G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Sputnik, 50 Years Later: The Launch of Techno-Power
By Norman Solomon
Created Oct 8 2007 - 8:45am
This is an excerpt from Norman Solomon's new book "Made Love, Got War: Close
Encounters with America's Warfare State [1]."
A story could start almost anywhere. This one begins at a moment startled by
a rocket.
In the autumn of 1957, America was not at war ... or at peace. The threat of
nuclear annihilation shadowed every day, flickering with visions of the
apocalyptic. In classrooms, "duck and cover" drills were part of the
curricula. Underneath any Norman Rockwell painting, the grim reaper had
attained the power of an ultimate monster.
Dwight Eisenhower was most of the way through his fifth year in the White
House. He liked to speak reassuring words of patriotic faith, with
presidential statements like: "America is the greatest force that God has
ever allowed to exist on His footstool." Such pronouncements drew a sharp
distinction between the United States and the Godless Communist foe.
But on October 4, 1957, the Kremlin announced the launch of Sputnik, the
world's first satellite. God was supposed to be on America's side, yet the
Soviet atheists had gotten to the heavens before us. Suddenly the eagle of
liberty could not fly nearly so high.
Sputnik was instantly fascinating and alarming. The American press swooned
at the scientific vistas and shuddered at the military implications. Under
the headline "Red Moon Over the U.S.," Time quickly explained that "a new
era in history had begun, opening a bright new chapter in mankind's conquest
of the natural environment and a grim new chapter in the cold war." The
newsmagazine was glum about the space rivalry: "The U.S. had lost its lead
because, in spreading its resources too thin, the nation had skimped too
much on military research and development."
The White House tried to project calm; Eisenhower said the satellite "does
not raise my apprehension, not one iota." But many on the political spectrum
heard Sputnik's radio pulse as an ominous taunt.
A heroine of the Republican right, Clare Boothe Luce, said the satellite's
beeping was an "outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions
that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our material
superiority." Newspaper readers learned that Stuart Symington, a Democratic
senator who'd been the first secretary of the air force, "said the Russians
will be able to launch mass attacks against the United States with
intercontinental ballistic missiles within two or three years."
A New York Times article matter-of-factly referred to "the mild panic that
has seized most of the nation since Russia's sputnik was launched two weeks
ago." In another story, looking forward, Times science reporter William L.
Laurence called for bigger pots of gold at the end of scientific rainbows:
"In a free society such as ours it is not possible Oto channel human
efforts' without the individual's consent and wholehearted willingness. To
attract able and promising young men and women into the fields of science
and engineering it is necessary first to offer them better inducements than
are presently offered."
At last, in early February 1958, an American satellite -- the thirty-pound
Explorer -- went into orbit. What had succeeded in powering it into space
was a military rocket, developed by a U.S. Army research team. The head of
that team, the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, was boosting the
red-white-and-blue after the fall of his ex-employer, the Third Reich. In
March 1958 he publicly warned that the U.S. space program was a few years
behind the Russians.
------------------------------
Soon after dusk, while turning a skate key or playing with a hula hoop,
children might look up to see if they could spot the bright light of a
satellite arching across the sky. But they could not see the fallout from
nuclear bomb tests, underway for a dozen years by 1958. The conventional
wisdom, reinforced by the press, downplayed fears while trusting the
authorities; basic judgments about the latest weapons programs were to be
left to the political leaders and their designated experts.
On the weekly prime-time Walt Disney television show, an animated fairy with
a magic wand urged youngsters to drink three glasses of milk each day. But
airborne strontium-90 from nuclear tests was falling on pastures all over,
migrating to cows and then to the milk supply and, finally, to people's
bones. Radioactive isotopes from fallout were becoming inseparable from the
human diet.
Young people -- dubbed "baby boomers," a phrase that both dramatized and
trivialized them -- were especially vulnerable to strontium-90 as their
fast-growing bones absorbed the radioactive isotope along with calcium. The
children who did as they were told by drinking plenty of milk ended up
heightening the risks -- not unlike their parents, who were essentially told
to accept the bomb fallout without complaint.
Under the snappy rubric of "the nuclear age," the white-coated and loyal
American scientist stood as an icon, revered as surely as the scientists of
the enemy were assumed to be pernicious. And yet the mutual fallout,
infiltrating dairy farms and mothers' breast milk and the bones of children,
was a type of subversion that never preoccupied J. Edgar Hoover.
