The second observation is really a question: Why do so many politicians feel obliged to get away from the city at every chance? They claim a pressing need to get back to the real America. To win votes, many of them like also to deride the city and mock its institutions. They run against Washington, in the shabby spirit made fashionable in recent presidential campaigns. It is as if they find the city alien or feel that too close an association with it might be somehow dishonorable. It is as if they want to get away from history when clearly history is what they need, they most of all, and now more than ever.
What if, instead of rushing off to wherever it is they come from, some of them were to spend a morning at the Wilson House or on the Mall with their fellow citizens touring the National Museum of American History? Or what if they took time, say fifteen minutes, at the National Gallery to enjoy and think about George Caleb Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen—that one painting? Might not that too be a way of reaching the real America?
I have no sense that the people they represent fail to appreciate the city or to feel its spell. They come in ever increasing numbers, by the tens of millions. They climb the sweep of marble steps at the Supreme Court, pose for a picture by the Grant statue. They move slowly, quietly past the fifty-seven thousand names in the polished black stone wall of the Vietnam Memorial. They pour through the Air and Space Museum, the most popular museum in the world, craning their necks at the technical marvels of our rocket century. We all do. We all should. This is our capital. It speaks of who we are, what we have accomplished, what we value.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Extraordinary Times
THE SPAN of years since 1936 has been the most troubled, unsettling, costly, adventurous, and surprising time ever. There is no period to compare to it. More has changed, and faster, more has been destroyed, more accomplished than in any comparable interval in the five thousand years since recorded history began.
To a very large degree it has been a time of horror, of war after war, wars to stop war, religious wars, wars of “liberation,” many more than fifty wars in fifty years, including the worst war of all time, the shadow of which is still with us. Terror and atrocity have been made political policy and carried to hideous extremes. But it has also been a time of marvels and of unprecedented material progress for much of humanity. To many areas of the world it has brought the exhilarating awareness that change is actually possible, that things don’t have to stay the same.
These have been the years of Stravinsky and Picasso, Faulkner and Eugene O’Neill, Ella Fitzgerald and the Golden Gate Bridge. Present advances in such fields as medicine and communications seem to belong to a different century from that of 1936. Since 1980, to cite one stunning example, there has not been one case of smallpox anywhere on earth.
The colossal sums spent on research and development, the links between government and science, industry and science, the onrush of scientific discoveries have made change of all kinds accelerative, like gravity, and the effect is felt everywhere. Science has transformed the way we live, how long we live. It has meant the steady spread of improvements of a kind new to human experience, and it has brought a level of fear that is also new. Physicists, biologists, and astronomers have become shapers of great world events as much as, or more than, generals and politicians, and this too is new.
Fifty years ago the center of world power and interest was Europe. On the maps of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East there were no countries called Tanzania or Zaire. Or the People’s Republic of China. Or Vietnam. Or Israel.
Furthermore, fifty years ago the physical limits of the human adventure were still defined by the geography of the earth alone.
One simple measure of how many changes have taken place in everyday life in America is our vocabulary. A college dictionary from 1936, for example, does not contain such words as automation or antibiotics, ecosystem, Chicano, nursing home, or condominium. No one then had ever heard of a zip code or jet lag. The word gay was defined as “full of, or inclined to, mirth,” or “bright-colored.” Program was a noun, not a verb.
America then had no Pentagon. The United States Army numbered all of four hundred thirty-eight thousand men, which put it in twenty-first place, behind, among others, the armies of Argentina and Switzerland.
With the country in the grip of the Great Depression, nine million people were out of work. The poorest were desperately poor. Nearly 40 percent of American families had annual incomes of less than $1,000. In places like the coal fields of Kentucky, there was seldom enough to eat. Some families were living on weeds.
Nineteen-thirty-six was a year of ominous headlines. Hitler marched unopposed into the demilitarized Rhineland. Spain erupted in civil war. The Italian dictator Mussolini, using planes, mustard gas, and two hundred fifty thousand troops, crushed Ethiopia, while his son, Vittorio, crowed over the victory. Bombing Ethiopian cavalry was “exceptionally good fun,” he told the press.
It also was the year that Franklin Roosevelt, speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, told the country, “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
Two of the century’s most crucial developments were not in the headlines, however. One was entirely unknown to the public, the other beyond the comprehension of all but a very few. A future that almost no one could have imagined in 1936 was already taking form in two European settings with nothing in common except their proximity on the Baltic Sea.
