Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

Chateaubriand had remarked of Talleyrand that he was ‘a nineteenth-century parvenu’s idea of an eighteenth-century great nobleman’. In the same way, Kennedy, with his fairy-tale looks, money and wife, was a hairdresser’s Harvard man. He was easily adaptable to a television age that older men had found uncomfortable. Next to the glowering, charmless, permanently unshaven-looking Richard Nixon, his election opponent, he shone, and especially entranced the intelligentsia of the East Coast. They, culturally still overshadowed by Europe, were often embarrassed by their own country, in some ways still very naive and simple. A visiting English grandee, Harold Nicolson, had gone on a coast-to-coast lecture tour in the USA to rescue his finances, had addressed Midwest ladies in cherried hats as to how the two democracies stood shoulder to shoulder facing the foe to the east, had taken yet another train to yet more ladies offering tea and cookies, and had gone back to London and told his friends that it had been ‘like a month at a servants’ ball’. The New York intelligentsia in their way agreed. They had not much cared for Eisenhower, who played the golfing Republican buffoon; and Norman Mailer set the tone for many writers to come when he dismissed the fifties as ‘the worst decade in the history of mankind’. Most writers really respond to conditions a generation before, did not feel at home in mass prosperity, and made fools of themselves when they pronounced on politics. But pronounce they did, and the sniggering or resentment of the intelligentsia had effect. Kennedy appeared. He was less well-read and was certainly less musical than Truman (who was a good pianist) or even Eisenhower, but the image was far better: he could pretend, and perhaps even believe in the pretence. Kennedy, a Catholic, and sprig of a corrupt Boston-Irish dynasty, was not by nature a convinced friend of the left-wing intelligentsia, and he had even, for a time, gone along with Joe McCarthy’s persecution of the crypto-Communists among them. That had helped Kennedy’s father, notoriously crooked, in effect to buy a Massachusetts Senate seat, which was retained by the longest-surviving Kennedy brother, Edward, for decades, despite a reputation that included manslaughter. Kennedy’s own electoral victory came only with a tiny margin, which he owed to the slippery practices of the man whom he chose as Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had managed Congress for Roosevelt and understood how Texas worked. Almost everything to do with Kennedy was, in other words, false. In practice, as Johnson said, he ‘never did a thing… It was the goddamnedest thing… his growing hold on the American people was a mystery to me.’ However, he was the man for the decade to come.

Kennedy proclaimed a ‘New Frontier’. The reference to Roosevelt’s New Deal was obvious, and Kennedy took office with a promise of new energy. Fashion clothes and concert pianists appeared in the White House, and clever academics made up a good part of the new presidential team. Was there any substance? ‘New’ is not generally a word to use in politics. It is exhausted before it even begins: it generally means that the user of it has no ideas of any depth, and runs out of steam early on. However, when he began, Kennedy symbolized quite well what were to be the great makers of the decades to come. Apart from anything else, he was the first, and very, televisual politician. That instrument was to give politics an altogether new shape, or, rather, it vastly spread what had already been a vice of the cinema, to oversimplify to the point of caricature. William Blake had prophesied this a century and more before, and in their way the medieval iconoclasts had done so, as well. ‘They ever will believe a lie who see not with but through the eye’, said Blake, and St Bonaventura had announced that ‘the ears communicate faith and the eyes, fervour’. But there were other inventions that shaped the sixties and beyond.

The 1960s were indeed a new age. In 1958 the world economy was revolutionized, because the main currencies became convertible one into another: that created a true world economy, almost independent of national governments or at any rate putting a great strain upon them, because money would just move out if they defied its rules. But other things of revolutionary importance were coming about. Most ages are marked by some invention or other: as Orwell wrote in a ten-second summary of world history, the castle defeated the knight, gunpowder defeated the castle, and the chequebook defeated gunpowder (he went on that the machine-gun defeated the chequebook). In 1960 such inventions came onto the mass market — the fax machine and the contraceptive pill. The first sent money round the world far faster than ever before. It had long and disputed origins, but came into its own because the Japanese could use it. Their language was almost impossible to type, for there were a great many characters, each needing a different combination of many pen strokes. These could now be quickly scribbled by felt pen, and sent by fax, not typewriter, and as Japan started on her long economic boom, towards the middle of the 1950s, faxes to banks and importers made it possible. She developed into a world economic power, second or third in weight. That example was followed, later on, by Taiwan, a desperately poor country that became fourteenth trading nation in two decades, and by South Korea, devastated by the war. Now, the money exchanges became very busy, no longer dependent on mail, and the amounts of money that went round the world made trade itself of less and less apparent weight. The later effects of the computer have been just a continuation of that process, though on a much greater scale.

