to loosen everything up also. Yet after Kennedy the cold war still lingered with Lyndon Johnsons escalation of the war in Vietnam so he wouldnt appear soft on communism. Then staunch anti communist Richard Nixon becomes president and actually ends the war in Vietnam totally contradicting the whole massive retaliation dogma made years earlier. Everything had finally calmed down and sanity had triumphed in regarding how and what we were actually fighting. The adamant conformed culture of the fifties finally broke and gave way to the free spirit essence of the sixties. Everyone stopped being afraid and started asking the questions that they had been holding on to.Whitfield also describes the changing entertainment culture with such movies as The Manchurian Candidate which satirizes McCarthys ridiculous practices, Stanley Kubricks Dr. Strangelove which satirized nuclear war, and Joseph Hellers novel Catch 22 that satirizes the irony of military procedure. The American culture was becoming more free and expressive and exemplified it in the entertainment of the day. If anything can be agreed upon almost unanimously it is the fact that the culture of primarily 1950s cold war America is quite interesting and influential on the present state of affairs. Stephen Whitfield does a great job capturing the essence of paranoia, fear, submission, and all of the other wonderful aspects of America that dominated the culture during this time. Whitfield truly demonstrated the unique culture of this era of the cold war. America was a conformist, paranoid nation that obeyed everything and anything which the authority commanded in fear of persecution. This oppressed culture is best expressed by the expulsion of all of these bottled up sentiments in the next decade. Our culture was based on the old FDR adage regarding World War II, There is nothing to fear except fear itself. The politics of this era created an invisible, evil scapegoat for all the problems in...