The more that work by expert scientists endangered us, the more we were
informed that we needed those scientists to save us. Who better to protect
Americans from the hazards of the nuclear industry and the terrifying
potential of nuclear weapons than the best scientific minds serving the
industry and developing the weapons?
In June 1957 -- the same month Nobel Prize^winning chemist Linus Pauling
published an article estimating that ten thousand cases of leukemia had
already occurred due to U.S. and Soviet nuclear testing -- President
Eisenhower proclaimed that the American detonations would result in nuclear
warheads with much less radioactivity. Ike said that "we have reduced
fallout from bombs by nine-tenths," and he pledged that the Nevada
explosions would continue in order to "see how clean we can make them." The
president spoke just after meeting with Edward Teller and other high-powered
physicists. Eisenhower assured the country that the scientists and the U.S.
nuclear test operations were working on the public's behalf. "They say:
OGive us four or five more years to test each step of our development and we
will produce an absolutely clean bomb.'"
But sheer atomic fantasy, however convenient, was wearing thin. Many
scientists actually opposed the aboveground nuclear blasts. Relying on
dissenters with a range of technical expertise, Democratic nominee Adlai
Stevenson had made an issue of fallout in the 1956 presidential campaign.
During 1957 -- a year when the U.S. government set off thirty-two nuclear
bombs over southern Nevada and the Pacific -- Pauling spearheaded a global
petition drive against nuclear testing; by January 1958 more than eleven
thousand scientists in fifty countries had signed.
Clearly, the views and activities of scientists ran the gamut. But
Washington was pumping billions of tax dollars into massive vehicles for
scientific research. These huge federal outlays were imposing military
priorities on American scientists without any need for a blatant government
decree.
------------------------------
What was being suppressed might suddenly pop up like some kind of
jack-in-the-box. Righteous pressure against disruptive or "un-American"
threats was internal and also global, with a foreign policy based on
containment. Control of space, inner and outer, was pivotal. What could not
be controlled was liable to be condemned.
The '50s and early '60s are now commonly derided as unbearably rigid, but
much in the era was new and stylish at the time. Suburbs boomed along with
babies. Modern household gadgets and snazzier cars appeared with great
commercial fanfare while millions of families, with a leg up from the GI
Bill, climbed into some part of the vaguely defined middle class. The fresh
and exciting technology called television did much to turn suburbia into the
stuff of white-bread legends -- with scant use for the less-sightly
difficulties of the near-poor and destitute living in ghettos or rural areas
where the TV lights didn't shine.
On the surface, most kids lived in a placid time, while small screens showed
entertaining images of sanitized life. One among many archetypes came from
Betty Crocker cake-mix commercials, which were all over the tube; the
close-ups of the icing could seem remarkable, even in black and white.
Little girls who had toy ovens with little cake-mix boxes could make
miniature layer cakes.
Every weekday from 1955 to 1965 the humdrum pathos of women known as
housewives could be seen on Queen for a Day. The climax of each episode came
as one of the competitors, often sobbing, stood with a magnificent bouquet
of roses suddenly in her arms, overcome with joy. Splendid gifts of
brand-new refrigerators and other consumer products, maybe even mink stoles,
would elevate bleak lives into a stratosphere that America truly had to
offer. The show pitted women's sufferings against each other; victory would
be the just reward for the best, which was to say the worst, predicament.
The final verdict came in the form of applause from the studio audience,
measured by an on-screen meter that jumped with the decibels of apparent
empathy and commiseration, one winner per program. Solutions were
individual. Queen for a Day was a nationally televised ritual of charity,
providing selective testimony to the goodness of society. Virtuous grief, if
heartrending enough, could summon prizes, and the ecstatic weeping of a
crowned recipient was vicarious pleasure for viewers across the country, who
could see clearly America's bounty and generosity.
That televised spectacle was not entirely fathomable to the baby-boom
generation, which found more instructive role-modeling from such media fare
as The Adventures of Spin and Marty and Annette Funicello and other aspects
of the Mickey Mouse Club show -- far more profoundly prescriptive than
descriptive. By example and inference, we learned how kids were supposed to
be, and our being more that way made the media images seem more natural and
realistic. It was a spiral of self-mystification, with the authoritative
versions of childhood green-lighted by network executives, producers, and
sponsors. Likewise with the sitcoms, which drew kids into a Potemkin refuge
from whatever home life they experienced on the near side of the TV screen.
