New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  74 Meany, “Port in a Storm,” 294; George Goldman, remarks at Veteran’s Day event, South Street Seaport Museum, November 1993, transcript, Seaport Museum.

  75 Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 37; Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: 1940–1996 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 13, 19, 51, 64.

  76 Kaiser, Gay Metropolis, 39.

  77 Ellis, Epic, 564; Ida Pollack, remarks at Veteran’s Day event, South Street Seaport Museum, November 1993, transcript, Seaport Museum.

  78 Hoopes, Americans Remember, 178, 276–277.

  79 Ibid., 276–277; author’s interview with Norman Worth, January 7, 2007.

  80 Michael Dobbs, Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 91–94, 101.

  81 Ibid., 62, 127–128.

  82 Louis Fisher, Nazi Saboteurs on Trial: A Military Tribunal and American Law, 2nd ed., abridged and updated (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 135–147.

  83 Dobbs, Saboteurs, 221, 273; ibid., 116–120.

  84 Griehl, Luftwaffe, 130, 148; Duffy, Target, 95–99, 119–124.

  85 Zenji Orita with Joseph D. Harrington, I-Boat Captain (Canoga Park, CA: Major Books, 1976), 276, 311, 317–318, 322; see also the documentary film Secrets of the Dead: Japanese SuperSub, directed by Eric Stange (Windfall Films and Spy Pond Productions for Thirteen, National Geographic Channel, WNET.org, PBS, 2010).

  86 Duffy, Target, 135–148.

  87 Ibid., 103–105; Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942–1945 (New York: Random House, 1998), 682–684; “Robot Bomb Attacks Here Held ‘Probable’ by Admiral, New York Times, January 9,1945, 1; “Bombs for New York?” New York Times, January 10, 1945, 22; “Officials Silent on Robot Threat,” New York Times, January 10, 1945, 7; “Sirens to Sound Long Note If Robot Bombs Fall Here,” New York Times, January 16, 1945, p. 21; “Topics of the Times: Bombs Help Planners,” New York Times, January 18, 1945, 18; “Bombing the Atlantic Coast,” New York Times, January 21,1945, 70.

  88 Philip K. Lundeberg, “Operation Teardrop Revisited,” in Runyan and Copes, eds., To Die Gallantly, 210–230.

  89 Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, “Italian Americans and the 1940s,” in The Italians of New York: Five Centuries of Struggle and Achievement, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro (New York: The New-York Historical Society, 1999), 140. Also caught in the anti-Nazi dragnet was the World War I propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, imprisoned in 1942 for failing to register as an agent of Germany. Viereck’s postwar memoir of his prison years, Men into Beasts (1952), is considered a founding work of American gay pulp fiction. His son, Peter Viereck, became a leading American conservative thinker.

  90 Greg Robinson, “Japanese,” in The Encyclopedia of New York State, ed. Peter Eisenstadt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 808; ibid., 138, 141–142; Kessner, La Guardia, 519.

  91 Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 168–171; Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3, 7–8, 23; Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 246–253, 255–265, 274; Kolkin, Veteran’s Day remarks, transcript.

  92 Anderson, Harlem, 290–291; Terkel, “The Good War,” 365–368.

  93 Anderson, Harlem, 295–298; Nat Brandt, Harlem at War: The Black Experience in WWII (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 184–206; Capeci, Harlem Riot, 99–105.

  94 Ketchum, Borrowed Years, 267; Geoffrey Perrett, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: The American People, 1939–1945 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), 363.

  95 Perrett, Days, 420.

  96 “Rabbis Present Plea to Wallace,” New York Times, October 7, 1943, 14.

  97 Norwood, “Marauding Youth,” 246; Bayor, Neighbors, 150, 155, 156.

  98 Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 250.

  99 Allon Schoener, New York: An Illustrated History of the People (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 312–313.