The first was a highly secret research installation begun that year by the Germans at the island village of Peenemunde for the purpose of launching experimental rockets. Unlike the modestly financed pioneering work on rockets by physicist Robert Goddard in the United States, Peenemunde was a high-priority military effort—enormous, amply supported, well staffed, and with a brilliant young engineer named Wernher Von Braun newly appointed as “technical overlord.”
The second, less than 120 miles from Peenemunde, was Copenhagen’s Institute of Theoretical Physics, a center of free inquiry open to scientists from all over the world, where in 1936 the subject was nuclear fission. As those involved would remember, the institute was the place to be at one of the most exciting junctures in the history of science. As time would tell, the history of science was to be very largely the history that mattered.
The institute’s director—and its inspirational force—was the much-loved Nobel Prize—winning physicist Niels Bohr, who had once thought it pointless to expect any new source of energy from the atom. Yet, in January 1939, Bohr reported to a Washington, D.C., conference of theoretical physicists that the uranium atom, when split, would produce a power millions of times greater than anything known on earth. It was possibly the most important piece of information of the century. Bohr, however, mumbled so that nobody understood what he was saying. When his friend Enrico Fermi stood up and offered a clarification, the room suddenly emptied, scientists rushing to the nearest telephones to alert their universities and laboratories, while the few reporters present sat wondering what was going on.
In August Albert Einstein addressed a historic letter to Roosevelt warning that a terrible new kind of bomb could be made and that Germany had already stopped the sale of uranium from the mines in Czechoslovakia. He urged a speeding up of scientific research under government direction. Roosevelt, in league with the British, initiated what would become the top-secret Manhattan Project at a cost of $2 billion, a sum undoubtedly equal to all the money spent until then on scientific research. Politics and physics had been joined irrevocably.
The war began September 1, 1939, when German armored divisions smashed into Poland. By the time it was finished, it had become “total war.” It was the cataclysmic upheaval of all time and the most important event of the century.
Eventually, more than eighty million people were in uniform and possibly as many as fifty-five million people were killed. And something new had been added to the annals of organized slaughter: the dead included tens of millions of civilians.
The war ended in 1945, and 1945 was the watershed year of the twentieth century. One kind of world ended, another began. Roosevelt died, Hitler committed suicide, Churchill was voted out of office. The United Nations was founded. An independent republic of Vietnam was formed with Ho Chi Minh as president. The end of the war was a time of huge celebration and thanksgiving, but it was also the point at which mankind saw as never before its own capacity for evil. It was the year the death camps were revealed, and it was the year of the bomb.
Although Hitler’s plan for the “complete elimination of Jews from European life” had been reported years earlier, only when a number of the camps—Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, Auschwitz—were liberated shortly before the German surrender was the truth known. Eisenhower, seeing his first “indisputable evidence” at a camp near Gotha, insisted on being shown everything, because “I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that ‘the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’”
Documentation came with the Nuremberg trials. Ten million human beings had been exterminated factory-fashion. Approximately six million were Jews. Another word not found in the 1936 dictionary had to be invented to label the process: genocide. Prisoners, including children, were shot, hanged, beaten to death, starved to death, buried alive, and systematically sent to gas chambers. Photographs of the survivors that appeared in magazines like Life are never to be forgotten.
Because the outcome of great events becomes so well established in our minds, there is a tendency to think things had to go as they did. But there is nothing inevitable about history. The defeat of the Nazis, the war’s overriding mission, was never a certainty. Recall the dark winter of 1941-1942, when the Germans had advanced nearly to Moscow, the British ships Repulse and Prince of Wales were at the bottom of the South China Sea, our forces on Bataan had surrendered and German U-boats were sinking ships within sight of the New Jersey shore. The importance of the defeat of the Nazis can hardly be overstated.
The date of the blinding flash at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the day the first atomic bomb was detonated, was July 16, 1945, six years and not quite six months after Niels Bohr’s announcement in Washington. Whether the use of the new weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary will never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. Based on the estimate that the planned invasion of Japan would result in possibly a half million American casualties and many times that for-the Japanese, however, the decision seemed necessary at the time. The bombs were dropped to end the war, and they did.
In the last analysis, the deciding factor in the war was America’s tremendous industrial power, and at the war’s end that power was still intact. With World War II, U.S. history had become world history. Europe’s—Great Britain’s—time had passed. “America at this moment stands at the summit of the world,” Churchill told Parliament the summer of 1945. For four years, until the Russians exploded an atomic bomb in 1949, the United States was without equal or challenge.
The next decades were earthshaking: the mounting tensions of the Cold War, the rise of the Third World, the astonishing revival of West Germany and Japan and the final stage of the Chinese Revolution, which has directly affected the lives of one-fifth of the human race. Mao Tse-tung became one of the looming figures of the age.
