had to be right. I even read his biography, Tail Gunner Joe. I wanted all these evil subversives rooted out. Nothing seemed more inconceivable than that I would one day become one. Sputnik sent us into a spin, because it felt as if they were getting ahead of us, not only in the space race, but perhaps in other ways as well.
By the late 1950s, observing mainstream debates between liberals and conservatives, I decided I was liberal. I didn’t think it was right that some people were rich while others were poor, and that a disproportionate number of poor people were black. I was stirred by events in the South, especially when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and when the army had to be brought in to defend pupils entering high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. My mother insisted that communist agitators were behind it. I doubted it, but also began to wonder if they were in fact behind it, whether communists were really so bad after all.
The 1960s arrived, and the world didn’t end. Things were changing, both in the wider world and in my perspective. The stability and smugness of the system I took for granted was starting to show cracks, revealing its vulnerabilities and delusions and hinting at other possibilities. There were new faces at the top, symbolizing the stirring from below. The election of John Kennedy as president and John XXIII as pope put faces on a new mood, a new energy, a new path forward. The faces of the other side changed, too. When we watched Khrushchev debating Nixon in a kitchen and banging his shoe at the United Nations, we didn’t fear him as we had Stalin. The Iron Curtain didn’t seem so iron any more. When revolution reshaped Cuba and Fidel Castro came to the United States, we regarded him as a folk hero. When he became a communist, it was more a push to question our attitude toward communism than toward him and the revolution.
We entered a new phase of the Cold War and of Catholicism as well. Vatican II was a kind of Protestantization of Catholicism, which had a powerful questioning and relativizing effect. At first it was just a new sense of freshness and dynamism, but eventually it set me on a course that led far beyond anything reformers intended. I took to the new vocabulary of dialogue and renewal, along with the exotic imported words such as kerygma and aggiornamento. In the political realm, the rhetoric of the “New Frontier” created a sudden sense of history in the making, of an energy breaking through the malaise of the Eisenhower era. It was not at all clear to me then what the Kennedy era meant in ideological terms, clouded as it was by the whole Camelot mystique as well as by my own political naïveté. It became clear that Kennedy stood for a more social democratic, technocratic, neo-colonial form of developed capitalism. Nevertheless, I responded to the atmosphere of vigor and vitality, to a more liberal, sophisticated approach to many things.
In the world of television, corporate sponsors loosened their grip on scripts, and the whole machinery of blacklisting was gradually dismantled. The first signs of change came in news broadcasts. For the first time, global events appeared on the screen in close to real time: the debates during the 1960 presidential election, the Kennedy inauguration, Khrushchev at the UN, Castro in Harlem, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination and funeral. At the same time, TV dramas continued in much the same manner as before, with the same programs, the same formats, the same standardized settings, plots, and patterns, the same stereotypical characters. It began to jar. Newton Minow, the Kennedy-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, declared television to be “a vast wasteland,” and many agreed with him. In response, the networks introduced more substantive programming in series like East Side West Side, Mr. Novak, The Defenders, and Dr. Kildare, showing social workers, teachers, lawyers, and doctors dealing with the urgent problems of American society—racial tension, inequality, unjust laws, generational conflict—without pretending they could always be resolved neatly by the end of each episode.
The western, crime, spy, and space genres saw a shift from the drama of righteous individual heroism to a more technocratic team professionalism. It corresponded to a consolidation of a shift from the values of a laissez-faire market economy to those of a more managerial corporate system. The lone lawman gave way to the tough teams of The Untouchables and 77 Sunset Strip. More attention came to be focused on the macho world of international intrigue, with Mission Impossible and The Man from UNCLE emerging as prototypical productions of the period. The cowboy code of honor no longer applied in this arena. Conflict centered less on principle and more on technique. The end justified the means, with less and less emphasis on the end and more and more on the means. The picture of the enemy likewise changed in the transition from the spy stories of the 1950s to the peaceful coexistence, cultural exchange-cum-espionage tales of the 1960s. Agents on both sides became less ideological in orientation and began to look and sound more alike. Agents of foreign powers had less of a furtive, sinister, scruffy look and began to resemble our own, so much so that it was possible for plots to revolve around the chic macho men and glamorous miniskirted women of the one side passing for the other. The spy spoof Get Smart, sending up all sides in ludicrous scenarios, reflected in its own campy way the easing of Cold War tensions. In the New Frontier mood, more eyes turned to space as well, in the mood articulated in the opening sequence of Star Trek, as the starship Enterprise set off on its mythic odyssey into the dark unknown of space, “the final frontier.”
The more liberal values of the Kennedy-Johnson years did not go unchallenged. Companies threatened to cancel their sponsorships and southern stations refused to carry certain episodes of network programs that transgressed traditional norms. This happened with increasing regularity as black actors began to appear more often and in more serious roles, and as the civil rights movement put more and more pressure on the deeply rooted racism of American society. But such ideological tensions as came to the surface in the early 1960s remained within the liberal-conservative spectrum, defined roughly by the ideological distance between Kennedy and Nixon. Despite real differences and acute tensions over civil rights and welfare legislation, there was still considerable consensus. Any discordant notes outside this consensus were still few and far between and somewhat muted.
I attended high school from 1958 to 1962. My grandfather thought I should go to Holy Child Academy in Sharon Hill rather than Archbishop Prendergast in Drexel Hill. I think he believed that posher was somehow better. Not many granddaughters of teamsters or daughters of draughtsmen went there, but daughters of doctors and lawyers and bank managers did. That seemed to be the point. He insisted on paying my fees, and my parents carried on doing so after he died, which was not easy considering they had so many other children by this time. I did not want to seem ungrateful, but there was much that I didn’t like about the school. I thought the nuns who staffed it were sheltered, neurotically fixated on Christ as a child and ridiculously preoccupied with the beatification of their foundress, Cornelia Connelly. One nun cautioned us to be modest about our bodies and advised us to wear cardboard under our undershirts (as if we wore undershirts) and to avoid patent leather shoes or strapless dresses, so as not to be occasions of sin to the opposite sex. As we were segregated by gender for schooling, we had all too few occasions of sin.
The yearbooks from that time show a vanished world. It is not only that the school no longer exists, but the images in Althean provide a window into a pious, conformist, Pollyanna life nearly impossible to imagine now. Girls in blue blazers and plaid skirts are shown at prayer, at play, and at work, all in the care of solicitous nuns. There were numerous campus groups: glee club, mission club, secretarial club, forensic club, dancing club, dramatic club, and more. The school newspaper carried such news as golden jubilees and feast days of nuns, rehearsals for the spring festival, and inter-varsity basketball and hockey scores. Graduation photos show rows of young women carrying red roses and wearing long white dresses rather than caps and gowns, making us look more like debutantes than graduates.
Our classes involved memorizing Latin and French vocabulary, grappling with conjugations and declensions, mastering algebraic equations and geometric theorems, and cutting up helpless frogs. Biology classes were premised on a blend of creationism and evolutionism. We were told that God created all that existed, including the process whereby the ape evolved into man. It was necessary to believe, Mother Jeanne d’Arc emphasized, that at some point God intervened and created a soul. This