  Chapter 9

  1 Kalman Seigel, “Biggest Raid Test Turns New York into a ‘Ghost City’,” New York Times, December 14, 1952, 1.

  2 Ibid.; “‘Operation Alert,’” New York Times, June 16, 1955, 30; Will Lissner, “Streets Cleared Swiftly,” New York Times, July 13, 1957, 1.

  3 “‘Operation Alert,’” 30.

  4 E.B. White, Here Is New York (1949; repr., New York: The Little Book-room, 1999), 54–55.

  5 Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead Nor Red: Civilian Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001), 19, 49–50; Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 35; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, fully rev. and updated ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 100.

  6 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 20, 67. For apocalyptic imaginings by magazine illustrator Chesley Bonestell of Soviet nuclear attacks on New York in 1950–1951, see Max Page, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 107–108.

  7 Howard Fast, Being Red: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 184–185.

  8 Ibid., 184, 185–187.

  9 Grossman, Neither Dead Nor Red, 113; John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting II: Radio-Television (n.p.: The Fund for the Republic, 1956), 1–22, 129–135. Author’s note: as a child and young adult, I remember these books of my father’s still covered with brown wrapping through the 1960s and 1970s.

  10 H.P. Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2009), 110, 632; Leonard A. Cole, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988), 65–69; Philip Messing, “Long, Strange Trip: Did the CIA Test LSD in the New York City Subway System?” New York Post, March 13, 2010; Nicholas M. Horrock, “Senators Are Told of Test of a Gas Attack in Subway,” New York Times, September 19, 1975, 14.

  11 Robert C. Doty, “City’s First Draftees Enter Army; 108 Honored by Review at Fort Jay,” New York Times, August 31, 1950, 1; “2,000 Skilled Hands Needed at Navy Yard,” New York Times, December 22, 1950, 7; “Shipyard Policy at Issue,” New York Times, May 29, 1953, 41; Geoffrey Rossano, “Suburbia Armed: Nassau County Development and the Rise of the Aerospace Industry, 1909–60,” in The Martial Metropolis: U.S. Cities in War and Peace, ed. Roger W. Lotchin (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1984), 76–77.

  12 Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), 158–159, 168–169; “Gen. Krivitsky Found Dead; Suicide Finding Questioned,” New York Times, February 11, 1941, 1; John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 411; “Woman Communist Missing 7 Months,” New York Times, December 18, 1937, 10.

  13 Tanenhaus, Chambers, 75, 79, 80–82, 83–86.

  14 Ibid., 83, 108, 110–115, 125, 363.

  15 Richard Goldstein, Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II (New York: Free Press, 2010), 45–48; Lorraine B. Diehl, Over Here! New York City During World War II (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 52–53; Sam Roberts, The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case (New York: Random House, 2001), 127; Cynthia C. Kelly and Robert S. Norris, A Guide to Manhattan Project Sites in Manhattan (Washington, DC: The Atomic Heritage Foundation, 2008), 28–29.

  16 Roberts, The Brother, 108–109, 243–244.

  17 Ibid., 282, 419–420, 430, 494, 522–523; John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr
, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 10–11, 309–310, 363; “Spy Case a Story of Legal Battles,” New York Times, June 20, 1953, 6.

  18 Stefan Kanfer, A Journal of the Plague Years (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 73.

  19 Roberts, The Brother, 386, 466, 490.

  20 B. Bruce-Briggs, The Shield of Faith: A Chronicle of Strategic Defense from Zeppelins to Star Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 175; Allan M. Winkler, Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety About the Atom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 122; Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), 521–522.

  21 Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 52–54.

  22 Winkler, Life Under a Cloud, 115–116; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 22–24; Miguel “Mickey” Melendez, We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 33; Grossman, Neither Dead Nor Red, 84; “School Children Get Identification Tags,” New York Times, October 19, 1951, 14.

  23 Bruce-Briggs, The Shield of Faith, 117–119; Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 95–99.

  24 Bernard Stengren, “City Lags on Civil Defense, With Plans in A-Bomb Era,” New York Times, June 13, 1955, 1; Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 282.

