: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Those words would be repeated millions of times at school assemblies and debating contests. Yet stirring words seldom lend themselves to deconstruction. They are swallowed whole, enjoyed for their music rather than their meaning. While nearly every American from that generation can recall those words, few understood their implications.41
The same holds true for the rest of the speech, in which Kennedy explained what he wanted of America. The message, however, was carefully camouflaged by poetry of exquisite cadence. Read the speech today and it seems frighteningly prophetic—it is littered with clues to the crises in Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and Berlin, not to mention the billions of dollars shot into space. Listen to a recording of the speech, however, and it still sends shivers down the spine.
Kennedy was an aggressive, manly leader who possessed a quintessentially American belief in the possible. The world’s problems were to him opportunities, prime candidates for benevolent American reform. “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike,” he proclaimed, “that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.” What followed was both a warning to the world and a call to arms. People in “the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery” were put on notice that America would save them. Americans, meanwhile, were warned that they would have to bear the costs—in money and lives—of these rescue missions. America would embark on her new crusade “not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” The Soviets meanwhile were warned that America would arm itself to protect its principles and to implement its plans. “We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”42
The new frontier carried a high price. Two months before the inauguration, Kennedy proclaimed that “men are not afraid to die for a life worth living”—an assertion which, while probably true, had costly implications. On January 20, he told the American people to expect sacrifices.
In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.
Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, . . . a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself
Like the expert salesman he was, Kennedy swayed the American people with mellifluous rhetoric. They thought they were being sold a shiny new sports car. In fact, they were buying a tank. The message was not, however, misunderstood by the Soviets. As foreign minister Andrei Gromyko warned Khrushchev, Kennedy’s victory would mean “a speeding-up of the arms race and, therefore, a further straining of the international situation with all the consequences that result from this.”43
Kennedy’s magnetism, Goodwin argued, arose from the fact that “he was as Americans would like themselves to be.” That assessment is only half right, since what Americans saw was not the real Kennedy. It is doubtful that most Americans wanted to be pill-popping womanizers. Nor did they want to fight wars in faraway jungles. Millions would learn to love Kennedy not for what he was but for what he seemed. His promises were handsome, his ideals sublime.44