The Culture Wars 1960-1968

 

The Military-Industrial Complex

 

The Cold War was not just a clash of military empires, but of economies, of cultures, of rival ways of life. The expenditure on armaments it entailed fuelled the American economy through the longest period of dynamic eco­nomic growth in world history, as it ushered in a new era of prosperity in the West. In 1960 defence expenditure in the United States amounted to nearly $50 billion - 52 per cent of all federal expenditure, about 10 per cent of gross domestic product. The United States had military alliances with forty-eight nations; more than 1.5 million of its servicemen were stationed around the world. The Department of Defense directly employed another 1 million civil­ians. Thousands of companies benefited from military contracts. Research projects were handed out to universities and research institutes by the hun­dred. A vast military-industrial complex developed whose interest it was to maintain or increase this level of expenditure.

Companies like General Dynamics, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, or Newport News Shipping depended on defence contracts, and lobbied for con­tinued high levels of defence spending. Many other US companies, including some of the largest, owed their high levels of production to defence work. All this public investment (much of it going to the southern and western Sunbelt states) generated profits for the shareholders. In Texas there were Bell Helicopters and the giant LTV Industries, as well as NASA in Houston. In Georgia there was Lockheed at Marietta, generating new wealth. The popula­tion of California increased sixfold; the McDonnell-Douglas and Hughes air­craft plants grew in size dramatically; nearly one-third of all defence contracts went to this single state. In the Northwest, Boeing in Seattle became one of the biggest employers. Wall Street also enjoyed the Cold War - shares in aerospace rose in value at a rate three times that of the market average.

 

Defence activities' spin-offs drove the civilian economy; the arms race cre­ated new metals and materials. Massive investment in radar and early warn­ing systems helped grow the electronics and telecommunications industries. The Boeing 707, before becoming the most successful civilian airliner of all time, began life as a military refuelling tanker. American industrial technol­ogy during the 1960s produced ever more sophisticated arms, and at the same time gave consumers the items they wanted.

 

The military-industrial complex was all-pervasive, and all-powerful. Hardly ever did a public figure speak out against it - few congressmen dared risk the charge of shortchanging the nation's defence by objecting to military expenditure. Kennedy, campaigning against Nixon, convinced many Ameri­cans that the Eisenhower administration had allowed a missile gap to grow between the United States and USSR, thus endangering national security. Only Eisenhower himself, in his farewell address on leaving office, dared warn America against the "unwarranted influence" of the "military­industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He also warned of the "prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money." It took a retiring president, at the end of a career that included dis­tinguished military service, to issue this warning.

 

The US economy was driven also by a growing internationalism. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States looked for foreign markets to sell into. From the Marshall Plan onwards, US foreign policy encouraged free and open private-enterprise economies on the American model because this provided not only foundations for democratic societies but a marketplace for American goods.  US exports quadrupled between 1950 and 1970. But US growth rates were still lower than those in Europe and Japan. Many American companies discovered they could earn more by investing their money abroad. Much of this money then remained in the economy that generated it. So the years of the Cold War saw the growth and flourishing of the multinational corporation. By 1968, 40 per cent of US investments in France, Britain, and West Germany was held by just three companies - Ford, General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey. Investment decisions were made not by govern­ment officials like those who had orchestrated the Marshall Plan, but by the boards of multinational companies whose objective was profit. American multinationals extended their business throughout the capitalist world. IBM, Ford, and Exxon invested heavily in Europe, South America, and Asia. Flying the flag, every US military base became an outpost ofAmerican trade and cul­ture. Coca-Cola and blue jeans were the symbols of modern consumerist cul­ture worldwide, the objects that millions aspired to use and flaunt.

 

An American Tragedy

 

At home in the United States, however, prosperity was not shared evenly. Areas of deprivation remained - islands of poverty in a sea of wealth. While the Sunbelt prospered, huge numbers of jobs were lost in the old inner cities.

 

At the beginning of the 1960s, more than 5 million Americans were unem­ployed; black 'unemployment was nine times the rate for whites. Across the southern states racism was still entrenched. Blacks and whites could not sit together on buses, eat in the same restaurants, drink in the same bars, or attend the same schools. Protest against this legalized apartheid built up in the 1950s; in the early 1960s it became widespread. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a young black Baptist minister, was thrust into national prominence when in Montgomery, Alabama, he led the struggle against segregated seating on pub­lic buses. King preached non-violent protest and civil disobedience. Thou­sands of boycotts, demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches publicized the sys­tem's injustices. Well-disciplined and non-violent civil rights protesters met intense opposition from local whites and from the police. News film of policemen brutally beating peaceful demon­strators with batons, or firing water cannons at them, solicited national and international sympathy. Demands to desegregate schools and colleges led to sensational set-piece confrontations, as in Birmingham, Alabama, where Governor George C. Wallace and his racist supporters looked on and fumed as federal troops enforced black students' enrolment at the state university.

 

King led the massive March on Washington in August 1963, when 200,000 civil rights supporters gathered to hear him. "I have a dream," he proclaimed. "Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children." Folk singer Joan Baez led the chorus of "We Shall Overcome." Bob Dylan sang of the changes that were "Blowin' in the Wind." The rally called on the White House to ban racist laws and to give black Americans equal opportunities in education and jobs. After the speeches, President Kennedy invited the leaders to the White House and congratulated them. Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, urged his brother to act. The president spoke grandly: "The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened." But he knew he needed the southern vote, and hes­itated to act decisively.

 

After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson took over and brought new priorities to the White House. High on his list was the building of what he called the Great Society and an "unconditional war on poverty." In July 1964 he signed the Civil Rights Act, outlawing racial discrimination. But equality was still a long way from a reality in the South. Throughout 1964 activists were attacked, beaten up, shot at, and a few murdered in what became known as Mississippi Summer. One woman, the granddaughter of a slave, who had been so severely beaten she could no longer walk, said on tele­vision, "Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave ... where our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings?" In Alabama, King led a harrowing march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965 to publicize the fact that only 1 per cent of eligible blacks were registered to vote in Dallas County. The marchers were attacked and beaten by angry whites until the president federalized the National Guard and in­structed Governor Wallace to allow the march to proceed. "We are on the move now, an idea whose time has come," declared King.