The world grew smaller and more dangerous. Crisis and more war followed—the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, the Hungarian Revolution, the Suez crisis, the chilling Cuban missile crisis and the repeated bloody challenges to the existence of Israel.
Among the consequences, for better or for worse, was the steadily increasing power of the American presidency. Harry Truman, a lifelong student of history, made history as few presidents ever have—including Franklin Roosevelt, who had exercised more power than any president since Lincoln. The Truman Doctrine of 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation,” set a course that can be said to have saved Europe and to have led to Vietnam. Truman launched the Marshall Plan, established NATO, sent U.S. troops into Korea, and proceeded with the hydrogen bomb. In the years since Truman, the size, complexity, and influence of the executive branch have only expanded.
“When you’re at war you think about a better life; when you’re at peace you think about a more comfortable one,” said a character in Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth. In postwar America prosperity was no longer “just around the corner,” it had arrived. The Great Depression seemed a memory of olden times. For all the energetic programs of the New Deal, it was World War II that had finally ended the Depression. Now it was the mounting cost of the Cold War arms race that helped keep the economy booming, though nobody liked to think of defense as the welfare state.
A shift of population that had begun during the war grew to surprising proportions over the next thirty-odd years, becoming one of the nation’s greatest migrations. Millions of people, black and white and mostly poor, left the rural South for the big cities of the North and West.
The GI Bill made possible a college education for millions of veterans who otherwise could never have met the cost. A federal interstate highway program—the largest construction effort on record—hastened the growth of suburbia and thus had more impact on home building than even the federal housing program. Women entered the work force in greater numbers; in time, the women’s movement took hold.
Television arrived. Television conquered. It has been said to represent an advance in communications comparable to the invention of print. We don’t know yet. But how greatly our perception of history has been affected by it! How many of the telling moments of our time are remembered because of what we saw on television: There was the point in the Army-McCarthy hearings when the Boston lawyer Joseph Welch turned and said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” There was Eisenhower’s surprising farewell address from the White House warning of the influence of the “military-industrial complex.” There were the Nixon-Kennedy debates, Watergate, the return of the hostages from Iran, the travels of Pope John Paul II and the endless Vietnam war on the nightly news. And, above all, the tragedy at Dallas, the scenes of which, like those of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial, have been replayed so often they have become part of the experience of a generation that was not alive to view them firsthand.
Television was only one manifestation of a much larger phenomenon, the advance of science and technology. Peenemunde produced the giant V-2 rocket, the first true ballistic missile, and the Manhattan Project produced the atom bomb. Importantly, World War II also produced in crude form what we call the computer. And it is the modern computer in combination with the rocket and the bomb that makes possible the intercontinental ballistic missile, and thus the threat of annihilation that hangs over us all. The rocket delivers the bomb, the computer delivers the rocket. But World War II also contributed radar and jet aircraft. In the 1950s came the polio vaccine and the Pill; afterward, microchips and lasers, all effecting enormous change. The deciphering of the genetic code in the 1960s could prove to be as important to the course of history as the splitting of the atom.
Few people picture this as an era of geographical exploration in the old sense, yet the largest topographical feature on earth was delineated and mapped in the late 1950s. The mid
ocean ridge system is an underwater mountain range some forty thousand miles in length with valley-to-peak elevations up to two miles. From this discovery and studies of the ocean floor has emerged a revolution in the earth sciences: the new geological theory of plate tectonics that envisions the crust of the earth as composed of immense shifting sections.
Unprecedented advances have been made in astronomy, in our understanding of the architecture of the human brain. Most dramatic of all has been the venture in space. It eclipses all prior voyages of discovery. The rocket, our most terrifying tool of destruction, has taken us on the adventure of the century. The rocket is the symbol of the times.
The American space program began, literally, where German rocket development left off. Wernher Von Braun and a staff of one hundred twenty or so German rocket scientists were brought to the United States from Peenemunde after the war, and it was the V-2 that they began working with in the late 1940s. Times had changed.
The first satellite in orbit was the Russian Sputnik of October 1957. A month later a second Russian satellite carried a small black-and-white dog named Laika, demonstrating that life was possible in outer space. The first human being to go, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, orbited the world on April 12, 1961. The following year John Glenn circled the globe three times and saw four sunsets in four hours, fifty-five minutes.
“These are extraordinary times,” John Kennedy said when he went to Congress in 1961 to ask for the money to put a man on the moon. From Laika to the flight of Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong’s walk of July 20, 1969, was only twelve years. The cost of the moon flight was $25 billion.
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