  25 Bruce-Briggs, The Shield of Faith, 164, 169; Norimitsu Onishi, “Frozen in Time, Cold War Kitsch,” New York Times, February 20, 1995, B1.

  26 Nan Robertson, “Feeling of Futility Voiced,” New York Times, September 2, 1961, 1.

  27 Winkler, Life Under a Cloud, 117; May, Homeward Bound, 161.

  28 Russell Porter, “City Evacuation Plan,” New York Times, March 12, 1955, 1; Warren Weaver Jr., “State Discloses Evacuation Plan,” New York Times, August 4, 1955, 10; Milton Bracker, “Atom Survival Plan Drawn Up by State,” New York Times, September 1, 1958, 1.

  29 Porter, “City Evacuation Plan,” 1.

  30 Stengren, “City Lags on Civil Defense,” 1.

  31 “Westchester Ban on Evacuees Kept,” New York Times, April 21, 1955, 16.

  32 “Evacuation Rule of City Clarified,” New York Times, April 22, 1955, 12.

  33 Bruce-Briggs, The Shield of Faith, 67, 92–94; Mark L. Morgan and Mark A. Berhow, Rings of Supersonic Steel: Air Defenses of the United States Army 1950–1979, 2nd ed. (Bodega Bay, CA: Fort MacArthur Military Press, 2002), 2, 8–16, 117–125.

  34 “U.S. Confirms Atomic Defense Here,” New York Times, April 23, 1957, 20.

  35 Bruce-Briggs, The Shield of Faith, 139–141; Morgan and Berhow, Rings, 25; Bill Becker, “8 Nikes Explode at New Jersey Base; 10 Killed, 3 Hurt,” New York Times, May 23, 1958, 1; “Civil Defense Alerted In City by Missile Fire,” New York Times, June 8, 1960, 1; George Cable Wright, “General Regrets Explosion Scare,” New York Times, June 9, 1960, 4.

  36 Page, The City’s End, 135–136; Dee Garrison, “‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage’: The Civil Defense Protest Movement in New York City, 1955–1961,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 207.

  37 Garrison, “‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage’,” 210–211, 215.

  38 Ibid., 212–216, 217–220.

  39 Ibid., 216; Robert K. Musil, “Growing Up Nuclear,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 38, no 1 (January1982): 19.

  40 John Cohen, in No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese (Spitfire Pictures, Grey Water Park Productions, Thirteen/WNET New York/PBS, and Sikelia Productions, 2005).

  41 Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 24–25.

  42 Joseph Lelyveld, “Police Break Up Antiwar Rally,” New York Times, August 9, 1964, 1.

  43 Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 12–13.

  44 Ibid., 24, 26.

  45 Melendez, We Took the Streets, 67.

  46 Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 49; Abbie Hoffman, The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000), 82–83.

  47 Gitlin, The Sixties, 90; Melendez, We Took the Streets, 68.

  48 Hoffman, Autobiography, 107–108; Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 110–114; Douglas Robinson, “Throngs to Parade to the U.N. Today for Antiwar Rally,” New York Times, April 15, 1967, 1; Douglas Robinson, “100,000 Rally at U.N. Against Vietnam War,” New York Times, April 16, 1967, 1; Mark Rudd, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 30–31.

  49 Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 51, 56–57, 81, 112–113. Another act of protest was the self-immolation by a young Catholic Worker, Roger La-Porte, who doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire outside the United Nations on November 9, 1965, one week after a Quaker named Norman Morrison similarly burned himself to death outside the Pentagon. Both pacifists were emulating the suicides of Buddhist monks protesting the Diem regime in South Vietnam.

  50 Kenneth T. Jackson, “The City Loses the Sword: The Decline of Major Military Activity in the New York Metropolitan Region,” in Lotchin, ed., The Martial Metropolis, 151–162.

  51 Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 133.