 

In the cities of the North, residential segregation concentrated deprived racial minorities into huge ghettos. In the summer of 1965 the black ghetto of Watts in Los Angeles exploded in the first of a series of inner-city race riots. Fifteen thousand troops had to be called in to restore order, and for nearly a week the ghetto burned. A thousand buildings were destroyed; 4,000 blacks were arrested; 1,000 people were injured; 34 were killed. For the next three years, northern cities experienced "long hot summers" of discontent, rioting, and outbursts of violence. These culminated in Newark, and then in Detroit

in 1967, where 43 people lost their lives and $250 million of property was destroyed. Newsweek headlined this "An American Tragedy." The race riots helped generate a "white backlash" against civil rights and a further division within American society. For Washington, claiming to lead the free world against the tyranny of communism, poverty, injustice, and conflict inside the United States proved embarrassing. America was at war both abroad and at home.

 

President Johnson's intended War on Poverty was slowing down as the real war in Vietnam ate up cash that could have gone into federal funding for anti-poverty programmes. It took as little as $50 a month to help one American out of poverty, but about $300,000 to kill one Viet Cong. King had strongly supported Johnson for his stand on civil rights; he now turned into an out­spoken critic of Vietnam policy as the Great Society became a victim of mili­tary spending in Southeast Asia.

 

What Are We Fighting For?

 

The unwinnable war in Vietnam became the great polarizing issue of the era, dividing the United States more than at any time since the Civil War, a hun­dred years earlier. With the nightly television coverage, and as the number of casualties rose, more people questioned why America was fighting this war. The anti-war movement really got going in October 1965 with demonstrations in more than ninety cities, including Washington, where eighty thousand protesters marched. The anti-war marches brought together pacifists, reli­gious groups, and left-leaning student organizations opposed to American militarism abroad. Johnson's extension of the draft caused the protest to grow dramatically; it brought university students directly into the war, and the campuses started to erupt in a rash of draft card burnings. Over the next few years, anti-war slogans echoed around campuses and cities across the United States, and directly outside the White House and the Pentagon.

 

But although the number of US personnel in Vietnam increased year by year, as did the casualties, the majority of the population still supported the war effort. In September 1966 three out of four Americans supported the pres­ident's war aims. Crowds carrying banners that read "Support our men in Vietnam - Don't stab them in the back" attacked the protesters. Congressmen called on the government to clamp down on that "sleazy beatnik gang" who defaced their draft cards. A law was passed by a voice vote in the Senate order­ing imprisonment for up to five years and a $10,000 fine for wilful destruction of draft cards. Ronald Reagan, then running for governor of California, gave his view of the anti-war demonstrations at Berkeley in three words: "Sex, drugs, and treason." For many in what became known as the "silent majority," it was one thing to protest over civil rights but something else to undermine the government's foreign policy during a war. When protesters started to burn the Stars and Stripes, thousands of patriotic Americans went out and bought miniature flags to display in windows and on their cars. "My Country Right or Wrong" posters began to appear throughout the nation.

 

The sixties generation of young Americans was the tallest, the best edu­cated, and the most affluent in the country's history. California, where much of the aerospace industry was based, epitomized a prosperous America. It was the richest state of the union, with an economy larger than that of any foreign country except the Soviet Union, West Germany, Britain, and France. It had the highest average income in the United States and the highest provision per capita of cars, swimming pools, backyard patios, barbecues, and colour tele­visions. It was in California, however, that a new counter-culture first ap­peared, in which thousands of young people rejected the materialism and consumerism of their parents' generation.

 

Having grown up with the daily threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them, young radicals wanted to turn their backs on an America they saw as racist, sexist, and imperialist. Activists started to claim that all were not equal in modern America - certainly blacks were not, nor were women. Alongside anti-Vietnam protests and peace vigils, there came a variety of sit­ins and teach-ins calling for a full-scale revolt against the American Way of Life. Some students just wanted to drop out. Others took a more ideological approach and wanted a radical overhaul of society.

 

Although many eloquent radicals argued forcefully for change, the move­ment was largely leaderless. Their organizations had names like Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and, more militantly, the Black Panthers, the Yippies, and the Weathermen. Out of this counter-culture came demands for black power, and later for women's liberation. From Berkeley came the first talk of "flower power" and the call to "make love, not war." In 1966-1967, San Francisco was the hippie centre of the world. Wearing flowers in their hair and calling for free love, young people were invited to "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

 

"For the first time in our history," a professor wrote in the early 1960s, "a major social movement, shaking the nation to its bones, is being led by young­sters." The huge boom in the birthrate after the Second World War created in the 1960s a bulge in the national demographic: some 30 million "baby boomers." Despite immense differences among the youth-led protest move­ments of the 1960s, from floral peaceniks to urban guerrillas, they shared a sense of being part of the same sixties generation. In 1969 a survey revealed that 80 per cent of youth felt part of "my generation." They rejected the mate­rialism of their parents, creating a discernible "generation gap." Hair grew longer; skirts were shorter. The birth control pill became widely available for the first time, allowing women to feel independent and enabling men to encourage girlfriends to "do it." The sexual revolution further divided the generations; parents accused the young of moral decay and degeneracy.

 

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LSD: Drug of the Sixties

 

The pharmacopoeia of the sixties counter-culture included marijuana, mescaline, amphetamines like "purple hearts," and a variety of "magic mush­rooms"; but at its core was one unique drug: LSD - known as "acid." Lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, was first syn­thesized in 1938 by a Swiss chemist, Albert Hofmann, while he was study­ing derivatives of alkaloids in an attempt to find a cure for migraine. LSD is a powerful hallucinogenic drug that acts on the brain to produce sen­sory distortions, leaving the mind free to process in its own way the evidence supplied by the eyes and ears. Frequently the drug will induce vivid visual and aural hallucinations and an entirely new experience of reality, known as a "trip." Response to the drug varies widely; it can generate apparently mystical insights at one

extreme, or intense anxiety and panic attacks at the other. The drug has been used experimentally in the study of mental illness, but its manufacture and sale are now banned in the United States, the UK, and other countries.

