Fifties (33 page)

Week by week the entire nation watched with fascination as Lucy grew larger, the real-life event paralleling the television script. She was allowed to have morning sickness on the air as she had it in real life. Finally, at exactly the time that she was due to deliver, the show (entitled “Lucy Goes to the Hospital”) called for her to go to the hospital. Again the show was filled with misunderstandings and slapstick. Lucy is calm as she waits for the big moment, but Desi is an emotional wreck. One scene shows them arriving at the hospital with Lucy pushing Desi in a wheelchair. Desi Arnaz, Jr., was born on January 19, 1953—right on schedule. By some estimates, 68 percent of the television sets in the country were tuned to the show, which meant that 44 million people saw it. That was twice the number who watched the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower the next day, a President who was uneasy with television but who presided over the years in which it became an ever more dominant force in American life.

During its first years the
I Love Lucy
show, like most of the early shows, had an urban setting; but a few years down the line, as their ratings slipped a bit, Lucy and Desi were forced to follow much of their audience to the suburbs. How, otherwise, could the housewives of America sympathize with Lucy? Fred and Ethel with them, they moved to Westport, Connecticut.

Their real lives were not quite so idyllic as their television existence. It was always a difficult relationship: Desi was a drinker and a womanizer. “If I stayed mad at every woman that Desi had an affair with, I’d have been angry with half of the nicest girls in Hollywood,” Lucy once said. As Desi Arnaz, Jr., the true child of television, once noted, “I learned pretty early to relate to
I Love Lucy
as a television show and to my parents as actors on it.... There wasn’t much relationship between what I saw on TV and what was really going on at home. Those were difficult years—all those funny things happening on television each week to people who looked like my parents, then the same people agonizing through some terrible, unhappy times at home, and each of them trying to convince my sister and me separately that the other was in the wrong.”

Television was a fickle instrument, as Fred Allen had found out. It could grant instant fame to a person or popularity to a fad and just as quickly withdraw that fame or popularity. This was a lesson that all kinds of comics, actors, and politicians were just beginning to learn the hard way. The great danger of this new medium, which favored the new at the expense of the old, was overexposure.

Television changed the relationship of the nation with its politicians: Where once the President had been a distant figure few Americans had ever seen and whose voice, even during the radio era, was rarely heard, television brought him into the home. At such close range there was a danger the President would lose the illusion of heroic proportions that distance created. At the same time, television brought an immediacy to events and demanded, as well, that they entertain. Slowly, as the power of television journalism grew, the national agenda would begin to respond to such changes. It was the comedians who first came to understand the darker side of television—such men as Fred Allen, Milton Berle, and, eventually, Allen’s long-running radio adversary, Jack Benny. Like Berle, Benny was first a beneficiary of the new medium: His success was considerable, and he had a fifteen-year run, beginning in 1950. But as he began to be pushed aside by other shows, he wrote an astute analysis not only of his own experience but that of many other entertainers, politicians, and athletes as well: “By my second year in television I saw the camera was a man-eating monster. It gave a performer a close-up exposure that week after week threatened his existence as an interesting entertainer. I don’t care who you are. Finally you’ll get on people’s nerves if they get too much of you. I don’t care how wonderful
or handsome or brilliant or charming you are—if the public gets too much of you, they’ll be bored. Given that kind of magnification combined with intimacy that’s characteristic of television, the essence of a comedian’s art becomes inevitably stale. The audience gets to know you inside and outside. Your tone of voice, your gestures, and your little tricks, the rhythm of your delivery, your way of reacting to another performer’s moves, your facial mannerisms—all of these things, so exciting to an audience when you are a novelty, soon become tedious and flat.” In radio, he said, people had loved him in a different way. “I came at them gently—quietly, through their ears. I suggested subtle images to them, picture jokes. I was like a friendly uncle, a slightly eccentric, mad uncle—now I became something too much. The television camera is like a magnifying glass and you can’t enjoy looking at anything blown up for too long.”

