VIEWING THE FIFTIES FROM THE EIGHTIES

Paul A. Carter specializes in revising our opinion of eras generally viewed with mild disdain or amusement. In The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (1972), he argued that Americans during the late nineteenth century were no less complicated or intelligent than descendants in jazzier ages. In The Twenties (1968) and Another Part of the Twenties (1977), he rehabilitated provincials and chided cosmopolitans whose confrontations marked the jazziest age. Now, looking a generation beyond the Crash, he sees "in the established concept of the fifties . . . a great gap between image and experience, comparable to the gap in our understanding of the twenties" (p. x). Once again, he challenges the "established concept" with a genial social history of ideas that mixes scholarly synthesis with personal reflections. Another Part of the Fifties contains much political and some diplomatic history. Consistent with emerging orthodoxy, Carter, while hailing the days when there were "two good [presidential] candidates," acknowledges Adlai Stevenson's limitations and Dwight D. Eisenhower's intelligence. Unfortunately, Eisenhower appears as an amiable hero who "never quite stopped being a small town kid" (p. 24) instead of a shrewd operator whose operations were not always benign. Carter correctly credits him with thawing the cold war and showing "good sense" during the Suez crisis, but slights his use of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA-sponsored coups that toppled Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala each receives a bland sentence. Equally misleading is the assertion that Eisenhower "stepped backward from, rather than more deeply into, Southeast Asia" (p. 66). The administration's close decision to shun military action in 1954 was followed by the rediscovery of and massive aid to Ngo Dinh Diem. Most of this reassessment of the culture of the fifties deals with intellectual history, broadly conceived to include moods, faiths, and entertainments. Here Carter shows greater originality and appreciation of ambiguity. He reviews television's early years without yielding to sentimentality and