 

Dr. Timothy Leary, an instructor at Harvard University, was the first to publicize using the drug, in the early 1960s. With moves to ban its use in 1966, LSD began to acquire cult status. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg urged that every healthy American over the age of fourteen should take at least one trip in order to gain insight into "the New Wilderness of machine America." During the peak of "acid culture" In 1966-1967, many prominent figures used the drug, including John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles. Although the melody of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was thought to

have been composed under the-influ­ence of LSD, other Beatles tracks like "A Day in the Life" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" are far more redolent of acid trips. At thou­sands of'hippie communes, university teach-ins, and innumerable love-ins and happenings, LSD tripping was commonplace. The drug does not pro­duce physical dependence, but psycho­logical dependency was common.

 

Unlike conventional drugs such as alcohol, which have the effect of numbing the senses, LSD, its propo­nents argued, had the effect of enhancing them, leaving the user with a heightened sense of consciousness. LSD opened up a new view of reality, transcending the material world; It provided self-oriented hallucination befitting the rejection by the counter­culture generation of older values.

 

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Music was the language of the movement. From Britain came the Liverpool sound of the Beatles, a sort of white version of black rhythm and blues. When the Beatles made their American TV debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, the programme got the highest rating ever in television history, and there was talk of an "invasion" of America by the Fab Four. Behind them came the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Animals. From California came the psy­chedelic beat of Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, and the Mothers of Invention. During the mid-sixties almost an entire generation, in their early teens to late twenties, was affected in one way or another by the power of this music and the sense of change it sounded. Nothing expressed the optimism and the dynamism of the decade better than its music. "All you need is love," sang John Lennon and Paul McCartney; "The time is right for fighting in the street," sang Mick Jagger.

 

Besieged by blazing black ghettos and the ubiquitous anti Vietnam War demonstrations, the US establishment saw the counter-culture's critique as a threat to national security. J. Edgar Hoover, the elderly, longtime director of the FBI, believed that Communists were behind the protests. The president ordered agents to infiltrate the movement and to tap the phones of its lead­ers. Believing that the anti-war movement had international links, the CIA was asked, illegally, to collect domestic intelligence on it. Eventually the agency reported no evidence of any international connection.

 

The generational conflict between parental conservatism and youthful idealism then became a head-to-head clash between seemingly repressive police forces and National Guard and anarchic youth in rebellion. The baby boom generation -who were born as the Iron Curtain descended, entered school as the first shots were fired in Korea, and were teenagers as Kennedy pledged to send a man to the moon - now reached maturity as the Vietnam War unfolded, and turned against the affluence that had helped shape their lives.

In October 1967 anti-war protesters organized a huge March on the Pentagon. A large group began a sit-down protest. For the first time since the Bonus Army riot in 1932, the federal government called in armed forces to defend the capital. Many protesters talked with the soldiers and chanted, "We'd love to turn you on"; some put flowers down the soldiers' rifle barrels. That night the troops attacked, kicking and clubbing the peace demonstra­tors. One eyewitness spoke of "troopers and marshals" advancing, "cracking heads, bashing skulls." This rally marked the end of the "summer of love." The curtain was up for 1968.

 

The protest movement, triggered often by anti-Vietnam War campaigns, was international. In Paris in May 1968, de Gaulle's Fifth Republic was nearly toppled when it came into conflict with a massed combination of workers, students, and intellectuals. In London policemen laid into anti-war demon­strators with their truncheons outside the US Embassy, in full view of televi­sion news cameras. In Germany and Japan radicals fought with the police. In Northern Ireland civil rights marches, modelled on those of the American South, sparked a new phase in the long confrontation between Irish republicanism and British rule.

 

The Credibility Gap

 

In January 1968, as President Johnson announced that the United States was winning the war in Vietnam, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive within virtually every town and city in South Vietnam. The gap between what gov­ernment said and what people saw on their television screens had never been greater, nor credibility lower. Support for the president's handling of the war dropped to an all-time low in the polls. Eighty per cent of Americans felt that the United States was making no progress in the war. Tet was a turning point. Senator Eugene McCarthy announced he would oppose Johnson for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Robert Kennedy also declared he was a candidate. Then, in March, Johnson surprised everyone by saying he would not seek nor accept his party's nomination. With his crushing triumph over Goldwater only four years behind him, Johnson now recognized the deep unpopularity of his war policies.

 

Four days after Johnson's announcement, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots swept the nation. A hundred American cities erupted; there were more than twenty thousand arrests and fifty deaths. Seventy-five thousand troops were called out to keep the peace. For many, King epitomized the dream of racial equality, but for two years his influence had been diminish­ing. Now leadership of the black community passed to more radi­cal figures who wanted to go beyond passive disobedience to active resistance. The Black Panthers trained as paramilitaries in the ghetto of Oakland, California, for a civil war with racist police. Other black nationalists called openly for revolution.

 

With a million college students and faculty members boy­cotting classes because of Vietnam, the stage was set for a show­down between McCarthy and Kennedy for the Democratic nomination. In the California primary, in June, Kennedy won by a whisker. Then, as he was leaving his hotel through a back entrance, he was shot in the head. He died the next morning. There was no rioting, just silence. The American nation was traumatized by these killings. People asked what was wrong with America. Why was the nation so violent?