SIXTEEN

A
FTER HIS RETURN, GENERAL
MacArthur waited for political lightning to strike. It never did. The polls reflected both his personal triumph and the wariness of the American people toward his policies: 54 percent of those polled by Gallup favored MacArthur’s more aggressive tactics against China, but only 30 percent favored them if they meant escalating the war. Even as the congressional cheers for MacArthur were continuing, Senator Robert Kerr went on the floor of the Senate and suggested that the general and his Republican supporters were more than a little hypocritical. Let them, he said, be honest about it and call for a declaration of war with China and open warfare with the Chinese as well. “If they do not,” he said, “their support of MacArthur is a mockery.” His challenge was answered with silence. The Senate hearings that followed MacArthur’s speech had been sobering, particularly
when Omar Bradley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had declared that MacArthur’s politics “would involve us in the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong enemy.” That one sentence had cut to the heart of the argument.

MacArthur’s political decline was quick indeed. Part of it was due to the nation’s wariness of men on horseback: It might cheer them, but it hesitated to vote for them. If it must choose a general for civilian office, then it preferred the quieter, more modest, more diplomatic Eisenhower. For a short time the crowds remained big, and MacArthur spoke all over the country. But since he did it still wearing his uniform, there was something unsettling about his attacks on the President of the United States. Gradually, his crowds grew smaller and less enthusiastic; his supporters diminished to a coterie of powerful, wealthy, conservative isolationists. His attempt at the Republican nomination was surprisingly leaden. Robert Taft was the true choice of the grass-roots conservatives. MacArthur’s last great chance came when he keynoted the Republican convention in 1952; his most ardent admirers hoped that he would ignite that convention with a speech similar to the one he had given before Congress. But it was not a success. He seemed uncomfortable trying to thread his way through the minefield of a divided Republican party. His audience shared his lack of enthusiasm, and many delegates in the audience left their seats to gossip with each other. The electricity was gone. To his own surprise, he did just what he had promised—he faded away. As the excitement he’d bottled the year before died, he was left with a job as chairman of the board of Remington Rand. A cartoon in
The New Yorker
captured the banality of his fall: It pictured the general’s office at Rand, and hanging on the doorknob was a sign that said: “Out to lunch. I shall return.”

Truman’s firing of MacArthur had a profound effect on the 1952 presidential race, wounding the President even more than it had the general. It also advanced the political chances of Dwight Eisenhower. The country was not in the mood to return to isolationism. It wanted to be reassured, not threatened. Who better to do that than a general who was a hero and an internationalist and who had successfully made the transition to being a civilian. Eisenhower was MacArthur’s sworn enemy. As William Manchester wrote, MacArthur’s feelings toward Ike were very much like those of Cain toward Abel. Eisenhower had made the supreme mistake of being a MacArthur aide who had gone on to surpass his boss. MacArthur still, on occasion, referred to Ike as “the best clerk I ever had.” It was the final irony that Douglas MacArthur’s desperate desire for the White
House eased the way there for Dwight Eisenhower, who did not seem to want it at all.

Yet by all rights the 1952 Republican nomination belonged to Robert Taft, and if Eisenhower was the only man who could stop him, no one, in late 1951, knew whether he was even a Republican, let alone a politician. Taft had waited twelve years and had been exceptionally loyal to his party. But his strengths were also his weaknesses. He appealed to a narrow slice of the electorate, and it was said that he could not win a national election. Before Taft announced, he wrote down the pros and cons. Perhaps, he noted, he was a little old and his health was not quite as good as it should be. But on the pro side, he wrote down, “Opportunity to save liberty in U.S.”

The Easterners might have captured the previous three nominations in a row, but Bob Taft believed in his heart that he was closer to what the average Republican believed in than Tom Dewey—twice the candidate, twice defeated—was. But Taft was a prisoner of his own past and had little appeal to younger voters, many of them veterans of World War Two. That year, Herblock, the
Washington Post
cartoonist, caught him in an image he seemed unable to escape, despite his considerable intelligence. It was a cartoon of a dinosaur bearing Taft’s face, telling Uncle Sam, “Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody is a dinosaur anymore.”

Taft was the last major isolationist of American politics, and his political base was rooted in an America of the past—pre-war, pre-superpower. John Franklin Carter, a friend of Dewey’s, wrote of him: “I believe he would make a splendid President for a stable prosperous country in an orderly world—say, in 1925. I suspect, however, that as has happened to many other able and patriotic men, his political serviceability has been repealed by World War II and the rise of the Third International [that is, Joseph Stalin].”

Taft was highly intelligent, commanding the respect of even those who disagreed with him completely. Yet he made no effort to charm or win over his colleagues; he was a man apart, almost rude, certainly standoffish. By all rights his personal manner should have cost him dearly in the Senate, which was one of the great old-boys’ clubs of all time. By its standards Taft was almost prissy. But even as partisan a figure as Harry Truman thought him “a high-class man ... honest, intelligent and extremely capable ...”

He was the scion of a great political family—the Tafts of Ohio—that included a solicitor general, a chief justice of the Supreme Court, and a President of the United States. Rooted as it was in the Midwest,
the family valued responsibility and obligation over wealth. (Taft’s uncle Alphonso had made a brief tour of New York in the previous century as a young man and had been appalled by the selfishness and greed he found there, and the fact that in New York, “money is the all and all.”)

Robert had gone off to prep school—the Taft School, of course, run by Uncle Horace, his father’s brother. He finished first in his class and then went to Yale, the preferred choice of both the Taft School and the Taft family—of his graduating class of twenty-five at Taft, twenty-one members went on to Yale. He was first in his class at Yale, too. His matriculation at Harvard Law caused something of a stir, because he was the son of the President. On the first day he was forced to answer reporters who showed up at his residence: “I’m here to study, I do not intend to go into athletics or to be a social lion, or to do missionary work, or to be interviewed.” Even then, noted his biographer, James Patterson, tact was not his forte. A classmate noted: “Have I mentioned anything of the Taft boy? ... He is very quiet, appears not to be even the slightest swell headed, yet seems not to care at all what people think or don’t think, but does exactly as he pleases. He gives the appearance of a person with lofty ideals, and the courage of his convictions and to spare. He dresses in very plain and sober clothes, which strike me as somewhat out of date ...”

At Harvard Law he was again first in his class, and after graduation he returned to Ohio, where he ran for the legislature and won. He married, typically, not merely within his class but within his remarkably circumscribed world: Martha Bowers—bright, engaging, highly political—was the daughter of a Yale classmate of Will Taft, who had served as the elder Taft’s solicitor general.

In those early days everything he did seemed right. Because his name was so powerful in the Midwest and particularly in Ohio, he never needed to court popularity in the traditional political sense. His skill with voters, especially voters who did not already agree with him, was limited. He was stiff, shy rather than arrogant. His speeches were intelligent but dry. Small courtesies seemed beyond him. He might spend several hours with a Capitol Hill reporter one day and two weeks later run into him without giving the slightest sign that they had ever met before.

The Robert Taft who finally showed up as a senator in Washington in 1938 was quite possibly the most cerebral politician of his era. His views were not likely to be influenced by the results of polls and were, by contemporary standards, libertarian. He hated the draft, not merely because he saw it as an escalating step toward
militarism but because he believed it limited a young man’s freedom of choice. He opposed federal aid to education, not because he did not value education but because he thought it yet another intrusion of the federal government into the rights of the states.

As the shadows of war in Europe began to fall on American politics, his reservations grew. “Modern war,” he said, opposing any escalation which would bring us into the Second World War, “has none of the glamour which we were taught to associate with war in our childhood. It is nothing but horror and mechanical destruction. It leaves the victor as exhausted as the vanquished.” He even opposed Lend Lease aid to England during England’s darkest hour. His lack of concern for traditional allies in Europe shocked even his family. “One of the best fellows in the world,” Uncle Horace Taft said of him, “but dead wrong on our foreign policy.” The pressure on him to change, to become more internationalist, was immense. One of his few friends in the press corps, Turner Catledge of
The New York Times,
saw him on a train in 1940, his glasses slipped halfway down his face, repeating to himself, “I’m just not going to do it ...”