The Pill’s effect on the relations of the sexes was, said Conrad Russell, like that of the nuclear bomb on international relations. On 1 June 1961 it came on the market in Germany (through Schering AG). It had origins going back to the early twenties, a time when ‘race improvement’ (eugenics) was fashionable, and the poor or stupid were supposed to be discouraged from procreating (in Sweden, up to the 1970s, Lapps were being sterilized on the grounds that they drank too much and were not very bright). German scientists received grants from American foundations for such research (the money was frozen in Germany under Hitler, and was used to pay for the experiments of Josef Mengele, at Auschwitz). Preventing ovulation had been done by natural methods in the past — in Mexico, for instance, women knew the qualities of wild yam in this respect; the ancient, Hippocrates, had recommended a wild carrot known as Queen Anne’s Lace. In 1951 Carl Djerassi, of Bulgarian-Jewish and Viennese origin, working in Mexico and connected with the Swiss chemical firm Ciba, took out a patent, and experimented with the first synthetic compound in 1956 in Haiti. Germans marketed the Pill first, but it spread very rapidly. Freeing women from unwanted childbirth was equivalent to a new dimension in world history. Before 1914, in England, women doctors had not been allowed to contribute to medical journals because this was thought to be immodest, indicating an interest in the body that was improper. Fifty years later, women were establishing themselves in a man’s world — probably the single greatest change, among the very many that set in after the Second World War. In the next generation, even mothers of small children were going out to work, some of them very successful, and many others left with no choice but drudgery. Feminism became a fashionable cause.

In some ways, what followed was a natural enough outcome of the sheer silliness with which conservatives defended their not indefensible world. They had been, in a way, spoiled by their own success against Communism. There was of course a conservatism that the following decade sneered at — churches got a billion dollars for building, twice what public hospitals got. The fifties ended with optimism and in retrospect seem to have been the last gasp of the old world. Families stayed together, women in the home or aiming to be, and the laws governing divorce or contraception were sometimes ridiculously difficult. A Catholic hierarch in Paris remarked that it was all very well to say that an extra child might break the family’s budget and starve; it would die surrounded by love. This business of course provoked unthought-out reactions. Republican women in Connecticut had to fight a (Catholic-inspired) law against birth control all the way to the Supreme Court and that resulted in the easy-abortion arrangements of Roe v. Wade in 1973. Homosexuals in England faced worse persecution than in the days of Oscar Wilde, as the police could gain promotion points if they provoked an approach in a public place, and got more convictions from magistrates’ courts than they had in the 1930s. There was still censorship, at a comic level, as when a lawyer, prosecuting Penguin for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s (unreadable) Lady Chatterley’s Lover , enquired in what he thought was a devastating way as to whether such a book could be read by the servants. Education was also rigidly unchanging, and everywhere operated unpredictably and unfairly, with, in most universities, a hierarchical professoriate that was all-powerful and old-fashioned. Sexual differences were enforced with ridiculous pinpricks. As late as 1968, at Trinity College, Cambridge, a 28-year-old graduate student was expelled when he was found by the porters ‘with a woman in his room’, and even in the 1970s, at Corpus Christi College, the Master’s wife was refused a key. When a distinguished French historian, Marc Ferro, wanted to bring his wife to stay at Jesus College, Cambridge, two seniors found an argument to stop them from using the main (and splendid) guestroom. The room was used for Boat Club breakfasts. Breakfasts meant toastcrumbs, difficult to vacuum-clean away. Men getting out of bed with bare feet might be expected to put up with the discomfort; women, not. Therefore no Madame Ferro. In the United States, such conservatism, picturesquely tiresome elsewhere, was deadly, because it worsened what was already the worst blot on the country, its treatment of Negroes, as they were then generally called. In New York, if you took a Negro friend to dinner in a restaurant, you telephoned the management beforehand. Even when Kennedy’s Vice-President went round Texas with his cook in a motor car, she could not use the roadside lavatories, and had to squat at the side of the road. Such things bred rebellion on the one side, contempt on the other, and guilty consciences in the middle.