 

Everything came to a head when the Democratic Party gathered inChicago to choose its nominee for the presidency - now either McCarthy or Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Chicago was controlled by Mayor Richard J. Daley, a tough, old-school hard-liner who ruled the streets through a broad network of ethnic supporters. He promised, "As long as I am mayor, there will be law and order on the streets." In the riots following Martin Luther King's death he had given his police authority to "shoot to kill" arsonists. Daley was determined to keep order during the convention when rumour predicted that 100,000 activists and anti-war campaigners would assemble in Chicago. Only about one-tenth of that number arrived, but Daley had no intention of allowing any marches to go ahead. His police, some out of uniform, attacked a group of hippies and Yippies in Lincoln Park and pursued them - and anyone else who happenedto be on the streets - with clubs and batons. On the night that Humphrey was to accept the nomination, the police used tear gas to break up a demonstra­tion outside the convention hotel. More than two hundred plainclothes policemen tried to infiltrate the march. Demonstrators, newsmen, and el­derly passersby were all clubbed and beaten. Tear gas got into the air vents of the hotel and into Humphrey's suite as he was preparing his acceptance speech. On live television, the cameras kept cutting between the convention and the extraordinary scenes outside. Humphrey left with his party's nomi­nation but was shattered. "Chicago was a catastrophe," he said later. "My wife and I went home heartbroken, battered, and beaten."

 

Just a week after Soviet troops shocked the world by moving into Prague, the Chicago police, according to the New York Times, "brought shame to the city, embarrassment to the country." Lawyers defending those charged in the demonstration spoke of a "police riot." Senator George McGovern denounced Daley and his "Gestapo" for creating a "blood bath." Radicals were driven even further outside the political system; they believed that the government was now totally illegitimate and led by war criminals, so that only further mili­tancy could win the day.

 

"Bring Us Together" was a campaign slogan for the Nixon camp. But as the campaign heated up, there was no coming together. Governor George Wallace had declared himself an inde­pendent candidate, with Curtis LeMay as his running mate. Wallace's plan to stop the trouble on the streets appealed only to the right-wing heartlands: "We ought to turn this country over to the police for two or three years and then everything would be all right." Nixon tried to come across as the statesman and peace­maker. He spoke of a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam and to bring "peace with honor." With conservative Spiro T. Agnew as his running mate, Nixon tried to defuse support for Wallace. In the end, the vote was nail­bitingly close: Wallace won 13 per cent, and Nixon narrowly defeated Hum­phrey with just over 43 per cent. America was split into two nations.

 

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China and the Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was officially launched by Mao Zedong in August 1966, to renew the spirit of the Chinese Revolution. Believing that the Russian Revolution had gone astray, Mao wanted to prevent the same thing from happening in China, so he unleashed a new revolution especially directed at the young. Seeing his own power slipping away, Mao wanted to purge his party colleagues and establish absolute obedience to his authority. The shock troops of the Cultural Revolution were the Red Guards, militant youth groups recruited in every town and city in China in a massive mobilization of the young. Everywhere students chanted slogans: "Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts!"; "We will smash whoever opposes Chairman Mao!" Wearing red armbands and waving little red books of Mao's "thoughts," they vowed to defend Chairman Mao and to fight the "Four Olds": old thought, old culture, old customs, and old habits. The Red Guards were encouraged to attack all bourgeois values and to test party officials by publicly criticizing them: "Destroy first and construction will look after itself." They started' off by attacking school and college teachers. In the release; of pent-up, sometimes hysterical energy, teenage Red Guards rapidly moved from verbal attacks to physical assaults: unpopular or "incorrect" teachers were tied by their, ankles and flogged, or beaten to death. Often, two students would twist the arms of a victim behind his back with such force as to nearly dislocate them; this torture, known as the "jet plane," became a characteristic of Red Guard interrogations. In grotesque acts of vandalism, anything "old" - antiques, paintings, museum exhibits, books - was smashed or burned. Young Red Guards even took' over traffic control; it was no longer deemed appropriate for "red", to mean "stop," or for traffic to drive on the "right." The turmoil soon turned into anarchy from one end of China to the other.

 

Everyone in authority came under attack - in factories, in government offices, in local Communist Party committees. Thousands committed suicide. Tens of thousands more were beaten, tortured, and murdered by Red Guards in a wave of state-supported frenzy. Every chant, every blow, every assault was carried out in the name of Mao, whose personality cult grew to religious proportions. He became known as the "Four Greats": great leader, - great helmsman, great commander, and great teacher.

 

In February 1967 several party leaders called for a halt, but Mao escalated the purge and unleashed a new terror with more killings and atrocities. Factions of Red Guards fell `out among themselves, arguing as to who represented the purest form of Mao's thought. Giant rallies were held in Tiananmen Square, at the heart of Beijing, in which a million Red Guards would gather, chanting the thoughts of Chairman Mao, waving their little red books. When Mao would wave down at them, many sobbed uncontrollably, howling out pledges of loyalty. Chaos followed in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. For many

years, the education system ceased to function. Industrial output slumped.

 

The party was decimated; officials, not wanting to take risks, became over cautious. Many leaders were purged. Liu Shaoqi, Mao's designated successor at the time, was removed and became ill with fear and anxiety. Party general secretary Deng Xiaoping and his family were exiled to remote Jiangxi Province, where they were treated as criminals and allowed no contact with the outside world. Deng was paraded around the streets with insulting placards around his neck and - was spat at and reviled. Deng's son, following efforts to make him confess the "treason" of his father, was severely beaten by a fanatical group of Red Guards. The coalition that Mao assembled to carry out the Cultural Revolution soon became immersed in a bitter power struggle over his succession. His wife, Jiang Qing, saw an opportunity to take power herself and plotted with three compatriots from Shanghai; they later became known as the Gang of Four. Zhen Boda, one of the fiercest ideological proponents of the revolution, came to the fore. As the military tightened its grip on Chinese society, Defence Minister Lin Biao emerged as Mao's successor.

 

In the late 1960s the Cultural Revolution began to wind down as the Red Guards were ordered into the countryside to live and work. This broke them up and restored some order to China's anarchic cities, but it transported the chaos to rural areas. Farmers who had worked their land all their lives were instructed by teenagers on how to farm in a purer ideological way. The Cultural' Revolution continued to wreak its havoc on Chinese society, for years, leaving scars that would take a' decade and more to heal.