  52 Ibid., 400–401, 407; Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 62.

  53 James Simon Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (New York: Random House, 1969), 120.

  54 Cannato, Ungovernable City, 239–243, 253–254, 257.

  55 Ibid., 243; Rudd, Underground, 115; Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 167–168; Nicolas Pileggi, “Revolutionaries Who Have to be Home by 7:30,” New York Times, March 16, 1969, SM26.

  56 Richard Reeves, “Mayor Urges Youths to Aid War Resistance,” New York Times, March 20, 1968, 1; John V. Lindsay, The City (New York: Norton, 1970), 39, 204.

  57 Gitlin, The Sixties, 183; Rudd, Underground, 43, 168–169.

  58 “State Presidential Vote,” New York Times, November 4, 1964, 24; Daniel C. Hallin, The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 11, 218; Melendez, We Took the Streets, 33.

  59 Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 92, 101, 168.

  60 Cannato, Ungovernable City, 122–124, 427.

  61 Murray Schumach, “70,000 Turn Out to Back U.S. Men in Vietnam War,” New York Times, May 14, 1967, 1; Hoffman, Autobiography, 108.

  62 Rudd, Underground, 29; Cannato, Ungovernable City, 245–246, 258–260, 627 n39.

  63 Cannato, Ungovernable City, 246, 260.

  64 Homer Bigart, “War Foes Here Attacked by Construction Workers,” New York Times, May 9, 1970, 1; Linda Charlton, “Some Protests Heckled; Fires Reported at Colleges,” New York Times, May 9, 1970, 10; ibid., 448–449.

  65 Cannato, Ungovernable City, 449–452.

  66 Ibid., 452–453; Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 334–335; Homer Bigart, “Huge City Hall Rally Backs Nixon’s Indochina Policies,” New York Times, May 21, 1970, 1.

  67 Victor Gotbaum, Anti–Vietnam War address (c. 1970), VHS 25—Can 2282, WNYC videotape collection, Municipal Archives of New York City; Bigart, “Huge City Hall Rally,” 1.

  68 Bigart, “Huge City Hall Rally,” 1.

  69 Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 387; Gitlin, The Sixties, 379.

  70 Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 420; Paul L. Montgomery, “End-of-War Rally Brings Out 50,000,” May 12, 1975, 1.

  71 Jennifer Leaning and Langley Keyes, “Introduction,” in The Counterfeit Ark: Crisis Relocation for Nuclear War, ed. Jennif
er Leaning and Langley Keys (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing, 1984), xvii; Winkler, Life Under a Cloud, 133.

  72 Leaning and Keyes, “Introduction,” xviii; Winkler, Life Under a Cloud, 133–134.

  73 Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982), 47–54.

  74 Paul L. Montgomery, “Throngs Fill Manhattan to Protest Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, June 13, 1982, 1; Anna Quindlen, “About New York: Earnestness as Whimsey in a Colorful Panorama,” New York Times, June 13, 1982, 43.

  75 Quindlen, “About New York,” 43.

  Chapter 10

  1 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 9–10, 12, 14–15.

  2 Ibid., 32, 36–37.

  3 Randall D. Law, Terrorism: A History (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 65.

  4 Douglas Robinson, “Townhouse Razed by Blast and Fire; Man’s Body Found,” New York Times, March 7, 1970, 1.

  5 Linda Charlton, “‘Village’ Fire Victim Identified as Leader of ’68 Columbia Strike,” New York Times, March 9, 1970, 32; Robert D. McFadden, “More Body Parts Discovered in Debris of Blast on 11th Street,” New York Times, March 16, 1970, 49.

  6 Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 301; Abbie Hoffman, The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000), 248.

  7 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 402.

  8 Mark Rudd, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 313; ibid., 377.

  9 Vincent Burns and Kate Dempsey Peterson, Terrorism: A Documentary and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 35, 36.

  10 Rudd, Underground, 192–193; Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 324–325; Morris Kaplan, “Bomb Plot Is Laid to 21 Panthers,” New York Times, April 3, 1969, 1; Emanuel Perlmutter, “Justice Murtagh’s Home Target of 3 Fire Bombs,” New York Times, February 22, 1970, 1.