Dad was apt to be emotionally aloof in real life, but on television the
daddies were endearingly quirky, occasionally stern, essentially lovable,
and even mildly loving. Despite the canned laugh tracks, for kids this could
be very serious -- a substitute world with obvious advantages over the
starker one around them. The chances of their parents measuring up to the
moms and dads on Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best were remote. As
were, often, the real parents. Or at least they seemed real. Sometimes.
Father Knows Best aired on network television for almost ten years. The
first episodes gained little momentum in 1954, but within a couple of years
the show was one of the nation's leading prime-time psychodramas. It gave
off warmth that simulated intimacy; for children at a huge demographic
bulge, maybe no TV program was more influential as a family prototype.
But seventeen years after the shooting stopped, the actor who had played
Bud, the only son on Father Knows Best, expressed remorse. "I'm ashamed I
had any part of it," Billy Gray said. "People felt warmly about the show and
that show did everybody a disservice." Gray had come to see the program as
deceptive. "I felt that the show purported to be real life, and it wasn't. I
regret that it was ever presented as a model to live by." And he added: "I
think we were all well motivated but what we did was run a hoax. We weren't
trying to, but that is what it was. Just a hoax."
-----------------------------
I went to the John Glenn parade in downtown Washington on February 26, 1962,
a week after he'd become the first American to circle the globe in a space
capsule. Glenn was a certified hero, and my school deemed the parade a valid
excuse for an absence. To me, a fifth grader, that seemed like a good deal
even when the weather turned out to be cold and rainy.
For the new and dazzling space age, America's astronauts served as valiant
explorers who added to the elan of the Camelot mythos around the
presidential family. The Kennedys were sexy, exciting, modern aristocrats
who relied on deft wordsmiths to produce throbbing eloquent speeches about
freedom and democracy. The bearing was American regal, melding the appeal of
refined nobility and touch football. The media image was damn-near
storybook. Few Americans, and very few young people of the era, were aware
of the actual roles of JFK's vaunted new "special forces" dispatched to the
Third World, where -- below the media radar -- they targeted labor-union
organizers and other assorted foes of U.S.-backed oligarchies.
But a confrontation with the Soviet Union materialized that could not be
ignored. Eight months after the Glenn parade, in tandem with Nikita
Khrushchev, the president dragged the world to a nuclear precipice. In late
October 1962, Kennedy went on national television and denounced "the Soviet
military buildup on the island of Cuba," asserting that "a series of
offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island."
Speaking from the White House, the president said: "We will not prematurely
or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the
fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth -- but neither will we shrink
from that risk at any time it must be faced."
Early in the next autumn, President Kennedy signed the Limited Test Ban
Treaty, which sent nuclear detonations underground. The treaty was an
important public health measure against radioactive fallout. Meanwhile, the
banishment of mushroom clouds made superpower preparations for blowing up
the world less visible. The new limits did nothing to interfere with further
development of nuclear arsenals.
Kennedy liked to talk about vigor, and he epitomized it. Younger than
Eisenhower by a full generation, witty, with a suave wife and two adorable
kids, he was leading the way to open vistas. Store windows near Pennsylvania
Avenue displayed souvenir plates and other Washington knickknacks that
depicted the First Family -- standard tourist paraphernalia, yet with a lot
more pizzazz than what Dwight and Mamie had generated.
A few years after the Glenn parade, when I passed the same storefront
windows along blocks just east of the White House, the JFK glamour had gone
dusty, as if suspended in time, facing backward. I thought of a scene from
Great Expectations. The Kennedy era already seemed like the room where Miss
Havisham's wedding cake had turned to ghastly cobwebs; in Dickens' words,
"as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all
stopped together."
The clocks all seemed to stop together on the afternoon of November 22,
1963. But after the assassination, the gist of the reputed
best-and-brightest remained in top Cabinet positions. The distance from
Dallas to the Gulf of Tonkin was scarcely eight months as the calendar flew.
And soon America's awesome scientific capabilities were trained on a country
where guerrilla fighters walked on the soles of sandals cut from old rubber
tires.
Growing up in a mass-marketed culture of hoax, the baby-boom generation came
of age in a warfare state. From Vietnam to Iraq, that state was to wield its
technological power with crazed dedication to massive violence.