 

 

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The anti-war movement clearly boosted North Vietnamese morale and sustained Hanoi's will to fight on. The hostile chants had almost certainly upset Lyndon Johnson and helped persuade the president not to stand for re-election. The anti-war movement also affected the atmosphere of decision making by which it was resolved not to broaden the conflict into a wider war in Southeast Asia. More than anything, the protests against the war in Vietnam and the reaction to them deeply divided the American people and, in the rest of the world, provoked widespread anti-American sentiment on both sides of the Cold War divide.

 

The United States, however, was strong enough and prosperous enough overall to hold its course in the Cold War, and to soldier on.

 

Keeping Abreast of the West

 

In East Europe and the Soviet Union, the 1960s saw some easing of govern­mental controls, some economic improvements. For most people, life was becoming less physically arduous. But few had money for luxuries. There was subsidized housing and food, universal free health care, free university edu­cation, and guaranteed full employment. But workers did not have the right to strike; there was virtually no freedom of speech (every typewriter privately owned had to be registered); and there were no free elections.

 

Full employment did not mean high productivity. Centralized state eco­nomic planning was wasteful and inefficient. Middle managers were bom­barded with innumerable instructions from central committees. To one young agricultural official it was as though those at the centre were firmly convinced "that without their bureaucratic directives no grass would grow and no cow would calve." Highly qualified people did low-skilled jobs, so eco­nomic productivity was appallingly low. And there was little incentive for workers, with guaranteed jobs, to improve their productivity. Nobody worked hard. There was little to buy. The only items for sale were those the state Idecided to sell, at prices fixed by officials. Queues were everywhere part of Soviet life - for meat, for butter, for clothing. Every family had someone who spent much of the day queuing, so productivity declined even further.

 

There were constant drives for greater productivity, with new targets set by the central planning committee in Moscow and with workers exhorted to work harder and faster. The Communist Party youth organization, the Kom­somol, was in the front line. Many factories had Komsomol brigades of young workers who were encouraged to compete for the honour of attaining the highest output. Across the Soviet Union, many workers shared a patriotic feel­ing that they were strengthening the motherland and not simply generating profits. Propaganda played on patriotism, stressing the duty of workers to strive to keep the Soviet Union abreast of the West.

 

Housing was still recovering from the destruction of war; everywhere there was overcrowding. Often whole families lived in a single room, sharing kitchen and toilet facilities. But people made the best of it. The future Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, then in his thirties, shared a communal apartment with a welder, a retired colonel, a mechanic, and their families, along with an alcoholic bachelor and his mother and four single women. In this overcrowd­ing, "people made friends, quarrelled, made up, celebrated anniversaries and feast days together, and played dominoes in the evenings." To reduce the housing shortage, vast pre-fabricated apartment blocks were constructed

around every city. It helped the overcrowding, but only added to the drabness of most Soviet cities.

 

In May 1957, in a major speech, Nikita Khrushchev goaded the Soviet people to overtake the United States in per capita production of meat, milk, and butter within four years. Some of the larger collectives offered to double their output in a single year. In the Riazan district they offered to increase the production of meat fourfold. Since this was impossible to achieve, the conse­quences were disastrous. To meet their targets collectives bought up cattle from the peasants' smallholdings and from neighbouring villages and slaugh­tered them en masse. Huge numbers of cattle, oxen, sheep, and pigs were butchered; this "meat campaign" dealt a blow to the country's private agri­cultural sector that took decades to recover from. But targets were met and Moscow was told what it wanted to hear. Khrushchev himself handed out the Order of Lenin, and the state-controlled press called on other collectives to fol­low the example of these great achievements. Only later was it realized that livestock farming had been devastated by these impossible goals; the rate of Soviet meat production remained at half that of the United States well into the 1970s.

 

Another of Khrushchev's gigantic agricultural initiatives was the Virgin Lands campaign; at least 90 million acres of uncultivated grasslands, mostly in Kazakhstan in Central Asia, were ploughed up and planted with wheat. To farm this enormous area, nearly half a million "volunteers" were moved in from western Russia and the Ukraine and settled on huge state farms. At immense cost, the state provided credit loans and financial incentives to the new farmers. Cultivation was initially successful but, after only a few years, as the topsoil was ploughed up, the area began to turn into a dust bowl. Although new grain production kept bread prices down for a while, there were never enough fertilizers to go around, nor enough grain silos to store the wheat, nor railroad hoppers to transport it. In 1962 there was a poor harvest, and an even more disastrous one followed in 1963. People now began to curse Khrushchev, blaming him for shortages of bread. For the first time, the Soviet Union, despite myriad acres of fertile land, imported grain from the United States.

 

The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex

 

Soviet society was being dramatically transformed by two great changes. First, it was becoming less a rural peasant society and more urban. In 1939 two-thirds of the population had been rural; by the time of Stalin's death this proportion had dropped to just over half; and by the end of the 1970s it dropped to one-quarter. The other trend was more directly a consequence of the Cold War and massive continued spending on the arms race. Immense growth and prosperity were concentrated in the areas closely linked to the expanding Soviet military-industrial complex. Powerful voices inside the Soviet elite, fearful of American "militarism," continued to make insatiable demands for military investments. Advanced industries and research facili­ties sprang up all over the country along with dozens of "secret cities," each employing thousands of people. This military-based economy was new and much more modern, but it co-existed alongside the old agricultural and industrial-age Soviet Union, still recovering from the collectivizations of Stalin and the destruction of the Second World War. The Soviet Union was becoming a divided society.

 

Arzamas-16 was a "secret" city about 250 miles east of Moscow, specializ­ing in nuclear weapons production. Scientists employed there on top priority work were paid well above the average. When goods were available, the citi­zens of the military-industrial complex had the wealth to purchase them. Billions of rubles were invested in the town. Arzamas-16 was an oasis of busy prosperity in a sea of stagnation, a widening "tale of two cities" inside the Soviet Union.

