One result has been to overlook the complexity of those deceptively eventful, tumultuous years, as well as that of the man who governed through them. Far from an era of consensus, the 1950s featured the rise and fall of McCarthyism and the early struggles for civil rights, sexual liberation, and feminism. The decade had bobby socks and backyard barbecues, but it also gave Americans The Old Man and the Sea, The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, “Howl,” On the Waterfront, and Rebel Without a Cause. It was jazz and Elvis, Playboy magazine and the Pill. Marilyn Monroe blossomed in the 1950s and barely outlived them; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as the nation fought through subversion, real and imagined, and the unsettling struggle of the Korean War. It was an age of the Red Scare, and also Castro, Che Guevara, C. Wright Mills, and Martin Luther King. And it was an epoch of perpetual danger, as two superpowers wrestled with the sudden acquisition of unimaginably destructive power, intent on burying each other but uncertain of how to win without dying.President Eisenhower was determined that Americans should enjoy the fruits of their freedom, and he set out to wean the nation from its addiction to crisis.