_______
About author Norman Solomon's book "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters
with America's Warfare State" will be published in early fall. The foreword
is by Daniel Ellsberg. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com
[2]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Norman Solomon
Created Oct 8 2007 - 8:45am
This is an excerpt from Norman Solomon's new book "Made Love, Got War: Close
Encounters with America's Warfare State [1]."
A story could start almost anywhere. This one begins at a moment startled by
a rocket.
In the autumn of 1957, America was not at war ... or at peace. The threat of
nuclear annihilation shadowed every day, flickering with visions of the
apocalyptic. In classrooms, "duck and cover" drills were part of the
curricula. Underneath any Norman Rockwell painting, the grim reaper had
attained the power of an ultimate monster.
Dwight Eisenhower was most of the way through his fifth year in the White
House. He liked to speak reassuring words of patriotic faith, with
presidential statements like: "America is the greatest force that God has
ever allowed to exist on His footstool." Such pronouncements drew a sharp
distinction between the United States and the Godless Communist foe.
But on October 4, 1957, the Kremlin announced the launch of Sputnik, the
world's first satellite. God was supposed to be on America's side, yet the
Soviet atheists had gotten to the heavens before us. Suddenly the eagle of
liberty could not fly nearly so high.
Sputnik was instantly fascinating and alarming. The American press swooned
at the scientific vistas and shuddered at the military implications. Under
the headline "Red Moon Over the U.S.," Time quickly explained that "a new
era in history had begun, opening a bright new chapter in mankind's conquest
of the natural environment and a grim new chapter in the cold war." The
newsmagazine was glum about the space rivalry: "The U.S. had lost its lead
because, in spreading its resources too thin, the nation had skimped too
much on military research and development."
The White House tried to project calm; Eisenhower said the satellite "does
not raise my apprehension, not one iota." But many on the political spectrum
heard Sputnik's radio pulse as an ominous taunt.
A heroine of the Republican right, Clare Boothe Luce, said the satellite's
beeping was an "outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions
that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our material
superiority." Newspaper readers learned that Stuart Symington, a Democratic
senator who'd been the first secretary of the air force, "said the Russians
will be able to launch mass attacks against the United States with
intercontinental ballistic missiles within two or three years."
A New York Times article matter-of-factly referred to "the mild panic that
has seized most of the nation since Russia's sputnik was launched two weeks
ago." In another story, looking forward, Times science reporter William L.
Laurence called for bigger pots of gold at the end of scientific rainbows:
"In a free society such as ours it is not possible Oto channel human
efforts' without the individual's consent and wholehearted willingness. To
attract able and promising young men and women into the fields of science
and engineering it is necessary first to offer them better inducements than
are presently offered."
At last, in early February 1958, an American satellite -- the thirty-pound
Explorer -- went into orbit. What had succeeded in powering it into space
was a military rocket, developed by a U.S. Army research team. The head of
that team, the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, was boosting the
red-white-and-blue after the fall of his ex-employer, the Third Reich. In
March 1958 he publicly warned that the U.S. space program was a few years
behind the Russians.
------------------------------
Soon after dusk, while turning a skate key or playing with a hula hoop,
children might look up to see if they could spot the bright light of a
satellite arching across the sky. But they could not see the fallout from
nuclear bomb tests, underway for a dozen years by 1958. The conventional
wisdom, reinforced by the press, downplayed fears while trusting the
authorities; basic judgments about the latest weapons programs were to be
left to the political leaders and their designated experts.
On the weekly prime-time Walt Disney television show, an animated fairy with
a magic wand urged youngsters to drink three glasses of milk each day. But
airborne strontium-90 from nuclear tests was falling on pastures all over,
migrating to cows and then to the milk supply and, finally, to people's
bones. Radioactive isotopes from fallout were becoming inseparable from the
human diet.
Young people -- dubbed "baby boomers," a phrase that both dramatized and
trivialized them -- were especially vulnerable to strontium-90 as their
fast-growing bones absorbed the radioactive isotope along with calcium. The
children who did as they were told by drinking plenty of milk ended up
heightening the risks -- not unlike their parents, who were essentially told
to accept the bomb fallout without complaint.
Under the snappy rubric of "the nuclear age," the white-coated and loyal
American scientist stood as an icon, revered as surely as the scientists of
the enemy were assumed to be pernicious. And yet the mutual fallout,
infiltrating dairy farms and mothers' breast milk and the bones of children,
was a type of subversion that never preoccupied J. Edgar Hoover.