 

One spectacular special project was the building from 1957 of a brand­new science city alongside a lake created by a huge hydroelectric dam near Novosibirsk, the principal West Siberian industrial centre. Modelled on Western university campuses, the city was called Akademgorodok, "Academic Town." Here Soviet scientists could work on nuclear physics and pure mathe­matics, geology, chemistry, and hydrodynamics, cut off from daily struggles over bare necessities. Khrushchev himself oversaw the investment of 220 mil­lion rubles in the new town. Within a few years, Akademgorodok was a flour­ishing city of some sixty thousand inhabitants. One nuclear scientist wrote: "We felt like tsars in our enormously big (as we saw them) apartments.... While people in Novosibirsk stood for hours in line for butter, meat, and sometimes even for bread, we, the residents of Akademgorodok, were getting regular home deliveries of foodstuffs."

In this privileged, relatively open community, great scientific work was done for the first few years. However, slowly the weight of ideological and bureaucratic control pressed down on the scientists at Akademgorodok. Research institutes in the city acquired a reputation as centres of radicalism. Some scientists there even spoke out against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslo­Ivakia. Fewer young scientists were sent to join them; without renewed invest­ment the campus declined, and scientific innovation slowly dried up. As with many other Soviet initiatives, vast financial resources had gone into some­thing that became more a drain on resources than an engine of growth. Some Soviet citizens - dissidents, as they later came to be known - began to be crit­ical of the way their country's economy was managed.

 

Khrushchev was prepared to interpret communism far less narrowly and rigidly than his predecessors. Many liberals who supported his attack on Stalinism saw this as the beginning of a new era that would offer increasing civil, political, and artistic liberty. Khrushchev's liberal period came to a cli­max in the middle of 1962. Many political prisoners were released, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, reveal­ing to all the horrors of life in the Gulag. Poets recited their work at events that were almost political rallies.

 

But for most Soviet citizens, life passed slowly, without surprises. Some young people did try to keep up with Western fashion. In the early sixties, a few young men started to narrow the legs of their state-regulated trousers, and to comb their hair back in the style of Western rock 'n' roll groups. Western visitors to Russia found there was a demand for their denim blue jeans on the black market. With new portable radios, young people began to listen to music stations broadcasting in the West - although this was strictly forbidden. In Moscow, Elvis Presley was an instant hit, and Beatlemania gripped the young. Western music represented to Soviet youth all that seemed glamorous, open, and affluent about the West. Occasionally, record­ings were smuggled in. As there was no vinyl available, bootleg copies cut into plastic X-ray film were passed around, selling for one ruble - then a vast amount. All this helped generate an underground culture of the beatniki, espe­cially among the children of the elite, who were more exposed to outside influences. Beatnik culture began with listening to jazz, then graduated to rock 'n' roll, then pop, percolating through Soviet society. These hints of change were never fast enough to keep up with aspirations, especially those of the young. But hard-liners feared that the Communist system would be undermined by a generation pining for the trappings of consumer culture.

 

In late 1962 conservatives in the Communist Party persuaded Khrushchev that things were getting out of hand. The premier paid a visit to the Manezh Art Gallery and denounced non-repre­sentational avant-garde art as "anti-Soviet" and immoral. Art had to be intelligible to the people; it was supposed to inspire or en­courage them, or help them to relax. If a painting communicated only to a small number of people, then it failed as art. Khrushchev followed up his attack on artists with a campaign against liberal writers. Even the popular young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko agreed to collaborate with the authorities. In the West he was often presented as an outspoken radical, but inside the Soviet Union he kept his head down. Thousands of young people were warned to conform by Komsomol organizations or by the KGB - or risk falling afoul of the authorities.

 

The Thaw Generation

 

The young generation of Soviet poets who grew up during the 1950s, when Khrushchev unleashed his attack upon Stalin, was at the vanguard of the new liberalism in the 1960s. Huge - audiences would gather to hear them recite their verse on street corners, in school and factory auditoriums, at concert halls, and at sports stadiums. Their boldness and idealism exploded across the Soviet Union, electrifying those who heard them. One hundred thousand copies were printed of first editions of works of poetry - fifty times the typical print run for a similar book in the West. Even then, they were soon sold out and were passed from reader to reader. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, one of the best-known poets, toured extensively in the West as well, where he excited audiences with the raw energy of his verse. In the Soviet Union he was cheered at readings; ten thousand people listened adoringly as he read poems like "Babi Yar," a denunciation of Soviet anti-Semitism. Khrushchev personally authorized the publication of his poem "The Heirs of Stalin" in Pravda in 1962:

 

We removed

Him

from the mausoleum.

 

But how do we remove Stalin

from Stalin's heirs?

 

Some of his heirs

tend roses in retirement,

but secretly consider

their retirement temporary.

 

Others

from platforms rail against Stalin,

but,

at night,

yearn for the old days.

 

Khrushchev Becomes a Non-Person

 

In October 1964 the Presidium of the Communist Party decided to oust Khrushchev from his office, partly because of his brinkmanship in the Cuban missile crisis, whose results were resented as a humiliation for the Soviet Union; partly because of the failures of his over-ambitious agricultural poli­cies; partly because the leadership had grown impatient with his restless pace of reform. When his colleagues demanded his resignation Khrushchev was at first furious, but he was persuaded to go quietly. In return he was allowed to keep his apartment in the Lenin Hills, his dacha, and his car. Pravda an­nounced that he had resigned because of "advanced age and poor health." Nikita Khrushchev effectively became a non-person, never referred to again until his death, when he was described simply as an "honorary pensioner."

 

In the smoothest transition since the revolution, the new leadership determined to keep a tighter grip on the reins of power. Officials toured the country and explained to party activists in closed meetings why the decision to remove Khrushchev had been taken. Leonid Brezhnev was appointed first secretary and Aleksei Kosygin chairman of the Council of Ministers. Nikolai Podgorny became president. After the hectic years of de-Stalinization and reform, they wanted to preside over an era of stability. Two years after the Kremlin coup, Yuri Andropov became head of the KGB. Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgorny, and Andropov would rule the USSR for almost a generation.

 

The Soviet economy was cracking under the strains placed on it by the insatiable demands of the Cold War. The arms race helped strengthen the American economy; but it fatally weakened that of the Soviets, which suf­fered from chronic low productivity and an inability to meet the demand for even basic consumer goods. While the Cold War helped make America rich, it helped keep the Soviet people poor.

