Golden Oldies

By R. Z. Sheppard

TITLE: THE FIFTIES

AUTHOR: DAVID HALBERSTAM

PUBLISHER: VILLARD; 800 PAGES; $27.50

THE BOTTOM LINE: Though he never dives deep, Halberstam offers an engrossing sail across a pivotal decade.

The 1950s is remembered more for its sociology than for its politics. After a decade of depression and four years of war, the nation was hell-bent on normality. Neither the Korean conflict nor McCarthyism could distract Americans from their rush to claim a place in the rapidly expanding middle class. The standard rerun of the period features sincere men in gray flannel suits and contented women in kitchen aprons smiling at Mr. Clean. And why not? Coincidentally or not, he looked a lot like their amiable President, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

It was not a bad way to spend 10 years. Split-levels sprouted in potato fields, Cadillacs grew fins, and families snuggled up to television sets, where they learned to love Lucy and eat prepared dinners prepacked in tinfoil trays.

Unlike the Chinese, Americans of the '50s were spared the curse of living in interesting times. Which may be why David Halberstam, prizewinning journalist and best-selling social chronicler, simply calls the period transitional, a truism that could apply to any decade. Likewise, his thesis that events of the '50s set the stage for the '60s, '70s and beyond is as safe as it once was to invest in IBM.

But only the hardest '50s egghead could deny that Halberstam has cobbled a blue-chip beach read. Shrewdly designed for today's shorter attention spans, The Fifties plugs in dozens of set pieces, vignettes and profiles from the period spanning the last days of World War II and the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy TV debates. The book ends abruptly with Dean Acheson complaining that both candidates appeared too cold, calculating and boring. It is Halberstam's way of trying to freshen up an old point: that the debates, in which Nixon looked uncomfortably shifty and Kennedy came off as poised and decisive, changed forever the way politicians were packaged and sold.

Halberstam's bounciest chapters are about the decade's leading entrepreneurs: William Levitt, the former Seabee who applied rapid building techniques to construct Levittowns; Eugene Ferkauf, whose E.J. Korvettes chain earned him the title "the Discount King"; Kemmons Wilson, founder of Holiday Inns; and Ray Kroc, who turned the McDonald brothers' Santa Anita hamburger ) stand into a national feeding trough.

One reason the '50s was called the silent generation was because its collective maw was too full to say anything. The "togetherness" theme played endlessly by McCall's magazine was a merchandiser's dream: the family as a consuming unit. Not everyone was satisfied. Halberstam's dissenters include Sloan Wilson, who popularized the rat race in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Betty Friedan, whose The Feminine Mystique, along with Goody Pincus' birth-control pill, challenged traditional relations between men and women.

There are some notable missing people. If a chapter on Friedan, why not a mention of Simone De Beauvoir, whose The Second Sex, published in 1953, gave U.S. feminists a modern ideology? Klaus Fuchs, the British atomic spy, makes a number of appearances, but Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed for espionage in 1953, are strangely absent.

Halberstam's omissions are less distracting than his unwillingness to go deeper into the era, especially since his authoritative tone suggests rather than delivers new and significant insights. The Fifties is more than an entertainment, but to borrow an image from novelist Peter DeVries, it puts you in a diving bell and takes you down three feet.