The more that work by expert scientists endangered us, the more we were
informed that we needed those scientists to save us. Who better to protect
Americans from the hazards of the nuclear industry and the terrifying
potential of nuclear weapons than the best scientific minds serving the
industry and developing the weapons?
In June 1957 -- the same month Nobel Prize^winning chemist Linus Pauling
published an article estimating that ten thousand cases of leukemia had
already occurred due to U.S. and Soviet nuclear testing -- President
Eisenhower proclaimed that the American detonations would result in nuclear
warheads with much less radioactivity. Ike said that "we have reduced
fallout from bombs by nine-tenths," and he pledged that the Nevada
explosions would continue in order to "see how clean we can make them." The
president spoke just after meeting with Edward Teller and other high-powered
physicists. Eisenhower assured the country that the scientists and the U.S.
nuclear test operations were working on the public's behalf. "They say:
OGive us four or five more years to test each step of our development and we
will produce an absolutely clean bomb.'"
But sheer atomic fantasy, however convenient, was wearing thin. Many
scientists actually opposed the aboveground nuclear blasts. Relying on
dissenters with a range of technical expertise, Democratic nominee Adlai
Stevenson had made an issue of fallout in the 1956 presidential campaign.
During 1957 -- a year when the U.S. government set off thirty-two nuclear
bombs over southern Nevada and the Pacific -- Pauling spearheaded a global
petition drive against nuclear testing; by January 1958 more than eleven
thousand scientists in fifty countries had signed.
Clearly, the views and activities of scientists ran the gamut. But
Washington was pumping billions of tax dollars into massive vehicles for
scientific research. These huge federal outlays were imposing military
priorities on American scientists without any need for a blatant government
decree.
------------------------------
What was being suppressed might suddenly pop up like some kind of
jack-in-the-box. Righteous pressure against disruptive or "un-American"
threats was internal and also global, with a foreign policy based on
containment. Control of space, inner and outer, was pivotal. What could not
be controlled was liable to be condemned.
The '50s and early '60s are now commonly derided as unbearably rigid, but
much in the era was new and stylish at the time. Suburbs boomed along with
babies. Modern household gadgets and snazzier cars appeared with great
commercial fanfare while millions of families, with a leg up from the GI
Bill, climbed into some part of the vaguely defined middle class. The fresh
and exciting technology called television did much to turn suburbia into the
stuff of white-bread legends -- with scant use for the less-sightly
difficulties of the near-poor and destitute living in ghettos or rural areas
where the TV lights didn't shine.
On the surface, most kids lived in a placid time, while small screens showed
entertaining images of sanitized life. One among many archetypes came from
Betty Crocker cake-mix commercials, which were all over the tube; the
close-ups of the icing could seem remarkable, even in black and white.
Little girls who had toy ovens with little cake-mix boxes could make
miniature layer cakes.
Every weekday from 1955 to 1965 the humdrum pathos of women known as
housewives could be seen on Queen for a Day. The climax of each episode came
as one of the competitors, often sobbing, stood with a magnificent bouquet
of roses suddenly in her arms, overcome with joy. Splendid gifts of
brand-new refrigerators and other consumer products, maybe even mink stoles,
would elevate bleak lives into a stratosphere that America truly had to
offer. The show pitted women's sufferings against each other; victory would
be the just reward for the best, which was to say the worst, predicament.
The final verdict came in the form of applause from the studio audience,
measured by an on-screen meter that jumped with the decibels of apparent
empathy and commiseration, one winner per program. Solutions were
individual. Queen for a Day was a nationally televised ritual of charity,
providing selective testimony to the goodness of society. Virtuous grief, if
heartrending enough, could summon prizes, and the ecstatic weeping of a
crowned recipient was vicarious pleasure for viewers across the country, who
could see clearly America's bounty and generosity.
That televised spectacle was not entirely fathomable to the baby-boom
generation, which found more instructive role-modeling from such media fare
as The Adventures of Spin and Marty and Annette Funicello and other aspects
of the Mickey Mouse Club show -- far more profoundly prescriptive than
descriptive. By example and inference, we learned how kids were supposed to
be, and our being more that way made the media images seem more natural and
realistic. It was a spiral of self-mystification, with the authoritative
versions of childhood green-lighted by network executives, producers, and
sponsors. Likewise with the sitcoms, which drew kids into a Potemkin refuge
from whatever home life they experienced on the near side of the TV screen.