 

Prague Spring

 

Meanwhile, in parts of the Eastern bloc there was new thinking and concern about declining growth rates and the failure to keep up with Western levels of consumer progress. In Poland agricultural output dropped year after year; food shortages plagued the country. The economy stagnated. The regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka, so rapturously welcomed as saviour of the nation in October 1956, was growing steadily more oppressive. Intellectuals spoke out against the government, and some were imprisoned as a consequence. In March 1968 a student demonstration was brutally broken up by the police, and several days of street rioting in Warsaw followed. Gomulka had lost nearly all support in the country, but Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership stood by him. Welcomed by Poles in 1956 because he declined to submit to the Soviets, Gomulka now was able to survive in power only because the Soviets backed him. But the crises of 1968 passed in Poland; it would be two more years before food shortages and continual price increases finally brought the Gomulka regime to an end.

 

In Czechoslovakia there was also concern about the economy's failure to grow; in 1962-1963 national income actually fell. In 1966 the government of Antonin Novotny took the first steps towards decentralizing the economy, giving greater power to local managers and greater priority to the production of consumer goods. Profits rather than quotas were made the measure of per­formance, a practice dubbed "market socialism." These reforms were too slow. Against a backdrop of student revolts, Alexander Dubcek was appointed party chairman in January 1968. No fiery revolutionary, he was boss of the Slovak party machine and a committed party loyalist. Dubcek promised the "widest possible democratization of the entire socio-politico system," wanting to bring communism up to date. His appointment speeded change, as he widened the debate about reform to those outside the party. Censorship was eased. Amidst unprecedented debate in the press and on television, the party in April approved an Action Programme. Most newspapers published "The Two Thousand Words" manifesto in June, when writers and intellectuals advocated democratic reforms within a broad socialist context. Dubdek's reforms became known as "socialism with a human face."

 

Over the months, Moscow, and other Warsaw Pact capitals, became increasingly agitated by the so-called Prague Spring. They believed that eco­nomic reform would inevitably test the party bureaucracy's ability to main­tain control, and would ultimately undermine its monopoly of power. They feared that fervent debate about economic objectives would be contagious. Indeed, in Poland demonstrators did call for a "Polish Dubcek." Gomulka in Poland and Walter Ulbricht in East Germany led the hard line against reforms in Czechoslovakia. Dubcek continued to proclaim his commitment to the one­party system and his loyalty to the Warsaw Pact, but other Communist states grew more and more impatient.

 

Moscow despaired over the Prague reforms. Inside the Kremlin it was feared that Dubdek's government would dismantle the internal security appa­ratus and evict the KGB from the country. The Soviet military was also wor­ried about its agreements with Czechoslovakia. In the early 1960s the Soviet Union had agreed terms with its Warsaw Pact allies for stationing nuclear warheads in East Europe. Under these terms the weapons would remain under strict Soviet military control. The USSR had large numbers of troops stationed in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany but no permanent garrison in Czechoslovakia. When Prague went soft on communism through 1968, the Soviets delayed the deployment of nuclear warheads there, fearing they could not maintain tight control over them. This was seen in Moscow as a weak link in the Warsaw Pact defensive frontier.

 

In July, Brezhnev met the leaders of his East European allies in Warsaw. They shared their concerns over events in Prague. A few days later Brezhnev, Kosygin, and the senior Soviet leadership met with Dubcek, and made new demands on him to re-impose censorship and tighten control over the media. An agreement at Bratislava appeared to promise a reconciliation between Prague and Moscow, but when Yugoslavia's Tito was given an enthusiastic reception in Czechoslovakia it seemed yet again that Dubdek was steering the country down its own independent road. The Soviet Politburo went into a three-day session on 15 August to consider what action to take. When Brezhnev spoke to Dub&k on the telephone, he shouted at him that the whole Communist system in the Eastern bloc could crumble because of what was happening in Prague.

 

Late in the night of 20 August 1968, Soviet paratroopers seized control of Prague airport. Over the next few hours, half a million Warsaw Pact troops crossed the borders into Czechoslovakia. In marked contrast to events in Hungary twelve years earlier, the government told the Czech and Slovak peo­ples to stay calm and not to resist. There were, however, still pockets of resis­tance, one led by the young playwright Vaclav Havel. But Soviet tanks moved against unarmed civilians, and again demonstrated how little prepared the USSR was to allow change, or national autonomy within the Warsaw Pact.

 

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Did the Czechoslovaks Invite the Russians In?

 

There have long been rumours that key Czechoslovak party officials invited the Soviets to invade their country to re-impose hard-line law and order. The key documents, locked in a top secret folder in the Moscow Communist Party archives, have only recently been made available. They prove that this was indeed the case. Now it is known that on 3 August the anti-reformist Slovak Communist Party chief Vasil Bilak wrote to Brezhnev a direct letter of invitation "to use all means at your disposal," including military force, to "prevent the imminent threat of counter-revolu­tion." Bilak warned that "the very

existence of socialism in our country is in danger." Rather than risk sending the letter to Brezhnev directly, he passed it to a Soviet intermediary n a men's lavatory. When the Soviet Politburo began a three-day meeting to review options in Czechoslovakia, Bilak again dispatched a message to Brezhnev, on 17 August, not only encouraging the Soviets to act quickly and decisively, but also offering to form an alternative government that would oust Dubcek and seize control in Prague when Warsaw Pact troops arrived. It is doubtful that this was a decisive factor in the Soviet decision to invade, but it must havee boosted the pro-military faction in the Kremlin, and it helped provide a pretext for the Soviets to claim that they were acting on behalf of a legitimate alternative government. In fact, the anti-reformists were entirely unable to deliver a government, and the Soviet Union ended up having to reinstate Dubcek's, which survived for several months.

 

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The West spoke out but did not - and, without risking nuclear confrontation, could not - intervene. Dubdek and the other leaders were arrested, taken to Moscow, and forced to accept the end of Czech moves to democracy. Over the next year hard-line Czechoslovak officials replaced their reformist predecessors at all levels. An experiment in political pluralism had come to an abrupt end. The orthodoxy of one-party rule was restored. Gustav Husak, obedient to central authority in Moscow, replaced Dubdek as party secretary in April 1969. In the following year, Dub6ek was expelled from the party. The people of Czechoslovakia, eager for freedom, were buried alive.

 

Events in the mid-1960s blurred the image of the two superpowers in the Cold War. It was hard to see the United States as freedom's champion when race riots protested inequalities, and police clubbed and tear-gassed anti-war protesters outside the hotel where the Democratic leadership was gathering. On the other hand, the failure of the Communist system to feed the Soviet peo­ple without grain from the United States, and the crushing of the Prague Spring with tanks, tarnished a government that claimed to rule on the peo­ple's behalf. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia ended for decades a possi­ble third way in East Europe, and the possibility of liberal reform within the Communist bloc.

 

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Literature

 

The Russian people have always been voracious readers, but during the Cold War, what they were allowed to read was strictly controlled. Classic Russian texts (except Dostoevsky, who was thought too pessimistic) and edifying socialist-realist novels like those of Maxim Gorky (Mother) and Mikhail Sholokhov (And Quiet Flows the Don) were printed in huge numbers.

 

When Stalin died in 1953, the flood­gates seemed to open. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote The Thaw in 1954, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 'n 1962, which Khrushchev personally authorized as part of his own fight against Stalin's political legacy. But there were limits to the new freedoms; Boris Pasternak could not publish his 1957 novel, Dr. Zhivago,' in the USSR, so he allowed its unau­thorized publication abroad. When he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958, Pasternak was told that he could go to Stockholm to collect his prize, but he would not be allowed back. He never made the trip.

 

More works were smuggled out of the country; those of Abraham Tertz (in real life Andrei Sinyavsky) and Nikolai Arzhak (Yuli Daniel) were among the earliest. When the two writers were put on trial in 1966 - Sinyavsky for, among other things, having written The Trial Begins in 1960 and sent to labour camps, the international outcry was enormous.

 

A few Russians too found the courage to protest (and were arrested themselves). Solzhenitsyn, who had spent eight years in labour camps after the Second World War, published The First Circle and Cancer Ward in the West in 1968 and 1969 to great acclaim. He was not sent to a labour camp this time, but in 1974, after the KGB discovered his manuscript for The Gulag Archipelago and he allowed its publication in the West, he was stripped of Soviet citizenship and exiled.

 

Writers increasingly resorted to samizdat ("self-publishing," as distinct from gosizdat "state-publishing"). This had begun in the 1950s, when banned poetry, memoirs of Stalin's vic­tims, and forbidden translations were first distributed as typescripts passed from hand to hand.

 

Not until Gorbachev came to power in 1985 were restrictions on what Russians could read gradually lifted.

 

The United States has never had an official censor, but this did not mean that books could not be banned during the Cold War. School boards and local libraries were keen to root out un-American beliefs and ideas, and this meant that the work of "subversive" writers like Howard Fast, Ring Lardner, Jr., Dalton Trumbo, and even Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, disappeared from the shelves. The United States Information Service, whose purpose was to fly freedom's flag, refused to stock Dashiell Hammett's detective stories. But repression was never co-ordinated, and even when hatred and fear of the USSR was at its most intense in the late 1940s and 1950s, books by left-wing authors could always be found somewhere. But whereas the works of Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo were virtually unobtainable outside radical bookshops, the novels of John le Carre, Ian Fleming, and Frederick Forsyth - spy thrillers with Cold War backgrounds in which the good guys were from the West and the bad guys from the East - sold in the millions. Paranoid fantasies, like Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate of 1959, did well too.

 

Novels sympathetic to the Soviets were almost unheard of, but overtly anti-collectivist political works like George Orwell's brilliant satire 1984, written in 1948, were immensely popular. Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, a cult work first published in 1943,

was a paean of praise to those virtues of self-reliance and rugged individual­ism that Americans thought they pos­sessed in abundance and that, in their eyes, the Soviet Union was devoid of.

 

Novels with political events in the foreground were not very popular, apart from Orwell's dystopian visions. But American left-wing writers staged their own intramural vendettas. Who had been a Communist in the 1930s and 1940s, and why had he or she left the party? The playwright Lillian Hellman was blacklisted when she refused to co-operate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. She did so partly on-the recommendation of her,lover, novelist Hammett, who had been a Communist in the 1930s; his best known works were The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. The lengthy quarrel that ensued involved many prominent American liberals - Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson, John Hersey - who appeared in each other's score-settling novels and articles.

 

By the 1960s the witch-hunt was pretty much over. Howard Fast's Spartacus was back on the shelves, and Hellman's plays were revived to packed houses.

           

In the 1980s, as Americans rearmed under the Reagan presidency, a series of best-sellers emphasized how crafty the Russian menace was. Martin Cruz Smith wrote Gorky Park in 1981. Frederick Forsyth's 1984 novel The Fourth Protocol was read not once but twice by Margaret Thatcher. Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October was also published in 1984; it sold nearly 6 million copies and was endorsed by Ronald Reagan himself.

 

Paradoxically, much Western Cold War literature was not even American: Fleming, Le Carre, Forsyth, and Orwell were all British. Nevil Shute, who in 1957 wrote the first of the apocalyptic nuclear-war novels, On the Beach, was an Englishman who emigrated to Australia.

 

In the USSR's client states dissident authors - whether they were Czechs like the novelist Milan Kundera and the playwright Vaclav Havel, or East Germans like Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym, or Poles like Czeslaw Milosz, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize - played cat-and-mouse games with officialdom. But after Stalin's death these younger writers risked prison, house arrest, or exile rather than the Gulag if they overstepped the mark. There was one promi­nent exception to the pattern of state harassment: the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who went to live in East Germany after the Second World War. Brecht had an Austrian passport and the regime dared not touch him.

 

Blood and terror in the East, fear and loathing in the West. The Cold War was an uneasy time for writers.

 

-         Jerome Kuehl

 

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