Dad was apt to be emotionally aloof in real life, but on television the
daddies were endearingly quirky, occasionally stern, essentially lovable,
and even mildly loving. Despite the canned laugh tracks, for kids this could
be very serious -- a substitute world with obvious advantages over the
starker one around them. The chances of their parents measuring up to the
moms and dads on Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best were remote. As
were, often, the real parents. Or at least they seemed real. Sometimes.
Father Knows Best aired on network television for almost ten years. The
first episodes gained little momentum in 1954, but within a couple of years
the show was one of the nation's leading prime-time psychodramas. It gave
off warmth that simulated intimacy; for children at a huge demographic
bulge, maybe no TV program was more influential as a family prototype.
But seventeen years after the shooting stopped, the actor who had played
Bud, the only son on Father Knows Best, expressed remorse. "I'm ashamed I
had any part of it," Billy Gray said. "People felt warmly about the show and
that show did everybody a disservice." Gray had come to see the program as
deceptive. "I felt that the show purported to be real life, and it wasn't. I
regret that it was ever presented as a model to live by." And he added: "I
think we were all well motivated but what we did was run a hoax. We weren't
trying to, but that is what it was. Just a hoax."
-----------------------------
I went to the John Glenn parade in downtown Washington on February 26, 1962,
a week after he'd become the first American to circle the globe in a space
capsule. Glenn was a certified hero, and my school deemed the parade a valid
excuse for an absence. To me, a fifth grader, that seemed like a good deal
even when the weather turned out to be cold and rainy.
For the new and dazzling space age, America's astronauts served as valiant
explorers who added to the elan of the Camelot mythos around the
presidential family. The Kennedys were sexy, exciting, modern aristocrats
who relied on deft wordsmiths to produce throbbing eloquent speeches about
freedom and democracy. The bearing was American regal, melding the appeal of
refined nobility and touch football. The media image was damn-near
storybook. Few Americans, and very few young people of the era, were aware
of the actual roles of JFK's vaunted new "special forces" dispatched to the
Third World, where -- below the media radar -- they targeted labor-union
organizers and other assorted foes of U.S.-backed oligarchies.
But a confrontation with the Soviet Union materialized that could not be
ignored. Eight months after the Glenn parade, in tandem with Nikita
Khrushchev, the president dragged the world to a nuclear precipice. In late
October 1962, Kennedy went on national television and denounced "the Soviet
military buildup on the island of Cuba," asserting that "a series of
offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island."
Speaking from the White House, the president said: "We will not prematurely
or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the
fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth -- but neither will we shrink
from that risk at any time it must be faced."
Early in the next autumn, President Kennedy signed the Limited Test Ban
Treaty, which sent nuclear detonations underground. The treaty was an
important public health measure against radioactive fallout. Meanwhile, the
banishment of mushroom clouds made superpower preparations for blowing up
the world less visible. The new limits did nothing to interfere with further
development of nuclear arsenals.
Kennedy liked to talk about vigor, and he epitomized it. Younger than
Eisenhower by a full generation, witty, with a suave wife and two adorable
kids, he was leading the way to open vistas. Store windows near Pennsylvania
Avenue displayed souvenir plates and other Washington knickknacks that
depicted the First Family -- standard tourist paraphernalia, yet with a lot
more pizzazz than what Dwight and Mamie had generated.
A few years after the Glenn parade, when I passed the same storefront
windows along blocks just east of the White House, the JFK glamour had gone
dusty, as if suspended in time, facing backward. I thought of a scene from
Great Expectations. The Kennedy era already seemed like the room where Miss
Havisham's wedding cake had turned to ghastly cobwebs; in Dickens' words,
"as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all
stopped together."
The clocks all seemed to stop together on the afternoon of November 22,
1963. But after the assassination, the gist of the reputed
best-and-brightest remained in top Cabinet positions. The distance from
Dallas to the Gulf of Tonkin was scarcely eight months as the calendar flew.
And soon America's awesome scientific capabilities were trained on a country
where guerrilla fighters walked on the soles of sandals cut from old rubber
tires.
Growing up in a mass-marketed culture of hoax, the baby-boom generation came
of age in a warfare state. From Vietnam to Iraq, that state was to wield its
technological power with crazed dedication to massive violence.
_______
About author Norman Solomon's book "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters
with America's Warfare State" will be published in early fall. The foreword
is by Daniel Ellsberg. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com
[2]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson